According to Science News Magazine, one experiment involving children aged 4-5, and another involving children aged 3-7, with a final experiment with 4-year olds, the case is very clear: kids overwhelmingly respected property rights, while adults in the study were far less respectful.
This makes perfect sense, especially to those who believe in God, and who believe we lived with our Heavenly Father prior to our lives here on Earth. Our spirits feel the same way about economic freedom as they do about freedom to choose the path our lives will lead. We were principled promoters of liberty in our pre-mortal existence, and we were placed here on the earth at this time, IMHO, to fight for American, and by extension, HUMAN freedom. It’s quite interesting; the numbers were pretty conclusive in the study:
About 75 percent of 4- and 5-year-olds decided in favor of the owner, versus about 20 percent of adults.
[…]
most 4-year-olds but only a minority of adults declared that the device should be returned to its owner
Apparently, humans are born with a natural respect for property rights. Leftists will grasp at anything to explain this now-proven fact away:
…psychologist Dan Ariely of Duke University…perhaps preschoolers thought that, relative to the boy using a crayon, the girl who owned that crayon liked it more or got more pleasure from using it…
No, that is not a misprint. Dan Ariely of Duke University really did hatch that ridiculous theory. It was so pathetic, it deserves its own article, but I’ll leave that to somebody else. I highlighted his ridiculous leftist postulation in the color RED in the ScienceNews article below. Here’s the lead off by Business Insider:
Proof That Humans Are Born Capitalists
Eric Falkenstein, Falkenblog | Jun. 23, 2011, 5:39 AM
Bastiat noted that “Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.” von Mises and Hayek championed this insight to note how private property was essential to economic efficiency via its decentralizing nature, and Hernando de Soto applied this to problems in the third world.
While the NYTimes likes to put scare quotes around ‘property rights’ when discussing eminent domain as if it’s some newfangled right wing obsession, the following following psychology experiment suggests it’s human nature…
Kids Own Up to Ownership
Concept of property rights may come naturally to preschoolers
By Bruce Bower June 18th, 2011; Vol.179 #13 (p. 17)
WASHINGTON — Young children are possessed by possessions. Preschoolers argue about what belongs to whom with annoying regularity, a habit that might suggest limited appreciation of what it means to own something.
But it’s actually just the opposite, psychologist Ori Friedman of the University of Waterloo in Canada reported on May 28 at the Association for Psychological Science annual meeting. At ages 4 and 5, youngsters value a person’s ownership rights — say, to a crayon — far more strongly than adults do, Friedman and psychology graduate student Karen Neary found.
Rather than being learned from parents, a concept of property rights may automatically grow out of 2- to 3-year-olds’ ideas about bodily rights, such as assuming that another person can’t touch or control one’s body for no reason, Friedman proposed.
“Parents and adults may teach kids when it’s appropriate to disregard personal ownership,” he said. One such instance would involve a mother’s advice on when to lend a toy to another child who wants to borrow that item.
Friedman’s team presented a simple quandary to 40 preschoolers, ages 4 and 5, and to 44 adults.
Participants saw an image of a cartoon boy holding a crayon who appeared above the word “user” and a cartoon girl who appeared above the word “owner.” After hearing from an experimenter that the girl wanted her crayon back, volunteers were asked to rule on which cartoon child should get the prized object.
About 75 percent of 4- and 5-year-olds decided in favor of the owner, versus about 20 percent of adults.
A second experiment consisted of more than 100 kids, ages 3 to 7, and 30 adults. In this case, participants saw the same cartoon boy and girl but were told that the crayon belonged to the school that the two imaginary children attended.
Nearly everyone, regardless of age, said that the user should keep the crayon for as long as needed in this situation. In other words, kids distinguished between people using an owned or a nonowned object.
In a final experiment that presented two cartoon adults, one using a cell phone that the other owned, most 4-year-olds but only a minority of adults declared that the device should be returned to its owner even before the borrower had a chance to use it. Children showed some flexibility in allowing borrowers to keep the phone — say, if it was needed for an emergency — but adults adjusted their opinions more readily to such circumstances.
It’s hard to know how children reasoned about experimental ownership scenarios, remarked psychologist Dan Ariely of Duke University. Perhaps preschoolers thought that, relative to the boy using a crayon, the girl who owned that crayon liked it more or got more pleasure from using it, Ariely suggested.
That possibility hasn’t been studied. What’s clear is that learning apparently plays little role in early thinking about possessions, Friedman asserted.
“A concept of ownership rights may be a product of the way we naturally think early in life,” he said.
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