gender differences in the semantics of ownership: a ... · gender differences in the semantics of...

JOURNAL OF

ELSEVIER Journal of Economic Psychology 15 (1994) 487-510

Gender differences in the semantics of ownership: A quantitative phenomenological survey study

Floyd W. Rudmin

Faculty of Law, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 3N6

Received 8 June 1993; revised 31 May 1994

Abstract

Gender differences in the meaning of ownership were sought in phenomenological data from 320 respondents from three Eastern Ontario samples (ferry queue, adult undergraduates, law students). Inspired by Husserl’s psychology and Frege’s semiotics, the study asked respondents to list examples of things they own but for which they have little sense of ownership and examples of things they do not own but for which they have some sense of ownership, and then to describe their sense of ownership. Responses were categorized by literal content analysis, and gender differences were determined by phi coefficient tests. Results showed men to be more focused on property as rights, with emphasis on absolute autonomy and exclusivity. Women more frequently reported ownership to entail responsibility, self-connection, and pride, and accordingly reported feeling ownership of familiar people and their possessions. Following Gilligan (19821, the argument is made that women’s appreciation and understanding of ownership has not been well represented in traditional property discourse.

1. Introduction

The ownership of property, including real estate, chattels, money, imma- terial possessions, and even interpersonal relationships, has been relatively neglected by the behavioral sciences for the past five or six decades. Before the 194Os, every psychologist of repute made some account of property (Rudmin, 19881, including behaviorists such as Pavlov (19281, Thorndike (19421, and Watson (1929). However, interest in the topic declined for

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488 F. W. Rudmin /Journal of Economic Psychology 15 (1994) 487-510

various reasons (Rudmin, 1990a), and the index word “property” was delisted by Psyc~oZogic~~ Abstracts in 1953. Research literature on this topic has been scattered and isolated in various sub-disciplines (for a bibliography, see Rudmin et al., 1987). Only since the 1980s has there been a resurgence of interest in the psychology of ownership (e.g., Furby, 1980; Hollowell, 1982; Rudmin, 1991a), sometimes overlapping with the larger interest in consumer motivations and attitudes (e.g., Belk, 1988; Csikszent- mihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981; Dittmar, 1992; Richins and Dawson, 1992; Rudmin and Richins, 1992).

Coincident with this resurgence, but in an independent line of development, has been the growth and establishment of feminist critiques of behavioral science topics, theories, and methods (e.g., Gilligan, 1982; Belenky et al., 1986). These critiques have focused on gender differences that demonstrate that important social and psychological phenomena have been described and theoretized from gender-biased perspectives. It is not necessary to resolve the important issue of whether or not gender differences arise from innate dispositions, or from socialization, or from adaptive responses to unequal distribution of social opportunities, material resources, and power. The disclosure of gender differences and the absence of women’s perspectives is sufficient reason for reformulation of theories about human behavior and social institutions.

The question of gender differences in the psychology of ownership has yet to be addressed in any systematic or conclusive way. However, there is record of concern about this even two millennia ago. Pythagoras in the 6th century B.C. argued that women are more sharing and less possessive than are men. He has been recorded in secondary sources as saying about women:

“They must not destroy the reputation they had acquired through tradition and not put the writers of myths in the wrong; on the grounds of their recognition of the justice of women, because they

give away clothes and adornments without witnesses when others have need of them, without this trustfulness resulting in lawsuits or quarrels, these poets created the myth that three women had but

one eye between them because there was such concord among them, If one was to apply this to men and say that one who had first obtained something could easily part with it and even willingly added

something of his own, nobody would believe it. For it is not in the nature of men.” (DeVogel, 1966, pp. 132-133)

Rudmin (1990b) has reviewed 20th century psychological evidence of gender differences in proprietary behaviors and his finding of general support for the Pythagorean observations will here be summarized. In

F. W. Rudmin /Journal of Economic Psychology 15 (1994) 487-510 489

children’s collecting behaviors, girls’ collections are more personalized, reflecting achievements and social relationships, whereas boys’ are more socially competitive, reflecting rivalry and trading relationships. In studies of wishing, women wish less for power and money than do men, and prefer instead opportunities for benevolence and personal achievement. Women typically name more possessions than do men, and more frequently self- identify with those possessions, with the exception of money and other assets. Girls are more sharing than boys, particularly among themselves, and share differentially rather than on principles of equity. In accord with these review findings, Rudmin (1990b) presented data from two different studies showing that women are more sharing and more egalitarian than are men.

Further research has demonstrated that women are more involved with gift giving (Cheal, 1988; Fischer and Arnold, 19901, including garage sales which function as gift-economies (Herrman, 1991). Female roommates share dorm wall decoration space more than do male roommates (Burroughs et al., 1991). Furthermore, for women, possessions symbolize emotional attachment and interpersonal relations, whereas for men possessions are more instrumental and utilitarian (Dittmar, 1989, 1991; Kamptner, 1991). Men more than women self-identify with money (Dittmar, 1989; Hobart, 1975; Prince, 1991). Looking at the disposition of goods, more women dispose of things as an act of communication, more men as an act of control (Young, 1991). Thus, women tend to give things away; men to actively or passively destroy them. Pythagoras, despite his great historical and cultural distance from contemporary Western society, seems to have well characterized female and male orientations to ownership.

