Psychological Ownership
Behavioural Design / Design Research / Behavior Settings / Design Methods
The Interaction Foundry aims to understand the psychology of behaviour in design contexts such that interventions can achieve their desired outcomes. Our work in 2024 focused on using theories of behaviour change to improve public health outcomes. We developed interventions for improving handwashing amongst low-income communities in Tanzania, and for reducing littering in dense urban environments.
Many of our everyday interactions are dictated by what it means to (psychologically) own. Understanding what it means to possess something, for instance, is a prerequisite to appreciating the meaning behind buying, selling, gifting, stealing, lending, borrowing and more [1]. Privacy too requires that we first feel that something is uniquely ours before someone can infringe upon this.
Before we continue, it is important to note that we are interested in a feeling of ownership that may or may not coincide with legal ownership. When we legally own things we typically also feel a sense of ownership for the object. However, a feeling of ownership need not match legal ownership directly. Perhaps you have been given a gift that you didn’t want and it is yours but the feeling of ownership is not strong. You may also feel strong ownership for something you don’t legally own as is the case with a work computer owned by a company but you feel it is yours.
This feeling of ownership is important in many everyday contexts. Consider how you might act, feel or think differently if you believe the first statement versus the second:
As these examples demonstrate, even small changes in how you feel towards an object can lead to dramatic differences in how you act. The examples also emphasise that you can feel ownership for any target (persona, place, thing) and while these are different, as we will discuss, the underlying reasons behind why and how someone feels ownership is similar. While ownership is always a consideration, it is being accelerated by a few trends.
We are increasingly interested in immaterial ownership. Ownership for digital artifacts (such as a web page), services, tasks at work, organisations, political candidates/parties, data and concepts (e.g. my environmental impact, my health) would all fit in this trend. It is often easier to think about interactions with physical goods but we care more and more about how people interact with things less tangible and less structured, such as abstract goods. Just as we can describe an interaction with a football and think of the possessive behaviours that come along with that, we can also describe the interactions one has with a football club and how a person can feel ownership for the organisation. It is also likely clear to us that someone who feels very strongly that they have a team interacts differently toward that team (and others) than they would if they didn’t have a team.
We increasingly care about ownership involving multiple users. Ownership for public spaces (parks, toilets, etc), shared objects, digital environments (e.g., Teams channels) and personal environments that are shared (hotel rooms, office space, etc) all fit into this trend. When more people are involved in a context, the boundary between mine, yours, ours and nobody’s can become blurred and one person’s action can impact the other’s experience. In a simple example, an individual went to fetch a dockless bike that was ‘available’ in the app but someone was sitting right next to it implying they had possession of the bike until they needed it again. Upon scanning the bike code and taking it, the person tried to stop the individual who had just hired it saying it was his bike.
Finally, we care about the ownership lifetimes differently. This category includes those instances where we don’t only think about ownership in a moment but as it changes over time. We have long been fixated on the point of sale moment when a product is transferred from one person to another but we are increasingly interested in the use and end of life of a product. Similarly, people no longer stay in a single job for most of their career which forces us to think about how we onboard them and send them off in a way they can more quickly feel a sense of ownership in the organisation. We could also think about the movement of people. Where we once would see large populations living in a single place for multiple generations, conflict and natural disaster has forced as much as 1 in 95 people in the world to forcibly move their homes — a number expected to continue to rise due to global climate change. For instance, how might we help refugees feel more at home in a new location? Without a sense of ownership, one may be left feeling like a permanent visitor or an outsider and never fully develop an identity with the place, engage in civic engagement activities and help cultivate the place for the better.
Unfortunately, policies, products and services seeking to address these issues often fail in large part because psychological ownership is poorly dealt with. There are three main pitfalls to avoid.
The first pitfall is that ownership is often overlooked altogether. Perhaps because it is such a fundamental idea underlying what we do, people do not see it. A now-famous example of this came in 2014 when Apple teamed up with the band U2 to ‘gift’ an album to hundreds of millions of iTunes users. Overnight, a new album showed up in people’s libraries and the backlash was severe. As Slate described, ‘it is an unsettling reminder that [...] our music collection is not really our own. [...] Apparently, consent and interest are no longer a requisite for owning an album, only corporate prerogative’ [2].
