Periodic Reporting for period 3 - OWNERS (‘This country is ours’: Collective psychological OWNERShip and ethnic attitudes )
Berichtszeitraum: 2020-04-01 bis 2021-09-30
Previous research has studied psychological ownership – feelings of possessiveness towards a target – from the perspective of individuals (‘mine’) and shown that people can feel that objects, places and ideas belong to them even in the absence of legal recognition. However, ownership can be experienced on a group level as well. People are not only concerned about their individual characteristics and property, but they also see themselves as group members. By extension, what we think we own as a group becomes relevant to us. Almost nothing is known about these experiences of collective psychological ownership (CPO): a shared sense that something is ‘ours’. Yet, CPO seems to be particularly relevant with respect to territories and in the context of ethnic relations.
The aim of the OWNERS research program is to develop a first instrument to measure collective psychological ownership and find out (1) to what extent people perceive their group as owning the country more than the relevant ethnic outgroup, (2) what psychological needs motivate people to claim ownership of the country for their group and which categories of people are more likely to do so, and (3) what consequences ownership claims have for attitudes towards other relevant ethnic groups. We focus on multi-ethnic countries. These are the settings where collective ownership claims are prominent in the political discourse. Moreover, implications of ownership claims on a national scale could be far-reaching and unnerving, endangering social cohesion at large.
Ethnic attitudes and intergroup relations are complex and location specific, and have been studied not only by social psychology but also by many other disciplines, such as history, anthropology, law, political science, and international relations. OWNERS projects’ contribution to this extensive literature is to examine in a range of multi-ethnic national contexts the prevalence, underlying motives, and group consequences of CPO. For the robustness of the tests, the OWNERS research team will study three types of settings: (1) Western European immigration countries that have a clear dominant ethnic majority (the Netherlands, UK/England, France), (2) settler societies that also have a dominant ethnic majority, but one that has colonized the indigenous groups (Australia, New Zealand, USA), and (3) countries with ongoing territorial disputes about ownership between two long established ethnic groups (Kosovo, Cyprus, Israel). If our comparative approach shows that in these diverse contexts CPO is a mechanism that contributes to ethnic tensions, and that the underlying reasons why people claim CPO are comparable, this will open up new possibilities for improving ethnic attitudes. Interventions can be implemented to promote historical narratives that give people a sense of ownership that is not exclusively reserved for their own group.
Furthermore, we have shown that ingroup CPO (‘this is our country’) is a different construct from out-group CPO (‘this is their country’) and that even in conflict regions such as Kosovo people tend to recognize that the rival ethnic group is to some extent also entitled to the territory in question. This led us to designing a new measure of “shared ownership”, using statements such as “Serbs and Albanians together own Kosovo”, and here we see much more variation in answers, with some people disagreeing with such statements and others agreeing.
We have further shown that ingroup CPO is related to more negative attitudes towards immigrants and the EU in the Netherlands and UK, as well as with a higher likelihood of having voted in favour of the Brexit referendum in the UK. In-group CPO is in furthermore in settler societies (Australia, Chile) among White inhabitants related to lower willingness to return the territory to the indigenous groups. And in conflict regions (Kosovo, Cyprus and Israel) we have shown that ingroup CPO represents an obstacle to reconciliation with the rival outgroup. However, emphasizing shared ownership makes people more willing to promote good relations with the other ethnic group.
We have also looked at historical principles based on which groups can claim ownership and we found that autochthony belief (a belief in entitlements for the first inhabitants) was in the UK is related to more welfare chauvinism (i.e. exclusion of immigrants from the welfare system), whereas in Australia and Chile autochthony belief was related to more willingness to compensate the indigenous groups (the true first comers) for the past transgression by the Whites. Thus, we have shown that first arrival is an important principle for claiming ownership of the territory for one’s group (among natives in Western Europe) and an important principle for recognizing outgroup (indigenous) ownership among the descendants of colonizers in settler societies. At the moment we are exploring the role of past investment, which is another principle on which ownership claims can be based. Our preliminary results from suggest that investment is related with more ingroup CPO and therefore more exclusion of newcomers and indigenous groups.
Up to date we have published three articles in peer-reviewed journals (two are available online, one is still being processed). We have another five articles under review and we are currently working on six additional ones. We have presented our work to academic audiences at international conferences and we gave invited talks for university students, high school students, and the general public.