Gender discussions also are evident in political economic literature, particularly in the late 19th century. For example, Morgan (18771, Engels (18841, Veblen (1912), and Sumner (19071 argued that women themselves are the archetypal property and that private ownership is essentially a patriarchal institution to subjugate women and other resources for privi- leged exploitation. Such arguments have been reinvigorated by recent feminist scholarship (e.g., Coontz and Henderson, 1986; Franck and Pax- son, 1989; Hirschon, 1984; Lerner, 1986). Empirical evidence from quantitative cross-cultural research does support theories that regimes of private ownership are gender bound or sexist, but not that they are misogynist. In five studies to date encompassing a total of 521 societies (Rudmin, 1992a,b; 1993a,b,c), consistent positive correlates with private ownership have included patrilocal residence, patrilineal kin groups, and bride-price, and

490 F. W Rudmin /.lournal of Economic Psychology 1.5 (1994) 487-510

consistent negative correlates have included bride-service, exogamy, and bilateral descent. Measures of explicit female subjugation or inferiority have shown near-zero correlation with measures of private ownership. In other words, where people practice private ownership, there children belong to their father’s gens, people marry within their social community, the bride moves to her husband’s locale, and her kin are compensated by payment of goods or money rather than by services.

For the present paper, the concern is not that private property is an archetypally male behavior or male institution, but rather that discourse about property has been male-dominated. The explanatory theories of private ownership may be gender biased, or more strongly, patriarchal. But if so, it is in part because female perspectives on possession and ownership have been unarticulated, ignored, or otherwise absent from the discourse. As developed in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, traditional property theories are all in a male voice. The theorists were male, the jurists were male, and some property rights were exclusively male. Even communist counter~arguments against private property carry a male orientation focused on interclass conflict and on the abstract necessity of equitable distribution (see Becker, 1977; MacPherson, 1978; Ryan, 1984.)

The purpose of this study is to seek for gender differences in the meaning of the verb “to own” in order to begin to identify and articulate female perspectives on property that may have been ignored and thus denied in traditional property discourse. This is a part of an on-going, boot-strap program of research to provide empirical observations that might contribute to the development of a feminist theory of property. Private ownership is a social institution instantiated in the minds and behaviors of a population and is thus largely invisible (Rudmin, 1991b). If it is not easy to see in the first place, it is indeed difficult to see anew. However, as Gilligan and Attanucci (1988) have argued, one approach to releasing theory from gender-bias is to seek for systematic observations of gender differences in order to unsettle established theory and to thus allow opportunity for new theorizing and speculation. Thus, the apriori expectations for this research were that there would be gender differences in the concept of ownership and that female perspectives would be relatively novel in comparison with traditional property discourse.

The study was directed to examining the meaning of ownership, as distinct from examining the personal meanings that objects have for their owners (Belk, 1991; Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981; Mehta and Belk, 1991; Richins and Dawson, 1992; Wallendorf and Arnould,


1988). There have been a number of empirical studies of the meaning of “own”, but all limited by constrained response options (e.g., Rapoport and Fillenbaum, 1972; Rudmin, 1994; Rudmin and Berry, 1987; Takane, 1980; Wagener and Pohl, 1986). The goals of the present study require open- ended response options if novel and unanticipated perspectives on property are to be given voice.

The design of this study was inspired by the theories of two late-nine- teenth century philosophers: Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and Gottlob Frege (1848-1925). Husserl(1962) developed phenomenological psychology as an empirical method for the scientific description of the processes of consciousness. Phenomenology has since been construed to label a wide variety of techniques of introspection, depth interviews, diary analysis, ethology, and generally anything involving naturalistic observation or self- report. But as originally articulated by Husserl, phenomenology requires that the self-observer suspend or inhibit judgements, expectations, infer- ences, associations, categories, and other habits of mind in order to focus on “bracketed” phenomena appearing in generic consciousness:

“Not the world or any part of it appears, but the ‘sense’ of the world. To enjoy phenomenological

experience we must retreat from the objects posited in the natural attitude to the multiple modes of

their ‘appearance’, to the ‘bracketed’ objects.” (Husserl, 1929, p. 700)

Phenomenology requires disruption of the natural routines of cognition. For each individual engaged in phenomenology, it is very much a decontex- tualizing and fragmenting process, directed to understanding the essence of the particular phenomena focused upon. One method recommended by Husserl was reflective imagination, meaning to examine phenomena at their extremes of variation, as in his example of trying to imagine color without any spatial extension (Bullington and Karlsson, 1984).

Phenomenological studies of concepts are commonly done by a single scholar presenting his or her own “look” at the phenomenon (e.g., Marcel, 19491, with the presumption that phenomena of the human mind are generic and universal. However, recent cognitive theory argues that there will be individual differences in phenomenological reports (Lave, 1988; Lakoff, 19871, which suggests that sampling of phenomenological accounts would be useful. When seeking phenomenological accounts from large samples of people, there can be no presumptions of training in phe- nomenolo~. The phenomenon and the task must be presented in a


manner to disrupt the ready routines, expectations, and explanations provided by experience, socialization, schooling, and other intervening con- structive processes so as to encourage the respondents to look anew.

Whereas Husserl was concerned about the psychological sense of intention, how consciousness directs itself to create phenomena, Frege was concerned about the semantic sense of intention, how signs direct consciousness to their referents (Frege, 1960a,b). Husserl and Frege saw their projects as related and were in correspondence with one another (Brynum, 1972). Frege’s semantic theory rests on three concepts: sign, reference, and sense (Currie, 1982; Thiel, 1968). For Frege, the best examples of signs were proper names, e.g., “Venus”, “the morning star”, “the evening star”. The reference is the physical or logical object which the sign designates. The three signs just listed all have the same reference. The sense is the way the sign designates the reference, by alluding to selected properties of the object.

