Not only do they prefer, but infants also punish. In one further set of these infant morality plays, a puppet that had previously stolen a ball was having difficulty opening a box. Along came two puppets. One helped the naughty thief open his box while the other one jumped on top of it, slamming it shut. At eight months, babies preferred to play with the puppet who thwarted the ball thief. Not only did they prefer to see justified retaliation, but they were also capable of dishing out punishment to antisocial puppets themselves. When they were given the opportunity to hand out treats to the puppets, two-year-olds punished the ball thief by giving them fewer or no treats and rewarded the good puppet that had retrieved the ball.9 Playing with puppets is all very well, but how do these preferences translate into real interactions with humans? To test this, two actresses each retrieved a toy and offered it to twenty-one-month-old infants. One of them failed in her attempt to hand the toy over by accidentally dropping it short, whereas the other offered the toy but snatched it back from the child just as they were about to grasp it. After witnessing the kind and the teasing adults, the infant was given the opportunity to retrieve a dropped toy to give to one of them in return. Three out of four infants preferred to hand the toy to the actress who had tried to be helpful even though unsuccessful, rather than the other one who had also smiled and spoken nicely to them but was deliberately mean-spirited.10 This suggests that infants are treating helpfulness as a disposition or trait in others – something that predicts how they will behave. Babies understand that there are the ‘good guys’ who are worth becoming friendly with because they are likely to help you in the future.11
These findings have led my colleague Paul Bloom at Yale to argue that babies are born with the ‘sprouts’ for morality.12 Even though they lack a full moral understanding of the adult world of crime and punishment, they recognize the basic difference between good and bad. Well before they enter a social world where they have to get on with others in the playgroup, children already have a sense of a reciprocal altruism – that one good turn deserves another and that freeloaders or mean people should be punished.
The property instinct
When young children get into conflicts, it is more often than not a dispute over ownership. About 75 per cent of young children’s arguments with peers concern possessions.13 As soon as a toy comes into the possession of another child, preschoolers want it.14 Owning stuff is all to do with status amongst competitors. These early disputes are a taster for later life in the real world. In many societies, especially in Western culture, possessions serve important functions as ostensive markers for self-identity to the extent that some adults will put their lives at risk defending their property. Every year, car owners are seriously injured or sometimes killed trying to prevent the theft of their vehicle by standing in front of, or clinging on to, the bonnet as it is driven away – acts that they would never contemplate in the cold light of day.15 Ownership can make us behave irrationally. William James was one of the first to recognize this importance of ownership as a reflection of self when he wrote,
A man’s Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account.16
Later, Russell Belk a professor of marketing, would call this materialist perspective the extended self,17 whereby we use possessions to broadcast to others our own sense of identity; something that advertisers have understood ever since they realized that linking positive role models to products was the secret to sales success. We are what we own, which explains much of our emotional overreaction when our possessions are violated through theft, loss or damage. This is because we experience these transgressions as a personal tragedy or insult against us.
We are a species that spends extraordinary amounts of time, effort and resources in acquiring possessions, and when our stuff is taken away from us we feel personally aggrieved. Some have even gone as far as to call it a property instinct, wired into our brains.18 As such, understanding the power of ownership and the rules that accompany possessions are key components of domestication. We must learn to respect ownership rights in order to live together harmoniously. When I take possession of an object, it becomes ‘mine’ – my coffee cup, or my telephone. Ownership plays an important role in domestication because it is one way to demarcate acceptable and unacceptable behaviours. Theft and vandalization are wrong precisely because they are violations against another’s property.
Children as young as fourteen months know what it means to own something19 and by two years many already have possessions that they are attached to.20 Around this time they begin to use possessive pronouns such as ‘mine’ and ‘yours’. At first, children only enforce property rights for their own possessions, so two-year-olds will protest if their stuff is taken away,21 but by three years, children will intervene on behalf of another by telling a puppet to ‘stop’ if it tries to steal someone else’s hat.22
Understanding ownership can be complex as the rules are not always obvious. As Waterloo psychologist Ori Friedman points out, it may be acceptable to collect seashells from a public beach, but to take them from a stall selling them is theft.23 There is nothing on the shell to tell you who owns it, but rather we rely on rules and conventions that have to be learned. Collecting seashells from many national parks is illegal, so without knowing the local regulations, one can easily fall foul of the law. Or it might be an unfamiliar custom. Each year, tourists return lava rocks that they have collected from Hawaii. It is not illegal to take them, but when they learn of the bad-luck curse that is said to befall those who remove the rocks from the island, they feel compelled not to tempt the local superstition.
Then there are some ownership disputes that can be baffling and ambiguous. Imagine a boy trying to knock a coconut from a tree. He manages to dislodge it with a well-aimed rock, but it falls at the feet of another boy walking past, who picks it up. Which of them has the rightful claim of ownership? The one who put in the failed effort to retrieve the coconut or the one who ended up with it in their possession? Or consider the real-life case of the Banksy graffiti artwork painted in May 2012 on the outside wall of a North London thrift shop to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee. Only days after the mysterious artist painted it on a mundane section of wall, it was chiselled off by the building’s owners and sold at auction for $1.1m in Miami despite attempts by the London authorities to prevent its sale as a piece of public art.24 The owners of the building argued that, as it was their wall, they owned the art. The residents argued that it was public property, and if they had asked a three-year-old, they might have got the same answer. When it comes to the trade-off between materials and effort, preschoolers are more likely to attribute ownership to the one who did all the work and came up with the idea, whereas most adults (unless they are local London residents) take into consideration who owned the material.25 The same goes for intellectual property. When children were asked to make up a story and then the experimenter retold it to another, either acknowledging that it was the child’s idea or taking the credit themselves, children as young as five years disliked those who took credit after stealing their ideas.26