A History and a Cross-Cultural Study of Motivations for Private Property

Abstract

Cross-cultural research has a history of more than two millennia, and much of it has been concerned with the institution of private property. This emphasis is shown by a review from Aristotle to the Roman Stoics and early Christians, to Aquinas and the Scholastics, to the classical political economists-including Locke, Rousseau, and Marx-to the nineteenth- century comparative sociologists, and finally to the science of society of Sumner and Hobhouse, who are the forefathers of modern quantitative cross-cultural research. In the present study of archived social science data, interpersonal values were examined as predictors of societal attitudes toward the institution of private property. Using societal median scores for male university students from fifteen societies, preferences for dominance and nonconformity strongly predicted positive property attitudes. Within societies, these relationships were moderated by societal preference for individual autonomy. Thus, the cultural ecology of private property may be a function of social dominance and escape from social control.