The sentences “Venus is the morning star”, “4 = 2 + 2”, and, for the purposes of the present study, “This book is owned by me” all carry information and are meaningful because the subjects and the predicates refer to the same references but do so in different ways. Frege’s example of calling a planet a star illustrates that experts do not have the final say in semantics, as argued by Putnam (19751. Thus, Frege would have agreed with Ackerman (1977) that expert legal definitions of ownership may be required to yield to lay conceptualizations. According to Frege, the task of semantics is to differentiate the sense and reference of a sign in order to articulate the former. Identifying true and false sentences requires knowledge of whether or not a particular sense belongs to an object.

The present study examines the meaning of the word “own” by asking respondents to look at common ownership phenomena in a way that might disrupt routine perceptions yet allow unrestricted description, a la Husserl, by means of a task that differentiates the sense of ownership from the objects of ownership, a la Frege. It would seem that for most instances of ownership, the legal facts of ownership coincide with the psycholinguistic sense of ownership, and it is difficult to disentangle them and bring the latter into focus. However, there are occasions in which the fact of ownership is discrepant from the sense of ownership. For this study, respondents were asked to focus on such instances of ownership, ripe with discrepancy, and to describe the phenomena they thereby encountered. Respondents thus might enter into a phenomenological frame of mind, examine ownership at extremes of variation, and differentiate the objects of

F. U! Rudmin /Journal of Economic Psychology I5 (1994) 487-510 493

ownership so often studied by consumer theorists from the sense of ownership per se.

2. Method

The respondents were all told on the consent form that they were being asked to “help in an exploratory study of the meaning of ownership”. The task instructions were:

List as many examples as you can of: (a) things that you do own but for which you feel little sense of

ownership; (b) things that you do not own but for which you feel some sense of ownership. Then

referring to your exemplars if you wish, try to describe what your sense of ownership consists of.

Labelled columns of 14 lines each were provided for the exemplar listings and space was provided at the bottom of the form for the description of the sense of ownership. The order of appearance of the listing tasks and report columns was reversed on half of the forms. The whole session was completed in 10 minutes by most people, although a few took as long as 20 minutes.

The respondents were from three Eastern Ontario samples: (1) passen- gers (n = 121) recruited in their cars while waiting at a ferry boat crossing; (2) mature undergraduate students (n = 105) recruited in evening and summer session introductory psychology classes, and (3) first-year law students (n = 127) recruited in property law classes at the start of their second term. Respondents younger than 21 were eliminated because of greater likelihood that they had had scant opportunity for independent ownership experiences. Mean ages were 42 for the ferry sample (sd = 13, range = 21-751, 26 for the undergraduates (sd = 7, range = 21-601, and 25 for the law students (sd = 5, range = 21-43). A Scheffe test following a significant ANOVA for age (F = 82, df = 2,258, p < 0.0001) confirmed that the ferry queue sample was older than the other two samples, which were undifferentiated. There were no statistically significant age differences between genders within samples. Gender ratios were very different in the three samples: in the ferry sample, there were 44 women and 51 men; in the undergraduate sample, 76 women and 28 men; and in the law student sample, 49 women and 72 men. The samples were not sufficiently exclusive to test hypotheses about differences in responses between sample groups, which in any case was not an objective of this research. The use of three


samples is merely to gain some assurance that any observed gender differences are not sample specific. Because the samples vary on such relevant characteristics as age, education, and experiences of work and ownership, and because they have different numbers of people and different gender ratios, any finding from the aggregated data was considered statistically significant only if there were no countermanding evidence in any of the three samples.

The first task of the analysis was to group the responses into common types or categories. In accordance with the phenomenological and linguistic objectives of being atheoretically descriptive, this categorizing of responses was done post-hoc, using literal content-analytic methods in order to bring as little interpretation as possible to the categorization process. Numerous studies of possessions and property done in different cultures have had to categorize objects of ownership and have usually done so on a post-hoc basis (e.g., Beggan, 1991; Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981; Dittmar, 1989, 1991; Furby, 1976; Kamptner, 1989, 1991; Rudmin and Berry, 1987; Schrader, 1966; Sherman and Newman, 1977). There has yet to emerge a consensus on a standard categorization scheme.

For this study, categorization entailed listing and alphabetically sorting the content words used by the respondents. Synonyms (e.g., “ideas” and “thoughts”) were grouped, as were words that formed a natural kind (e.g., “food” and “drink”). The categories for what is owned and what is not owned were determined in common, though the counts of category frequencies were done separately. By this process, 52 categories of exemplars of property were identified, including categories of No Response and MiscelLuneous, this last containing 13 items and two illegible responses. Many respondents gave qualified responses, such as “my boyfriend’s tapes”, or “borrowed things”. These qualifications were categorized separately from the objects of ownership and are marked in the tables by an ellipsis ( . . .> indicating the objects to be qualified. Using the procedure just described, 21 such categories of qualifiers were identified, including No Response. There was no need for a Miscellaneous category. Object and qualification categories used by at least 2% of all respondents appear in Table 1, ordered for each task by frequency-of-mention. The following categories were used by fewer than 2% of respondents: Debts, Name, Found . . . , Hidden . . . , Societal . . , , Stolen . . . , Temporary . . . , Used . . . ,

