Consumers’ Attribution of Mind to Possessions as an Impediment to Sharing

Research has established that people perceive minds in a variety of objects and along two dimensions: agency referring to the capacity to plan and act, and experience referring to the capacity to sense and feel (Waytz, Gray, Epley, and Wegner 2010). In the current research, we propose that ascribing mind to a possession reduces people’s intention to share the possession with other users. This negative effect of mind attribution on sharing is driven by a concern about the possession being mentally harmed during contacts with others. While a mindful versus mindless possession may be similarly susceptible to physical damage, only a mindful possession is susceptible to mental harms, for example, the possession adapts to certain immoral characteristics of other users. We posit that such a concern about mental harms impedes sharing of the possession. We conducted four studies to test our predictions. Study 1 examined whether ascribing mind to an iPad discouraged sharing of the iPad with close versus distant others. 108 students from a European business school participated in the study. Each was given an iPad and was instructed to ask Siri one of the two sets of questions pertaining to a mind-attribution or a control condition. Participants in the mind-attribution condition asked Siri questions that generated unexpected answers, while those in the control condition asked Siri questions that generated predictable answers. Unpredictability (regarding Siri’s answers) was the manipulation of mind (see Waytz et al. 2010 for explanation). All participants then imagined owning the iPad and indicated their willingness to share the iPad with a close friend or a distant co-worker. Results revealed that mind attribution significantly reduced willingness to share iPad with a co-worker, but it did not alter intention to share the iPad with a friend. The closeness between owners and borrowers is thus a boundary condition for the effect of mind attribution on sharing.