Intuitive Theories of Acquisition, and Why They Matter: An Investigation into People’s Lay Theories of Ownership and Learning

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Leonard, Julia

Abstract

The skills, knowledge, and things we acquire determine who we become. Knowing how to drive allows us to go places unreachable by foot, learning basic arithmetic allows us to track our personal finances and future savings, and obtaining a college degree opens new career opportunities. How do people decide what they can acquire? Consideration about resource acquisition — what makes things yours, mine, or no one else’s — rests on the primitive concept of ownership emerged more than two million years ago, where an owner has exclusive control over their acquired resources. Crucially, intuitions about ownership are only useful to the extent that they are shared across individuals. Yet information about whether an object is owned and by whom is often unavailable in plain sight, making ownership inferences difficult despite its central role in human life. In the first part of this dissertation, I explore the intuitive theories that underlie people’s ownership judgments in simple object transfer between two agents, where consensus might be expected. Data collected across four experiments reveal surprising yet systematic differences in people’s ownership intuitions: When an original owner accidentally loses physical possession of their property, about 40% of people judged that the original owner also lost ownership over it and 50% of people believed that the original owner still retained ownership since there was no intention to relinquish ownership. This difference in people’s ownership intuitions further predicts people’s judgments of object use: whether an agent could use, alter, lend, and dispose the property. Of course, our experience of acquiring things extends far beyond physical objects in an instant transfer. Starting from infancy, we acquire (learn) new knowledge and skills — things that are harder to describe and lack a concrete physical basis — over longer periods of time. Could people represent this more intangible acquisition process? I show in the remaining two chapters that children as young as five understand that acquiring a new skill is unlike a binary property transfer (success /failure) but rather a gradual process. Moreover, adults correctly intuit the exponential decay shape of skill learning over time, where learners rapidly improve early on but performance gains asymptote later. Adults also possess sophisticated intuitions about the skill acquisition process, flexibly predict a naïve learner’s learning trajectory based on task difficulty and effort allocated. However, since skill acquisition is often an opaque process that is only grounded in the physical domain through a performance metric, forming precise expectations are challenging. Both children and adults are overly optimistic about their performance during skill acquisition. These inflated expectations about one’s ability to acquire a new skill have downstream consequences on people’s learning experiences: The more optimistic adults are about their future performance, the worse they feel about their performance at the start of learning. Thus, what we think we are capable of acquiring could have the potential to shape our subsequent choices and outcomes. Taken together, this set of work shows that people hold sophisticated beliefs about acquisition — over not only physical objects, but also intangible skills — but systematic differences in people’s intuitions exist and could explain meaningful variances in people’s subsequent judgments and affective experiences.

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