Paid For . . . , and Valuable . . . . The determination of the categories for the sense of ownership was done

in the same fashion: the respondents’ key words were tabulated, alphabet-

Table 1

F. W Rudmin /Journal of Economic Psychology 15 (1994) 487-510 495

Prouortion of subiects (N = 320) mentioning a category

Cars or Trucks 0.18 Sundries 0.07

No Response 0.17 Land 0.06

Ciothes 0.16 Toiletries 0.06 Furniture 0.15 Education 0.04

Residence 0.12 Public . . . 0.04

Things or Stuff 0.10 Body or Organs 0.04

Pets 0.10 Job or Employment 0.03 Food or Drink 0.09 Personality 0.03 Books 0.09 Rights or Vote 0.03 Stocks or Bonds 0.08 Tools 0.03

Gov. Property 0.08 Unimportant . , 0.03 Money 0.08 Shared . . 0.03 TV or stereo 0.08 Ideas or Thoughts 0.03 Recreation Items 0.07 Personal Space 0.03

Family’s . 0.07 People 0.03

Things not owned but with smne sense of ownership

Residence 0.47 Family 0.08

Family’s . . 0.41 Emptoyer’s . . . 0.07

People 0.27 Borrowed . . . 0.07

Cars or Trucks 0.24 Recreation Items 0.07

Parks or Lakes 0.21 City or Region 0.07

Friend’s . 0.16 Rights or Vote 0.06

Public . . . 0.15 Air or Sun 0.06

Gov. Property 0.14 Nearby 0.06

Personal Space 0.14 Books 0.05

Rented . . . 0.12 Job or Employment 0.05

Pets 0.12 TV or Stereo 0.05 Things or Stuff 0.11 No Response 0.04 Nation 0.11 Work Site 0.04

Institutions 0.10 Utilities 0.04

Environment 0.09 Land 0.03 Furniture 0.08 Emotions 0.03

Roads or Walks 0.08 Patronized Places 0.03

Control

Bought or Paid For Possess or Have Exclusive or Private

Use

Right Responsible For

Emotion or Attach.

Unrestrained

Care For Legal Title “Mine”

Earn or Achieve Familiar Clear or No Lien

0.28 Permanent 0.09 0.20 Need or Utility 0.08 0.19 Enjoy or Like 0.08 0.18 Self 0.07 0.16 Value or Asset 0.07

0.16 Complete or Total 0.06 0.16 Gift 0.06 0.15 Belong 0.06 0.14 Made or Changed 0.06 0.11 Communal 0.06 0.11 Family 0.06 0.10 No Response 0.05 0.10 Acquired 0.05 0.09 Pride 0.05 0.09 Intangibles 0.05

Things owned but with little sense of ownership

Trash Environment

Roads or Walks

Miscellaneous

Mortgaged . Life or Destiny

Jewelry Time Utilities

Former

Given

Businesses

Freedom Empioyer’s .

Parks or Lakes

Tools

Body or Organs Culture or Art

Businesses

Freedom Former .__

Mortgaged . . . Health

Beliefs or Values

Money

ID Cards Shared ___

Time

Clothes Life

Ideas or Thoughts

View

Personal Meaning

No Ownership Tangible Things

Miscellaneous

Can Dispose of

Keep Cognitive

Claim Accessible

Degree or Priority Can Share

Protect or Defend First

Want or Desire Not Disruptive

0.03

0.03

0.03

0.03

0.03 0.02

0.02

0.02 0.02

0.02

0.02 0.02

0.02 0.02

0.02

0.03

0.03 0.03

0.03

0.03

0.03 0.03

0.03

0.03

0.03 0.02

0.02

0.02

0.02 0.02

0.02 0.02

0.05

0.05 0.05

0.05

0.04

0.04 0.03

0.03

0.03 0.03 0.03

0.02 0.02

0.02 0.02

496 F. W Rudmin /Journal of Economic Psychology 15 (1994) 487-510

ized, and grouped according to literal semantics. For example, the following response, “Sense of ownership consists of things that are mine, that I have worked for and paid for myself - which I am proud of having. Sense of keeping parks, etc. clean as if they were my own”, resulted in the following key words being tabulated and categories assigned: “mine” (“Mine”), “worked for” (Earn or Achieve), “paid for” (Bought or Paid For), “proud of’ (Pride), and “keeping clean” (Care For). As listed in Table 1, 45 categories were thus identified, including No Response and Miscellaneous, this last containing 16 explanations, 13 of which declared what ownership is not.

Admittedly, these category labels are inadequate to describe each category. However, because of space limitations, only those categories which differentiate women from men or otherwise arise in discussion will be elaborated and illustrated with several of the most frequently used expressions. More extensive reductions in response categories were not pursued since that would necessarily entail more intrusive interpretative shaping of the data and thus frustrate the descriptive, phenomenological goals of the research.

To examine the reliability of the category groupings and category labels, a female undergraduate research assistant independently placed all of the responses of all of the subjects into the categories identified by these minimal labels. Cohen’s (1968) kappa was used as the measure of nominal scale agreement. Kappa ranges from - 1 to + 1 and can be interpreted as a correlation coefficient. For the object exemplar categories, K = 0.85, with most disagreement on the categories of Patronized Places and Tools. For the exemplar qualification categories, K = 0.86, with most disagreement on the category of Temporary . . . . For the sense of ownership categories, K = 0.83, with most disagreement on the Cognitive and Degree or Priority categories. These high kappa coefficients argue that the categorization of responses was reliable and replicable and that the category labels ade- quately reflect the category contents.

