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The million-dollar account
At 12, 13, and 14, Dana White knew a boy whose father had done well. The family had a beautiful house and cars, and the boy had everything a kid could want. His father put a million dollars into an account for him, then ran into hard times and took the money back. The boy's reaction was that his father had stolen a million dollars from him.
His own reaction at that age was disbelief. That a father would put that money aside for his son at all was incredible, and the money still was never the son's, because he had not earned it.
Delivering on help
The same holds for help. Someone with connections can make phone calls and set a person up in a position, and once that is done, the person has to go in and deliver.
Why can unearned money feel like yours?
Researchers call the feeling that something is mine psychological ownership. Jon Pierce, Tatiana Kostova, and Kurt Dirks laid out the idea in a 2001 paper in the Academy of Management Review. They argued the feeling can arise without any legal title to the thing. In their theory it grows from three routes: control over it, intimate knowledge of it, and investing the self in it.
Why does a withdrawn gift feel like theft?
People judge outcomes against a reference point, and something expected can become that reference point. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky described this in their 1979 prospect theory paper in Econometrica. Losing what was anticipated registers as a loss rather than a missed gain. Later experiments estimated that losses weigh roughly twice as heavily as equal gains.
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