Mere Ownership of a Self-centrality Object Enhances One’s Perceived Self-Efficacy

Past research on mere ownership effect demonstrate how mere ownership of an object affects one’s evaluation of the object per se, such as judging the owned (vs. unowned) object more favorably (Beggan, 1992). We argue that mere ownership also affects one’s evaluation of the self, such as perceiving the self has greater efficacy when owned (vs. unowned) an object. The current study investigates how self-centrality influences the manifestation of this form of self-enhancement by mere ownership. We propose that people would perceive the self to have greater efficacy when they merely own an object which functional value is central to their own self (personal-self-centrality, Study 1) and their own culture (cultural-self-centrality, Study 2). Study 1 showed that when participants faced a self-threat of lacking luck, those who owned a lucky charm relevant to their zodiac sign (high personal-self-centrality) reported feeling luckier than those who did not own any charm or those who owned a charm irrelevant to their zodiac sign (low personal-self-centrality). In Study 2, Chinese and American participants were presented a bottle of essential oil purported to have holistic-boosting function. As holism is a value central to Asian culture, but less emphasized in American culture, the holistic-boosting oil thus has high cultural-self-centrality to Chinese participants, but low cultural-self-centrality to American participants. Results showed that when participants faced a self-threat (vs. no-self-threat) of lacking holistic ability, Asian participants could restore their threatened holistic-efficacy once they merely owned (vs. did not own) the oil. However, such mere ownership has no impact on American participants. The findings provide support to the proposition of self-centrality breeds self-enhancement within the framework of mere ownership.