In order to minimize the effects of respondent perseveration on a category (e.g., listing “knives”, “forks”, and “spoons”) and to minimize presumptions about the relative importance of a respondent’s exemplars, data were compiled categorically (whether or not a category was mentioned), instead of by frequency (how many times the respondent mentioned the category), by relative frequency (what proportion of the respondent’s mentions were of a particular category), or by first-mention (what was the category of the first-mentioned response). Thus, the test of gender

E W Rudmin /Journal of Economic Psychology 15 (1994) 487-510 497

difference for a category took the form of a two (female, male) by two (not mentioned, mentioned) contingency table, and the statistic of choice was the phi coefficient. Phi is a direct calculation of contingency in a fourfold table, equal to a point-biserial correlation, with 0 meaning no influence of gender on category and 1 meaning one gender always mentioned the category and the other gender never mentioned it (Hays, 1988).

Table 1 shows the response categories and the over-all frequencies of response for those categories mentioned by at least 2% of the combined samples. Testing for gender differences on categories with frequencies of response lower than that is not feasible. For the exemplars of things owned, 45 response categories were tested for gender differences. For the exemplars of things not owned, 51 response categories were tested. With these 96 tests of gender difference, plus 45 tests for the categories of sense of ownership, phi tests of the total 141 categories using a significance criterion of p < 0.05 would tend to falsely identify gender differences. However, with the further conjunctive criterion of no reversed direction of difference in any of the three samples, which has a binomial probability of p = 0.25, the risk of Type-I errors is considerably moderated. A Monte Carlo examination of 10,000 random samples showed the significance level of the combined criteria to be p = 0.02. This indicates 2 or 3 possible false findings for the 141 phi coefficients examined. Where there is concern or doubt, future studies might be commissioned to test specific gender differences more rigorously.

Multivariate analyses were not pursued for two reasons. First, because the number of response categories far exceeds each respondent’s total number of responses, the categories are ipsative with one another. That is, giving a response in one category necessarily decreases the opportunity, and thus the probability, of giving a response in another category. This means that their intercorrelations, in fact and in theory under the null hypothesis, tend to be negative, which would confound most multivariate algorithms. Second, all multivariate procedures are indeterminate, and the final algorithm selected and the final configuration of data presented are ultimately dependent upon the interpretive preferences of the researcher. This would be contrary to the phenomenological intent of the study.

3. Results

To understand the tabulation of results, consider the first report in Table 2. For the category of Furniture, 25% of the women and 12% of the


Table 2

Things owned but with little sense of ownership

Response categories with significant gender differences

Test of gender association

Proportion mentioning a category

Sample 1: Sample 2: Sample 3:

All samples Ferry queue Undergraduates Law students

(F = 169, M = 151) (F = 44, M = 51) (F = 76, M = 28) (F = 49, M = 72)

Categories

Mentioned by more women than men

Furniture

Phi F M F M F M

0.19 :.0005 0.25 > 0.12 0.28 > 0.18 0.10 > 0.01

Mentioned by more men than women

Public .

Gov. Property

Phi F M F M F M

0.13 :.02 0.00 < 0.04 0.00 < 0.04 0.06 < 0.11

0.13 0.02 0.04 < 0.16 0.03 < 0.04 0.08 < 0.13

men in the ferry queue sample, 28% of the women and 18% of the men in the undergraduate sample, and 10% of the women and 1% of the men in the law student sample listed furniture as an example of something they own but with little sense of ownership. Comparing the responses of all 169 women against those of all 151 men, the phi coefficient is 0.19, rather than 0.00 as would be expected if women and men listed furniture equally. The likelihood the phi coefficient would be as high as 0.19 due to random patterns in the data or to luck-of-the-draw in the sampling is p = 0.0005, which is not very likely.Thus, this study shows that more women than men listed Furniture (“furniture”, “household items”, “appliances”) as examples of things owned. However, more men than women listed Public . . . (“government . . . “, “public . . . “, “crown corporations’ . . . “1 and Gouern- ment Property (“government”, “public property”, “crown corporations”). These last two categories, though not totally coincident, were redundant and highly correlated (r = 0.66, p < 0.001). Generally, respondents had difficulty thinking of exemplars of things that they own but for which they have little sense of ownership. For both women and men, 17% listed nothing, and the mean number of responses for women (mean = 2.6, sd = 2.1) and men (mean = 2.5, sd = 2.2) were relatively low and statistically indistinguishable (t = 0.51, df= 318, p = 0.61).

For things not owned but still sensed to be owned, respondents overall listed a mean of 4.0 exemplars, which was significantly more than the


examples of things owned (t = 8.8, df= 319, p < 0.001). Furthermore, significantly more exemplars (t = 2.2, d. = 318, p = 0.03) were listed by women (mean = 4.3, sd = 2.5) than by men (mean = 3.7, sd = 2.4), and this difference of means was evident among ferry queue respondents (women 3.70, men 3.68), adult undergraduates (women 4.57, men 3.321, and law students (women 4.37, men 3.79). Because gender differences in amount of response did not occur for the other tasks, this significant difference should not be interpreted as merely a gender difference in response style, linguistic facility, or experiment reactance. To the contrary, the empirical evidence suggests that women experience a less distinct sense of property boundaries than men do. There is more of the world that they do not own but sense that they do. This may be a result of greater material dependency

Table 3 Things not owned but with some sense of ownership


Test of gender Proportion mentioning a category

association Sample 1: Sample 2: Sample 3: All samples Ferry queue Undergraduates Law students (F = 169, M = 151) (F = 44, M = 51) (F = 76, M = 28) (F = 49, M = 72)

Categories

People

Family’s . Friends’

Pets

Work Site

Clothes

Family

View

Employer’s . . Beliefs or Values

Emotions

Public’s .

