Am I My Neighbour’s Keeper? The Psychology of Responsibility

I woke to two stories in the news today, both with the same sad theme: a breakdown of collective responsibility and the misunderstanding of the psychology of personal well-being. When my individual rights exceed the rights of others, I may feel a momentary "high," but is that enough?

The "Assassin" Water Gun Game

I was wondering this as I read about a recent update to a game that teens play with water guns. The idea is that groups of teens, often in their final year of high school, will track down classmates and tag them in very public spaces like shopping malls. It might sound harmless, except people are calling the police when they see young people wearing black ski masks and carrying what look like guns into public spaces, sometimes with disastrous consequences for the young people involved. Incredibly, teenagers are being shot by people thinking that the kids are actually carrying out a real attack, or the teens are causing car crashes as people try to escape the mayhem. Seems police and bystanders can’t tell the difference between real guns and toy ones.

While there are plenty of issues here for criminologists to ponder, I’m more focused on our shift away from what has been called a collective commons. We are meant, physically and psychologically, to be in relationships, and those relationships and the sharing of common spaces mean compromises for the collective good. When a game has the potential to disrupt the delicate fabric of social order at the mall, wouldn’t it be reasonable to put aside the game in favour of everyone’s safety? There is a selfish motive here, too. We are individually far more resilient to stress when the social order around us remains strong and trustworthy.

Research on Collective Behavior

There is plenty of good science to support this idea. A long history of research on collective behavior has shown that when we look out for others, we tend to be individually more successful. A new paper in Social Influence by a German research team led by Annedore Hoppe at the Leipzig Research Center looked at longitudinal data gathered during the COVID-19 pandemic and found that a strong ingroup sense of belonging and a willingness to abide by group norms resulted in a greater amount of collective efficacy. To put it bluntly, the more people paid attention to helping others survive, the better our individual chances of survival increased as well.

The Impact of Individual Actions on the Collective Commons

A child’s right to carry a toy gun into a mall to swarm another child and soak them may seem innocent enough, except that it breaks the bonds of the collective commons. The child’s right to play creates a measure of insecurity in everyone else in the mall. Collective chill and psychological "dis-ease" is the result.

In a very different way, measles has also broken our social contract. Individual decisions to not vaccinate have put many in our collective commons at risk, not to mention hospitalizing many children for a preventable illness that had been all but eradicated. There is an odd psychology to this debate, though. The argument for independent decision making suggests that the unvaccinated child/adult is separate from others, and that, like children in malls with fake guns, the unvaccinated have no impact on others. There is a psychological rupture in that thinking, as quite obviously, an infected child will infect very young babies before they have had the measles vaccine. The unvaccinated will also infect those who are immune-compromised and place an unnecessary burden on the healthcare system. Once again, the collective commons becomes a place that is unsafe and exclusionary, rather than a place where we all find a measure of psychological (and physical) well-being.

To experience the peace of mind that creates psychological resilience to stress, our individual state of mind is never ours alone to control. We are embedded in a psychological "ant hill" of social interactions: Our mood, sense of security, and even our feelings toward others are all a dance in which we are both leading and following. To overlook how individual actions help the collective thrive or whither is to misunderstand the basics of psychological well-being. We are our neighbor’s keeper, just as they are ours.