Collective psychological ownership as a new angle for understanding group dynamics

ABSTRACT

Even without legal ownership, groups can experience objects, places, and ideas as belonging to them (‘ours’). This state of mind–collective psychological ownership–is understudied in social psychology, yet it is central to many intergroup conflicts and stewardship behaviour. We discuss our research on the psychological processes and social-psychological implications of collective psychological ownership. We studied territorial ownership, in different parts of the world and at different geographical levels, offering not only a cross-national but also conceptual replication of the processes. Our findings show that collective psychological ownership is inferred based on primo-occupancy, investment, and formation. Further, we demonstrate that collective psychological ownership can have positive intragroup and negative intergroup outcomes, which are guided by perceived group responsibility and exclusive determination right. We then discuss ownership threat (losing what is ‘ours’), and we consider the role of group identification in ownership-related processes. We conclude by providing directions for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Collective psychological ownership
• rights
• responsibilities
• intergroup relations
• stewardship

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Availability of data and material & code

We have made the data and code of our studies discussed in this review article available online on Open Science Framework. Please see the respective publications for the related links to Open Science Framework.

Ethics approval

Our research line OWNERS has been approved by the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences of Utrecht University (clearance number: FETC18–118).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Note that Table 1 only includes studies on collective psychological ownership and collective ownership threat. Studies on autochthony belief that we also discuss in this review are not included in this table.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 715842) awarded to the first author.