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Psychologies of Property (and Why Property is not a Hawk/Dove Game)

Carol M. Rose

Writers on property have generated an array of viewpoints about the psychological states associated with the institution. The bulk of these views take the perspective of the person who owns something, and they theorize or speculate on why it matters to people to be able to claim ownership.1 In this chapter, I will designate this perspective the view from the ‘inside’—that is, the property owner’s perspective on his or her own situation—and I will briefly describe a range of the reasons that writers have given for the importance of owning things.

But my more serious interest is in what I will designate the ‘outside’ perspective, the psychological state of the non-owner, who is confronted regularly with things that belong to others. By the non-owner, I do not necessarily mean to signify persons who own little or nothing themselves, but I rather use this term more situationally, to designate those who in any particular instance observe but do not own the thing observed. It is this outside perspective that is of greatest interest in this chapter—that is, the non-owner’s recognition of and heed to the ownership claims of others. I will argue that the outside perspective is critically important to the success or failure of property regimes, but that the non-owner’s psychological state is not well understood.

One theory in particular identifies the non-owner as a ‘dove’ in a Hawk/Dove game, but I will argue that the hawk/dove analysis of property has serious flaws— not the least of which is the psychological state suggested by the dove role. A more promising avenue might be to note the relationship of the non-owner to a cooperative first mover in a tit-for-tat game, but here too the ultimate psychology remains somewhat mysterious, or as Jon Elster calls it, magical.2

But I will begin with the inside perspective, focusing on some psychological states that have been said to accompany property ownership. While there is considerably more to be said on the subject,3 the following pages give a very rough summary of that topic.

1	See e.g. a very interesting survey of psychological aspects of property, almost entirely focused on
the perspective of the owner or claimant: Blumenthal 2009.
2	Elster 1989, 194–202.	3 See e.g. Blumenthal 2009.