Gov. Property Parks or Lakes

Shared . . .

Phi P F M

0.25 0.00001 0.39 > 0.14

0.22 0.00003 0.34 > 0.18 0.17 0.002 0.14 > 0.02

0.15 0.006 0.14 > 0.06

0.14 0.01 0.14 > 0.00

0.13 0.02 0.00 0.00

0.13 0.02 0.1)s > 0.04

0.12 0.03 0.07 > 0.00

0.12 0.04 0.23 > 0.10 0.11 0.05 0.02 > 0.00 0.11 0.05 0.05 > 0.02

Phi P 0.19 0.0006 0.15 0.008 0.14 0.01 0.12 0.04


F M

0.37 > 0.21

0.63 > 0.14 0.26 > 0.18 0.21 > 0.11 0.04 > 0.036 0.05 > 0.00 0.09 > 0.00

0.00 0.00 0.04 > 0.00 0.05 > 0.04

0.05 > 0.00


F M F M

0.11 < 0.24 0.01 < 0.07

0.18 < 0.24 0.03 < 0.07

0.27 < 0.41 0.05 < 0.07

0.00 0.00 0.01 < 0.07

F M

0.37 > 0.14

0.51 > 0.29

0.22 > 0.11

0.12 > 0.06 0.06 > 0.01

0.04 > 0.00

0.18 > 0.06 0.04 > 0.00

0.08 > 0.01

0.04 > 0.00

0.06 > 0.01

F M 0.16 < 0.26 0.12 < 0.22 0.22 < 0.25

0.00 < 0.06

500 F. W. Rudmin /Journal of Economic Psychology 15 (I 994) 487-510

or less material wealth, though measures of that were not available for this study.

However, looking at the categories with significant gender differences, it can be argued that this is more a matter of female affiliativeness. As shown in Table 3, women more than men reported proprietary expansiveness in reference to People (“children”, “boyfriend”, “friends”), Family’s . . .

(“parent’s . . . “, “family’s . . . “, “spouse’s . . . “1, Friend’s . . . (“friend’s . . . “, “boyfriend’s . . . “, “roommate’s . . . “1, Pets (“cat”, “dog”, “pets”), Work Site (“workplace”, “office”), Clothes (“clothes”, “shoes”), Family (“family”, “parents”, “siblings”), view (“landscape”, “view”, “autumn color”), Employer’s . . . (“company’s . . . “, “client’s . . . “, “office’s . . . “1,

Beliefs or Vulues (“values”, “faith”, “attitudes”), and Emotions (“feelings”, “friendships”, “pride”).

As shown at the bottom of Table 3, men more than women reported proprietary expansiveness towards Public . . . (“government . . . “, “public

7, ... > “crown corporations . . . “>, Government Property (“government”, “public property”, “crown corporations”), Parks or Lakes (“parks”, “lakes”, “public land”), and Shared . . . (“shared . . . “, “joint . . . “1. Again, the categories of Public . . . and Government Property were redundant

Table 4 Descriptions of the sense of ownership


Test of gender Proportion mentioning a category

association Sample 1: Sample 2: Sample 3:

All samples Ferry queue Undergraduates Law students

(F = 169, M = 151) (F = 44, M = 51) (F = 76, M = 28) (F = 49, M = 72)

Categories

Phi

Responsible For 0.17 e.003

Self 0.17 0.003 Pride 0.16 0.004

Phi p

Unrestrained 0.18 0.001

Clear or No Lien 0.15 0.007

Complete or Total 0.14 0.01

Right 0.13 0.02


F M F M

0.18 > 0.10 0.26 > 0.11

0.07 > 0.00 0.17 > 0.04 0.16 > 0.04 0.08 > 0.00


F M F M 0.09 < 0.26 0.09 < 0.14

0.09 < 0.16 0.00 < 0.11 0.02 < 0.14 0.03 < 0.04

0.07 < 0.12 0.12 < 0.14

F M

0.16 > 0.08

0.06 > 0.04

0.02 > 0.00

F M 0.06 < 0.21

0.08 < 0.13 0.04 < 0.10 0.14 < 0.29


(Y = 0.74, p < 0.001). It may seem incorrect, or at least curious, that men should more frequently report owning public properties but feeling that they don’t, and not owning them but feeling that they do. The data suggest, however, that these reports came from two distinct subgroups of men, since the correlations of the object and qualification categories claiming ownership of public property had uniformly near-zero correlations with the object and qualification categories denying ownership of public property (r values of -0.02, 0.05, -0.05, and 0.00). There is insufficient information upon which to further identify these subgroups. The final finding, that men more than women tend to feel ownership over what is shared with them, may in part explain the Pythagorean observation that men are reluctant to share.

Gender differences in the descriptions of the sense of ownership are shown in Table 4. The mean numbers of explanations coded for women (3.8, sd = 1.9) and for men (4.1, sd = 2.1) were not significantly different (t = -0.96, df= 318, p = 0.34). Ho wever, more women than men used expressions of Responsible For (“responsibility”, “responsible for”, “en- trusted”), self (“express self”, “part of myself ‘, “identify with”), and Pride (“pride in”, “proud of”). More men then women used expressions of Unrestrained (“as I wish”, “do as I please”, “without interference”), Clear or No Lien (“clear”, “no debt”, “no worries”), Complete or Total (“complete”, “absolute”, “total”), and Right (“right”, “cannot be taken away”).

