Young Children Use Discovery and Creation Significantly More Than Adults for Deciding Ownership

Figure 1

Vignettes and script for the Discovery vs. Creation story. The numbers between brackets indicate the vignette that accompanied the narration: (1) “One day, Luis was walking by the forest. It was a dark place, full of trees and plants. Nobody had ever reached that sector of the forest. While walking, Luis found a bunch of wood pieces: ‘This is great! This wood is nobody’s, so I’ll take it. Now it’s mine’. Luis was the first one to find those pieces of wood, pick them up, and say they were his.” (2) “Luis took the wood pieces to a nearby path and put them behind a big rock. After that, he continued walking.” (3) “Later, Nico walked by that place and saw the wood pieces that Luis had put behind the rock.” (4) “Nico said: ‘Wow, a bunch of wooden pieces! I am going to build a chair’. Then, Nico built a chair with the pieces of wood. He did it in a short time. It was a weak, uncomfortable, and ugly chair. If a big person would have sit on the chair, it would have broken down.” (5) “Sometime later, Luis came back, saw the chair and said: ‘My wood pieces!’ But Nico answered: ‘It’s my chair!’ Luis said: ‘The chair is mine because I found and picked up those wooden pieces. They are mine’. And Nico answered: ‘The chair is mine because I made it. It’s mine’. And they could not reach an agreement.” Afterward, the sixth vignette was shown and children were asked: (6) “Whose chair is this? (Spanish: ‘¿De quién es la silla?’) Is it Juan’s, who discovered the wood, or is it Luis’, who built the chair?”.