Publisher's Synopsis
FROM THE EDITORS
Ownership is of broad importance in children′s lives. It is invovled in countless activities including sharing, borrowing, buying, trading, and stealing. As such, ownership relates to many subfields of development psychology including social development, social cognition, object cognition, moral reasoning, and economic reasoning.
In general, ownership is important for cognitive researchers because it involves abstract concepts and rules, and yet children appear to reason about it from a young age. A major task for cognitive development research will be to characterize the processes underlying children′s reasoning about ownership, and to understand how they acquire ownership concepts. Ownership is important for social researchers because it is intertwined with their sense of self, their many conflicts over objects, and because ownership provides one of the clearest examples of the role that reciprocity plays in the development of moral principles. A major task for social development researchers will be to characterize how social input from parents, peers, and others influences children′s acquisition of ownership principles.
Despite the broad significance that ownership has in children′s lives, until recently very little research has actually investigated it. However, much new work is currently underway, as represented by the contributions to this volume. With this volume, we hope to communicate that ownership is clearly a New Direction for research in developmental psychology.
