The Tree Is Mine, The Forest Isn’t: An Extended Abstract on the Construal Level of Possessions

Abstract

Ownership creates a special status for objects. Mere ownership of objects as common as pens and mugs almost instantaneously leads to increased liking (Beggan 1992; Huang et al. 2009), increased valuation (i.e. the endowment effect) (Kahneman et al. 1990; Thaler 1980) and enhanced memory for the object (Cunningham et al. 2008; van den Bos et al. 2010). Ownership to some extent seems to render objects more important, unique and irreplaceable in the eyes of their owners and thus seems to affect the way objects are mentally represented and processed. While extensive research has reported on effects of ownership—e.g. the endowment effect (Thaler 1980) and the mere ownership effect (Beggan 1992)—much of this literature takes a transactional perspective where ownership is acquired or lost in a “legal,” objective way. Recent research shows, however, that psychological ownership—the subjective feeling of being owner—is an important driver of ownership effects (Morewedge et al. 2009; Peck and Shu 2009). We aim to advance the understanding of understudied concept of psychological ownership by relating it to the framework of psychological distance and construal level theory (CLT) (Trope and Liberman 2010). Many authors discussed the importance of “an association” between a person and objects in the genesis and perception of ownership (Beggan and Brown 1994; Friedman 2008). We test the hypothesis that the “(strength of) association” underlying psychological ownership can be seen as psychological closeness, with effects as predicted by CLT. Psychological distance is egocentric; its reference point is the self, here and now (Amit et al. 2009). Given the strong relationship between the self and possessions (Belk 1988; Pierce et al. 2003), it makes sense to see possessions as psychologically close and therefore mentally represented at a low level of construal. High level of construal would highlight abstract properties like core features or the object’s main purpose, which would imply that objects are more readily substitutable with others of the same category. This is of course not the case, as endowment studies show that people are reluctant to trade in even easy-to-replace items like pens and coffee mugs (Kahneman et al. 1990). The studies reported below test the relationships between ownership, construal level and psychological distance.