On the social nature of nonsocial perception: The mere ownership effect.

The assumption of the present research was that ownership of an object causes the owner to treat the object as a social entity because ownership creates a psychological association between the object and the owner. Three experiments investigated whether Ss would evaluate an object more favorably merely because they owned it, a bias analogous to other self-serving biases people display. Study 1 confirmed the existence of this mere ownership effect. Study 2 showed that the effect was not due to Ss having greater exposure to an owned object relative to an unowned object. Study 3 showed that the effect may be a specific instance of a general tendency of people to make self-enhancing judgments. Research in social psychology has focused predominantly on how individuals think and feel about other people (cf., Higgins & Bargh, 1987). In contrast, relatively little attention has been directed toward examining how people think and feel about objects. At first glance, this neglect is not surprising. After all, relative to objects, people possess a number of characteristics that makes person perception more complex and therefore more interesting to social psychologists than object perception