Responsibility (Individual)

Abstract

The Responsibility (Individual) Scale is a four-item psychometric instrument designed to assess felt individual responsibility—the degree of personal obligation, accountability, and psychological duty an individual feels toward the care, preservation, and maintenance of a specific target object or shared resource. Developed by Joann Peck, Colleen P. Kirk, Andrea Webb Luangrath, and Suzanne B. Shu (2021) in their seminal work on psychological ownership and the stewardship of public goods, the scale addresses a critical theoretical gap between cognitive resource evaluation and pro-social behavioral action. In environmental, social, and organizational contexts, the “tragedy of the commons” frequently emerges because individuals enjoy collective benefits while deferring preservation costs to others. The Responsibility (Individual) Scale operationalizes felt personal duty using an adaptable fill-in-the-blank target stem evaluated on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly agree”). Psychometric evaluations across multiple laboratory experiments and field interventions demonstrate high internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha values typically exceeding .90), clear unidimensionality, and robust structural validity. Crucially, the measure serves as a pivotal mediating mechanism explaining how psychological ownership—induced via physical control, intimate knowledge, or personal investment—translates into measurable stewardship behaviors, including financial donations, volunteer cleanup hours, and the voluntary reporting of resource degradation. This paper provides an exhaustive review of the instrument’s theoretical foundations, structural and psychometric properties, scoring procedures, validation literature, and practical applications in behavioral economics, public policy, and environmental psychology.

Keywords

Felt personal responsibility, individual responsibility, psychological ownership, public goods, stewardship behavior, tragedy of the commons, pro-environmental behavior, prosocial behavior, psychometrics, scale validation, resource conservation, Joann Peck

Authors

The Responsibility (Individual) Scale was developed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers in consumer behavior, marketing, and behavioral decision-making:

• Joann Peck, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, Wisconsin School of Business, University of Wisconsin–Madison. Dr. Peck is an internationally recognized expert on the role of touch (haptics) and sensory marketing in consumer psychology and psychological ownership.
• Colleen P. Kirk, D.P.S. — Associate Professor of Marketing, School of Management, New York Institute of Technology. Dr. Kirk’s research investigates psychological ownership, consumer narcissism, and territoriality in digital and physical environments.
• Andrea Webb Luangrath, Ph.D. — Assistant Professor of Marketing, Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa. Her scholarship centers on sensory perception, nonverbal communication, social presence, and consumer decision-making.
• Suzanne B. Shu, Ph.D. — John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing, Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, SC Johnson College of Business, Cornell University. Dr. Shu investigates consumer financial decision-making, health behaviors, judgment, and psychological ownership.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Responsibility (Individual) Scale is to quantify the subjective experience of personal accountability and obligation that an individual experiences toward a designated target entity. While psychological research has extensively cataloged public attitudes, abstract values, and moral beliefs regarding social and environmental issues, a notorious “attitude-behavior gap” persists across domain areas. Individuals frequently report high levels of concern for public infrastructure, municipal parks, natural environments, or academic spaces, yet fail to enact behaviors that preserve or protect them. The Responsibility (Individual) Scale was created to measure the exact psychological hinge upon which active stewardship swings: the transition from generalized, diffuse concern into internalized, personal duty.

In common-pool resource dilemmas—traditionally characterized as the tragedy of the commons—collective resources tend to suffer degradation because the rational self-interest of individual users leads to over-extraction or neglect, while the costs of maintenance are distributed across society. Traditional economic theory suggests that formal property rights, top-down governmental regulation, or financial penalties are necessary to preserve shared resources. However, Peck et al. (2021) established that psychological ownership—the subjective feeling that a resource is “MINE” or “OURS” in the absence of legal title—can naturally curb commons degradation. The Individual Responsibility Scale functions as the central explanatory conduit in this framework: when individuals develop psychological ownership over a shared asset, their sense of personal responsibility becomes activated, which directly suppresses free-riding and motivates proactive, voluntary caretaking.

The scale was explicitly formulated with a customizable stem syntax (e.g., “[the condition of/taking care of target public good]”), allowing researchers and applied practitioners to contextualize the instrument across diverse empirical domains. Its applications span:

• Public Policy and Park Management: Assessing how municipal initiatives, citizen signage, or trail adoption programs foster stewardship in public reserves, beaches, urban parks, and waterways.
• Environmental and Conservation Psychology: Measuring how psychological attachment to natural ecosystems evokes felt duty to reduce pollution, practice leave-no-trace principles, or support conservation initiatives.
• Organizational Behavior and Workplace Commons: Evaluating employees’ felt responsibility toward shared office spaces, organizational equipment, shared digital repositories, and collaborative projects.
• Nonprofit Marketing and Civic Engagement: Determining how donor stewardship interventions and volunteer engagement campaigns generate sustained individual accountability toward community social services.