The second pitfall is that the importance of ownership is discounted. This is often because people see legal ownership as the dominant interaction and reduce ownership generally to a utilitarian idea. Part of this is due to a narrow understanding of a quote attributed to Professor Theodore Levitt which states that ‘People don’t want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole’. In other words, people want the outcome of ownership and not necessarily the means. However, the outcome has often been interpreted as only legal ownership which completely misses the mark and discounts the importance of other benefits people get from ownership. This is summarised nicely (and painfully) in a Fastcompany article looking at the sharing economy. The promise of a more sustainable and efficient future facilitated by the sharing economy often ends in ruin and a big part of this is due to the discounted interest in ownership. As one founder of a failed sharing economy put it (with a delightful reference back to Professor Levitt’s comment), ‘Everything made sense except that nobody gives a shit. They go buy [a drill]. Or they just bang a screwdriver through the wall’ [3].
The third pitfall is that people often see ownership and recognise its importance but they do not properly understand the mechanics of it. Intuition alone often works but does not fully unlock the potential of making design interventions. Whether we are trying to help people manage their own health, develop a more successful sharing economy model or increase the ownership one feels for a task at work, theory can sharpen our approach. Psychological ownership theory provides a foundation for analysing when, where and why ownership takes place and designing interventions accordingly. In the next section, we will derive a framework for psychological ownership before describing how it can be applied.
Before we continue, it is important to note that we are interested in a feeling of ownership that may or may not coincide with legal ownership. When we legally own things we typically also feel a sense of ownership for the object. However, a feeling of ownership need not match legal ownership directly. Perhaps you have been given a gift that you didn’t want and it is yours but the feeling of ownership is not strong. You may also feel strong ownership for something you don’t legally own as is the case with a work computer owned by a company but you feel it is yours.
This feeling of ownership is important in many everyday contexts. Consider how you might act, feel or think differently if you believe the first statement versus the second:
| General Statement | Ownership Statement |
| My health is my GP’s responsibility | My health is MY responsibility |
| I know some things I do are not bad but how else would I be living? | I feel a strong sense of ownership for MY environmental impact. |
| This is a community where I happen to live | This is MY community. |
| This is a shared bike I am using for this single journey | This is MY bike |
| She is a candidate chosen by her party | She is MY political candidate |
| This is a house given to me by the council | This is MY house |
| This is an idea that came from a different business unit | This is MY/OUR idea |
As these examples demonstrate, even small changes in how you feel towards an object can lead to dramatic differences in how you act. The examples also emphasise that you can feel ownership for any target (persona, place, thing) and while these are different, as we will discuss, the underlying reasons behind why and how someone feels ownership is similar. While ownership is always a consideration, it is being accelerated by a few trends.
We are increasingly interested in immaterial ownership. Ownership for digital artifacts (such as a web page), services, tasks at work, organisations, political candidates/parties, data and concepts (e.g. my environmental impact, my health) would all fit in this trend. It is often easier to think about interactions with physical goods but we care more and more about how people interact with things less tangible and less structured, such as abstract goods. Just as we can describe an interaction with a football and think of the possessive behaviours that come along with that, we can also describe the interactions one has with a football club and how a person can feel ownership for the organisation. It is also likely clear to us that someone who feels very strongly that they have a team interacts differently toward that team (and others) than they would if they didn’t have a team.
We increasingly care about ownership involving multiple users. Ownership for public spaces (parks, toilets, etc), shared objects, digital environments (e.g., Teams channels) and personal environments that are shared (hotel rooms, office space, etc) all fit into this trend. When more people are involved in a context, the boundary between mine, yours, ours and nobody’s can become blurred and one person’s action can impact the other’s experience. In a simple example, an individual went to fetch a dockless bike that was ‘available’ in the app but someone was sitting right next to it implying they had possession of the bike until they needed it again. Upon scanning the bike code and taking it, the person tried to stop the individual who had just hired it saying it was his bike.