4. Discussion

These findings, of course, are tentative and require replication before they can confidently be considered to describe gender differences in the semantics of owning. Replication needs also to be extended to other cultural settings. All empirical semantic studies presume that the findings are limited to the linguistic community studied. However, where ownership concepts have been studied cross-culturally, there are fewer differences between cultures than might be expected (e.g., Brown, 1973, Lukmani, 1979; Ross, 1957; Rudmin, 1994; Snare, 1972; Wagener and Pohl, 1986). Nevertheless, despite limitations, the phenomenological survey data of this study are provocative and might serve to inform or excite further research and theoretical developments on ownership.

The first important observations on these data are so obvious that they might be overlooked. To those who would have expected the fact of ownership to be always congruent with the sense of ownership, that is, to


those might have thought the research task to be oxymoronic, it may be surprising that any responses were forthcoming at all. Although 17% of respondents could not think of examples of property for which they had little sense of ownership, only 4% could not think of examples of things for which they had some sense of owning but in fact did not own. There is an asymmetry: we know clearly what we do own but not what we do not own. This would suggest that people have a readiness to extend ownership beyond its factual bounds. If this is true of humans generally, then societies do well to have property law, property markers, and means of adjudication.

Perhaps a further surprise is the variety of categories that respondents used to expemplify ownership, going well beyond the strict definitions of chattels, real property, and intellectual property commonly recognized by law and political economic theory. Most dramatic of these were categories of people (People, Family), categories of self (Beliefs or V&es, Body or Organs, Emotions, Health, Ideas or Thoughts, Life or Destiny, Name, Per- sonal Space, Personality), categories of intangibles (Culture or Art, Educa- tion, Freedom, Rights or Vote), and categories of the natural environment (Air or Sun, Environment, Parks or Lakes, View). Responses such as these can be found in other studies that ask people to list examples of property or possessions (e.g., Beggan, 1991; Dittmar, 1989, 1991; Furby, 1976; Rudmin and Berry, 1987). This demonstrates that conventional definitions of ownership do not encompass the full psychological domain of the concept.

Several categories of objects deserve special mention. Clothes represent archetypal property for theories focused on the role of property in display- ing status and social class (e.g., Dittmar, 1992; Goffman, 1951; Mason, 1981; Spencer, 1893; Veblen, 1912). Yet Clothes, paradoxically, were the second most common example of property that carries little sense of ownership. It may be the public display function of clothing, and its temporary, surface linkage to the person, all allow too little control, privacy, and personal impress for clothes to be well owned. Money (“money”, “wealth”, “currency”) is another important object of ownership for which many respondents reported little sense of ownership. Like clothing, money has temporary, utilitarian functions - it comes, it goes. Money also has been noted to be profane (Belk and Wallendorf, 1988) and to be abstract (Rudmin, 1990b,c). All of these qualities disallow many of the listed senses of ownership. Two more unusual categories were Ideas or Thoughts (“ideas”, “thoughts”, “ opinions”) and Beliefs or Values (“beliefs”, “values”, “attitudes”). That ideas, beliefs, attitudes and other cognitive


objects are like possessions has been argued by Plato, Cooley, Allport, Litwinski (see Rudmin, 1990~1, Marcel (1949), Abelson (19861, Prentice (1987), and others. Respondents in this study gave some spontaneous confirmation that this line of argument has some merit.

A third observation is that there was no consensus, not even a majority opinion, on what the sense of ownership entails. The sentence, “I own this”, could have many meanings and different claims to truth and falsity depending on which sense of “own” is used. Again, if this is generally true of humankind, then it is understandable that people have conflicting claims on property and that societies develop formalized legal definitions of ownership and means to adjudicate property disputes.

The most common account of ownership in each of the samples, reported by 28% of the respondents overall, was that the sense of ownership entails Control (“control”, “decide”, “needs my permission”, “have say”). Other studies have also found control to be central to the semantic sense of ownership or to motivations for owning possessions (Beggan, 1991; Furby, 1976; Lukmani, 1979; Marcel, 1949; Miller and Johnson-Laird, 1976; Pren- tice, 1987; Rudmin and Berry, 1987; Schrader, 1966). The next two most common components of the sense of ownership were Bought or Paid For (“bought”, “paid for”, “purchased”, “buy”) and Possess or Have (“II assess”, “have”, “possession”, “occupy”). Again, there is a substantial record of other semantic studies finding these two categories close in meaning to ownership (Rapoport and Fillenbaum, 1972; Rudmin, 1994; Rudmin and Berry, 1987; Takane, 1980; Wagener and Pohl, 1986). That the most salient results of this study are in accord with other studies demonstrates that the phenomenological approach used in this study did elicit information about the meaning of ownership.

Two widely held theories of property did not show well in these data. Both Locke (1690) and Marx (1877) argued that the foundation of ownership is invested labor: we own what we make. However, Made or Changed (“made”, “labor”, “improve”, “change”) as an explanation of the sense of ownership was mentioned by only 6% of all respondents. Other studies have similarly found weak evidence for the labor theory of ownership (Ellwood, 1927; Rudmin, 1987; Rudmin and Berry, 1987; Rudmin, 1994). In common law, first possession, or first discovery, is a strong claim of ownership (Becker, 1977; Da Costa, 1982). However, in the present study, only 2% of all respondents mentioned First (“first”, “discovered”, “find”) as a component of the sense of ownership.

