An excerpt from Slate's interview with law professor Michael Heller, who has co-written a book called 'Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives': Heller: Just to give you a concrete example, there's a guy named James Beach who was flying from Boston to Denver, and he had actually a little plastic clamp called a Knee Defender, which you can buy online. It's really very effective. You stick it on the seat in front of you, on the little tray table, and it keeps the seat in front of you from leaning back. On this particular flight, the woman in front of him tried to lean back. She couldn't; she realized what was wrong. She asked him to take them off. He didn't comply. She turned around and threw her water at him. The pilot did an emergency landing right away. They were taken off the flight. The plane went on to Denver an hour and 38 minutes late.
But those little Knee Defenders turn out to reveal a tremendous amount about the ownership conflicts that are all through our lives. The woman in front is saying, "That space behind my seat, it's mine, because the little button reclines the seat." And the guy behind, like the kids in the playground, he's saying, "No, it was mine. I had it first, for my laptop," or "I possessed it first with my knees." So that wedge of space is an ownership battle, it turns out, between attachment and possession and first-in-time.
When I talk to audiences about that conflict, I always poll them, and it's amazing to me that invariably half say the person in front is in the right, and half say the person in back is in the right. What's most amazing is how each side is just amazed that anybody else could have a different view. It feels and looks and seems so obvious, what's mine, the same way it is to toddlers on a playground. But that little conflict on the airplane seat is not just an accident, it turns out. It's deliberately engineered by the airlines so they can sell that same space twice. Most of us are just polite; we try to work it out, and that's true in all of the ownership conflicts we go through throughout our day, throughout our lives, in the Starbucks line, to line up at Disney World.
Anywhere that we're trying to make something mine, our experience is being engineered and designed by some owner to shape our behavior. And on the airplane seat, the design is to get us to fight with each other instead of being mad at the airlines, to not realize that they're selling that same space twice. And what they're using is one of the most advanced tools of ownership design that Jim and I have uncovered in doing this work, which is what we call strategic ambiguity. Ownership is ambiguous a lot more often than people realize. And that ambiguity is really valuable, in this case to the airlines.
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