Finally, we care about the ownership lifetimes differently. This category includes those instances where we don’t only think about ownership in a moment but as it changes over time. We have long been fixated on the point of sale moment when a product is transferred from one person to another but we are increasingly interested in the use and end of life of a product. Similarly, people no longer stay in a single job for most of their career which forces us to think about how we onboard them and send them off in a way they can more quickly feel a sense of ownership in the organisation. We could also think about the movement of people. Where we once would see large populations living in a single place for multiple generations, conflict and natural disaster has forced as much as 1 in 95 people in the world to forcibly move their homes — a number expected to continue to rise due to global climate change. For instance, how might we help refugees feel more at home in a new location? Without a sense of ownership, one may be left feeling like a permanent visitor or an outsider and never fully develop an identity with the place, engage in civic engagement activities and help cultivate the place for the better.
Unfortunately, policies, products and services seeking to address these issues often fail in large part because psychological ownership is poorly dealt with. There are three main pitfalls to avoid.
The first pitfall is that ownership is often overlooked altogether. Perhaps because it is such a fundamental idea underlying what we do, people do not see it. A now-famous example of this came in 2014 when Apple teamed up with the band U2 to ‘gift’ an album to hundreds of millions of iTunes users. Overnight, a new album showed up in people’s libraries and the backlash was severe. As Slate described, ‘it is an unsettling reminder that [...] our music collection is not really our own. [...] Apparently, consent and interest are no longer a requisite for owning an album, only corporate prerogative’ [2].
The second pitfall is that the importance of ownership is discounted. This is often because people see legal ownership as the dominant interaction and reduce ownership generally to a utilitarian idea. Part of this is due to a narrow understanding of a quote attributed to Professor Theodore Levitt which states that ‘People don’t want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole’. In other words, people want the outcome of ownership and not necessarily the means. However, the outcome has often been interpreted as only legal ownership which completely misses the mark and discounts the importance of other benefits people get from ownership. This is summarised nicely (and painfully) in a Fastcompany article looking at the sharing economy. The promise of a more sustainable and efficient future facilitated by the sharing economy often ends in ruin and a big part of this is due to the discounted interest in ownership. As one founder of a failed sharing economy put it (with a delightful reference back to Professor Levitt’s comment), ‘Everything made sense except that nobody gives a shit. They go buy [a drill]. Or they just bang a screwdriver through the wall’ [3].
The third pitfall is that people often see ownership and recognise its importance but they do not properly understand the mechanics of it. Intuition alone often works but does not fully unlock the potential of making design interventions. Whether we are trying to help people manage their own health, develop a more successful sharing economy model or increase the ownership one feels for a task at work, theory can sharpen our approach. Psychological ownership theory provides a foundation for analysing when, where and why ownership takes place and designing interventions accordingly. In the next section, we will derive a framework for psychological ownership before describing how it can be applied.
Data Centre is a proposed iOS intervention designed for the Information Commissioner's Office that was prototyped to show how technology companies might comply with the UK's new Age Appropriate Design Code. The solution is a built-in educational tool for operating systems that helps children to understand and manage their data, subsequently promoting autonomy and online safety.
Both parents and children can lack awareness of the data collection practices used by third-party services and their impact on privacy. The lack of transparent data management on websites can exacerbate this situation, highlighting the need for a user-friendly system that affords user autonomy within online spaces. The ICO's new Age Appropriate Design Code aims to regulate online services for children more effectively. However, as a new piece of legislation, the ICO lacked examples of how technology companies could implement the code.Therefore, we worked with the ICO to prototype a low fidelity solution that involves a built-in educational tool for operating systems. The intervention focuses on children aged 7-11 within the iOS platform. However, the intervention can equally apply to alternative operating systems and other demographic groups with slight adjustments. We chose the 7-11 age to target Piaget's concrete operational stage of developmental psychology and complement the Key Stage 2 ICT curriculum.
The main features include a personalised interface to capture user attention and increase engagement; distinct animations to indicate when personal, locational or behavioural data is requested; and an optional guided overlay to indicate how to delete all personal data and disable data sharing to third parties. Since research indicates that autonomy-supportive parental action is advantageous over control-based action in the context of data awareness, the tool was designed as an instructive intervention, educating and highlighting the importance of data awareness without restricting online activity. Through this tool, children can be afforded greater dignity within online spaces and learn how to manage risky situations more effectively.