Before discussing gender differences, one more obvious observation


needs to be made: none of the phi coefficients were 1.00. That is, there were no either-or, black-and-white, male-female differences. To the contrary, the data show degrees of differences between women and men, gender-sensitive nuances in the meaning of ownership. Nevertheless, these data do accord with Gilligan’s (1982) argument that women’s perspectives have been absent from the discourse and with her general hypothesis that women are more contextual and interpersonal and less rule-governed than are men. The men in this study were more responsive to principles in the abstract, evident in a greater focus on ownership as an unencumbered right, complete, total, and without restraints. This seems to be a close articulation of traditional property theory, displayed, for example, in the Napoleonic Code or more strongly in Sir William Blackstone’s influential definition of property in his 1765 Commentaries on the Laws of England:

“Ownership is the right to enjoy and dispose of things in the most absolute manner, provided they

are not used in a way contrary to law or regulations.” (French Civil Code, Article 544, 1804, quoted

from Haar and Liebman, 1985, p. xxxix)

“There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind,

as the right of property or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over

the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the

universe.” (Blackstone, 1765, quoted from Haar and Liebman, 1985, p. xxxix)

Responsibility, pride, self - these components of the sense of ownership more identified by women - do not appear in the standard explanations of ownership in law and political economics. Where is the responsiveness to networks of social relationships, seen in a focus on family, friends, work sites, and other nodes of human connection? When ownership entails a sense of Responsible For, then it is not absolutes or freedom from other people that are the defining qualities, but contingent obligations to other people and to the property owned. This quite accords with Gilligan’s (1982) conclusions of women’s moral sense. Numerous consumer behavior studies have similarly noted that women more than men favor and identify with possessions that represent interpersonal relationships (Csikszentimihlayi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981; Dittmar, 1989, 1991; Sherman and Newman, 1977; Wallendorf and Arnould, 19881.

It also appears that ownership tends to be more directly and positively related to the self for women than it is for men. There is a a wide literature (see Belk’s, 1988, review) and a long tradition going back at least to Aristotle (see Rudmin, 1988) that property is integral to the self. As


Margaret Radin has argued: any theory of ownership should entail reference to the self:

“[Tlo be a person an individual needs some control over resources in the external environment. The

necessary assurances of control take the form of property rights. Although explicit elaboration of

this perspective is wanting in modern writing on property, the personhood perspective is often

implicit in the ~nnectjons that courts and commentators find between property and privacy or

between property and liberty. In addition to its power to explain certain aspects of existing schemes

of property entitlement, the personhood perspective can also serve as an explicit source of values for making moral distinctions in property disputes, and hence for either justifying or criticizing current

law .,. It is not surprising that personhood has played a part in property theories all along the

political spectrum.” (Radin, 1982, p. 957)

The data of this study show that women more frequently relate property to explicit terms of self and of pride. The emerging image of women’s sense of ownership includes a self unconstrained by property boundary definitions, ready to shade boundaries or erase them, depending on social contexts. Property boundaries adjust to interpersonal relationships, not vice versa. Men, however, tend to define self by negation and derivation, in a way very dependent on the property boundary. The image is of an insecure self set in contrast to hostile others restrained by regimes of rights and by sharp rule-bound relationships. At the extreme, property boundaries define the interpersonal relationships. Karen Horney has described just this orientation as “neurotic”:

“Winning affection means obtaining reassurance through intensified contact with others, while

striving for power, prestige and possession means obtaining reassurance through loosening of the

contact with others and through fortifying one’s own position.” (Homey, 1937, p. 162)

Although no feminist theory of ownership will be here articulated or outlined, the obse~ations of this study, if they can be confirmed by replications, do establish some “facts” that any feminist theory of property should encompass. Most generally, this analysis would support an argument that for men ownership functions more to disconnect and separate people, to make private realms of isolated autonomy, based on cognitively simple and efficient rules. For women, on the other hand, ownership functions more to connect and unite people, in ways potentially complex or novel. The poles for the tension to develop a feminist theory of ownership might be held at these extremes: connecting vs. disconnecting, boundary-breaking vs. boundary-making. This would accord with Gilligan’s (1982) distinction of women as contextualist and men as abstract in their moral development, with Carlson’s (1971) distinction of women giving priority to values of


communion and men to values of agency, and with Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger and Tarule’s (1986) distinction of a female proclivity for interconnectedness and male proclivity for separatism.

Traditional political-economic and legal theories of property appear to be over-dosed with the male perspective, which seems to have gained ascendency in Western civilization during the Renaissance and the Refor- mation (MacPherson, 1962; Macfarlane, 1978). Property as stewardship, entailing responsibility and social utility, held sway in earlier periods, albeit with highly religious overtones (Avila, 1983; Schlatter, 1951). It may be that a feminist theory of ownership could serve as a new Renaissance, to bring back some balance between connecting and disconnecting perspectives. Rose’s (1990) recent feminist account of male and female property perspectives is just such an attempt. She illustrates the process by which the archetypal male conception of ownership as a zero-sum competition for exclusive resources forces archetypal female models to adopt the zero-sum conception or be deprived.

It is also important to keep in mind that female and male orientations towards property need not entail an exclusive “either/or”. Bankart and Vincent (19891, writing on a similar and related dichotomy of communion (archetypally feminine) and agency (archetypally masculine), concluded that communion mitigates agency in men analogously to the way agency mitigates communion in women. These authors perceived a balanced androgyny to be an ideal state. Similarly, new theories of property, and eventually regimes of property law, might begin to encompass and legiti- mate the perspectives of both genders for a more comprehensive understanding of ownership.

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