Abstract
Ownership plays a privileged role in human cognition. Even when minimally and arbitrarily assigned, ownership robustly alters value judgments (see ‘endowment effect’). But how far do the effects of ownership extend? Might ownership also influence what we attend to in the first place? In two initial experiments, we first manipulated ownership within a multiple-object-tracking task. Prior to the task, participants were introduced to 12 unique ‘coins’. In Experiment 1, they were asked to select four coins they wanted to own; in Experiment 2, they were asked to select four coins they liked. On each trial, participants were asked to track 4 of 12 visible coins: some, all, or none of which came from the owned (liked) set. The unique markings of each coin were initially visible, but were hidden during the tracking portion of the trial. The coins then moved around the screen for several seconds, after which participants were asked to indicate the locations of the four to-be-tracked objects. In Experiment 1, we found that owned targets were tracked better than generic, unowned targets. In Experiment 2, moreover, we found that this advantage was highly specific to ownership: participants were no better tracking liked targets than generic, unliked targets. This suggests that ownership — minimally assigned — uniquely influences attention, above and beyond mere preference. In Experiment 3, we tested whether ownership also captures attention in a visual search paradigm. Participants saw similar displays of coins flash on the screen for 1 second and had to indicate whether a target coin had been present or not. They were again more accurate at identifying the presence of owned targets compared to generic, unowned targets. Collectively, these experiments suggest that ownership influences not only what we like or what we value, but perhaps what we attend to in the first place.