First Arrival and Collective Land Ownership: How Children Reason About Who Owns the Land

Four survey experiments provide evidence that children (9–12 years) infer collective land ownership from first arrival. In Experiments 1 and 2, children indicated that a group owns an island relatively more than another group when having been or living on the island first. In the third experiment, it was found that first comers were considered to own the land more independently of whether the second group joined or succeeded them in living on the island. In Experiment 4, the first arrival principle to infer collective ownership was independent of the duration of stay of the first comers before being joined by the second group. Taken together, the findings provide clear evidence of the importance of first arrival for inferring collective place ownership.