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Policy makers have long intuitively realized the benefit of encouraging strong psychological ownership toward social programs. For example, Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s purposely designed the Social Security program to include a high feeling of ownership by workers, to generate a sense of responsibility and protection from future legislation. Recent research suggests that this sense of ownership continues to be an important part of the SSA program and is a significant predictor of when retirees claim their benefits. Strong feelings of ownership also exist for other programs (e.g., Medicare) and financial services (e.g., investments), and there are significant implications of that psychological ownership on consumers’ decisions and behavior around these programs. Policy makers and marketers may wish to consider the role of interventions that affect consumers’ psychological ownership, along with feelings of trust and fairness, for such products.

Publicly owned or shared items can often suffer from a lack of stewardship due to a diffusion of responsibility, a dilemma sometimes known as the tragedy of the commons. We propose that even when an item is publicly rather than privately owned (e.g., a local pond or community park), there can still be high levels of psychological ownership. The benefit of high psychological ownership for public goods is that the individual then takes a stronger responsibility for care (stewardship) of the object, thus reducing the tragedy of the commons. We discuss interventions designed to increase ownership for shared and public goods, including the use of social identity to drive engagement, and offer experimental evidence for such approaches.