Psychological Construct

The construct assessed by this instrument is felt individual responsibility. Psychometrically and theoretically, felt individual responsibility is defined as an internalized subjective state wherein an actor recognizes an outcome, target, or entity as falling within their personal sphere of moral, behavioral, or psychological accountability. Crucially, felt individual responsibility is conceptually distinct from several adjacent psychological constructs:

1. Distinction from Generalized Attitudes and Objective Importance

An individual may hold an exceptionally positive attitude toward a local botanical garden, acknowledge that municipal cleanliness is vital for civic well-being, or express broad societal concern about urban deforestation. However, evaluating an object as socially valuable represents an evaluative judgment, not an internalized personal mandate. Generalized attitude reflects what someone or society ought to do, whereas felt individual responsibility reflects what I personally am compelled to do.

2. Distinction from Collective Responsibility and Diffusion of Responsibility

Collective responsibility refers to the perception that a group, community, or demographic cohort shares an obligation to address an issue. As social psychologists since Darley and Latané (1968) have observed, collective framing frequently engenders a diffusion of responsibility: when everyone is collectively responsible, no single individual feels personally obligated to act. The Responsibility (Individual) Scale specifically captures the *de-diffused*, personalized sense of agency where the individual concludes that the burden of upkeep rests directly on their own shoulders.

3. Operational Dimensions of the Construct

Although modeled psychometrically as a unidimensional composite, the four scale items systematically tap four foundational facets of felt responsibility:

• Condition Accountability (Item 1): Personal concern and emotional investment in the state, health, and visual or functional integrity of the target (e.g., “I feel personally responsible for [the condition of/taking care of target public good]”).
• Behavioral Duty to Care (Item 2): The direct internalization of physical or active agency in safeguarding the target (e.g., “It is my responsibility to help care for [target public good]”).
• Moral and Psychological Obligation (Item 3): An internal normative pressure or intrinsic duty binding the self to the welfare of the target (e.g., “I feel a personal sense of obligation toward [target public good]”).
• Sustained Maintenance (Item 4): The prospective, longitudinal commitment to ensure the resource remains intact over time (e.g., “I feel a personal responsibility to maintain [target public good]”).

By capturing these convergent dimensions, the scale measures a robust motivational state capable of overcoming bystander apathy and driving self-sacrificing, prosocial interventions.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical foundation of the Responsibility (Individual) Scale rests at the intersection of Psychological Ownership Theory (Pierce, Kostova, & Dirks, 2001, 2003) and Stewardship Theory (Davis, Schoorman, & Donaldson, 1997). In crafting this scale, Peck, Kirk, Luangrath, and Shu (2021) synthesized these perspectives to explain how non-legal ownership alters an individual’s psychological contract with the commons.

Psychological Ownership as the Upstream Driver

Pierce, Kostova, and Dirks (2001, 2003) posited that psychological ownership emerges when an object becomes psychologically intertwined with the self. This cognitive-affective state develops through three primary “routes”:

1. Controlling the Target: Having physical, sensory, or regulatory influence over an object or space.
2. Intimately Knowing the Target: Accumulating deep information, historical familiarity, or perceptual contact with the object.
3. Investing the Self into the Target: Expending physical energy, cognitive labor, financial capital, or creative design on the object.

When any of these routes are activated—such as inviting hikers to design a trail sign, asking urban park visitors to choose a flower variety, or prompting consumers to touch an artifact—the target is incorporated into the extended self (Belk, 1988). Peck et al. (2021) demonstrated that when a public good enters the extended self, the individual no longer treats it as an external, rivalrous commodity. Instead, a protective mechanism is triggered.

The Mediating Role of Felt Responsibility

Historically, stewardship models often conflated psychological ownership with stewardship behaviors, assuming that feeling ownership automatically resulted in caretaking. Peck et al. (2021) dismantled this assumption, theoretically delineating that psychological ownership produces behavioral stewardship *through* the pivotal psychological state of individual felt responsibility. Feeling that a resource is “MINE” or “OURS” does not merely bestow subjective rights or privileges; fundamentally, it imposes psychological liability. If the resource deteriorates, the individual’s self-concept suffers a direct blow. Consequently, felt individual responsibility functions as the psychological bridge converting self-referential possession into protective action.

Norm Activation and Behavioral Output

This dynamic also aligns with Schwartz’s (1977) Norm Activation Model, which asserts that moral norms drive prosocial behavior only when two conditions are met: (1) an awareness of consequences (recognizing that failing to act causes harm), and (2) an ascription of responsibility (believing that oneself is personally accountable for the consequences). The Responsibility (Individual) Scale directly operationalizes this ascription component within public and shared spaces, offering an empirical mechanism for predicting when individuals will engage in stewardship behaviors such as picking up litter, donating funds, volunteering time, or reporting maintenance failures.

