Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People often over value their current property. For example,even young children will choose to keep their current propertyover trading it for property of similar utility (Hartley & Fisher,2018). In two experiments (N = 180), we examined howchildren aged 3 and 4 weigh the potential loss of existingproperty against the gain of property in their reasoning aboutothers’ actions. We found that by 4-years-old, children expectothers to prioritize the retention of existing property over theacquisition of new property. We suggest that this expectationreflects an understanding that people often value what theyalready own more than what they can potentially gain. Wediscuss the implications of our findings for competing theoriesof ownership reasoning, and for children’s reasoning about lossaversion.