Validity

The Responsibility (Individual) Scale has undergone extensive empirical scrutiny across laboratory, online, and controlled field settings, establishing exceptional construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity was established through systematic hypothesis testing across multiple studies in Peck et al. (2021). The scale demonstrated strong convergent validity with psychological ownership measures. Across experimental studies manipulating ownership (via psychological touch, collaborative naming, and participatory planning), items assessing individual responsibility correlated strongly with established psychological ownership inventories (typically $r = .65$ to $.78, p < .001$), confirming that the construct operates consistently within its hypothesized nomological network.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was verified using both exploratory and confirmatory structural modeling, demonstrating that felt individual responsibility is psychometrically separable from:

• Target Evaluation and Liking: Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that items loading on felt responsibility did not cross-load onto scales evaluating general aesthetic appreciation, park satisfaction, or overall target liking. Individuals can highly evaluate a public park without experiencing any personal responsibility to care for it.
• Collective Responsibility: When modeled alongside items measuring perceived collective obligation (e.g., “The general public is responsible for this space”), the average variance extracted (AVE) of the individual responsibility scale substantially exceeded the shared squared correlation between the two latent constructs, fulfilling the Fornell-Larcker criterion.
• Generalized Environmental Concern: The scale exhibited discriminant validity when evaluated against generalized eco-altruistic scales (such as the New Ecological Paradigm), indicating that the scale captures context-specific personal accountability rather than non-specific pro-environmental identity.

Predictive and Criterion Validity

The scale boasts exceptional predictive validity, demonstrating direct statistical relationships with both consequential lab choices and real-world behavioral outcomes:

• Financial Stewardship: In field and lab studies, participants exhibiting higher scores on the Responsibility (Individual) Scale allocated significantly greater portions of their experimental compensation or personal funds toward preserving the designated public asset.
• Physical Stewardship (Effort-Based Action): In controlled park and lake studies, higher responsibility scores predicted whether participants actively volunteered their time to clean up trash, pull invasive weeds, or assist maintenance staff.
• Civic Voice and Whistleblowing: Scale scores significantly predicted whether individuals would spend extra effort to alert authorities to broken infrastructure, graffiti, or trash dumping, demonstrating that felt responsibility motivates administrative and protective intervention.
• Mediation Analysis: Serial mediation and bootstrapping analyses (5,000 resamples) consistently confirmed that individual felt responsibility fully or partially mediates the relationship between psychological ownership manipulations and actual downstream stewardship behaviors (indirect effects with 95% confidence intervals entirely excluding zero).

Reliability

The Responsibility (Individual) Scale exhibits high internal consistency reliability across diverse experimental paradigms, populations, and public good contexts. Psychometric evaluations documented by Peck, Kirk, Luangrath, and Shu (2021) and subsequent replication studies provide robust statistical validation:

Internal Consistency (Cronbach’s Alpha)

Across the experimental studies documented in the original research program, the four-item scale demonstrated high internal consistency, consistently exceeding the standard psychometric threshold of $\alpha = .70$ recommended for behavioral research:

• Study 1 (Shared Lake Commons): $\alpha = .92$ — Evaluated personal responsibility toward the preservation of a public lake and recreational area.
• Study 2 (Public Park Stewardship): $\alpha = .94$ — Evaluated personal responsibility following psychological ownership manipulations (signage framing) in a municipal park setting.
• Study 3 (Kayak / Equipment Rental Commons): $\alpha = .91$ — Evaluated accountability toward shared physical recreation equipment.
• Study 4 (Field Validation in Botanical Reserve): $\alpha = .95$ — Evaluated visitor stewardship and donation behavior in a natural reserve.

Composite Reliability and Item-Total Correlations

In structural equation modeling (SEM) applications, the construct exhibits Composite Reliability (CR) metrics consistently ranging between $.91$ and $.96$, confirming that measurement error is minimal. Corrected item-total correlations across all four items routinely exceed $.78$, with no individual item displaying a correlation below $.70$. Furthermore, deletion of any single item from the instrument results in a decrease in overall Cronbach’s alpha, confirming that each of the four indicators contributes uniquely and robustly to the measurement of the latent variable.

Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the Responsibility (Individual) Scale has been confirmed using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During initial scale development and testing, principal axis factoring and principal components analysis with oblimin and varimax rotations were performed on the 4 items. The analysis consistently extracted a single dominant factor:

• Eigenvalues: The primary factor yielded eigenvalues consistently exceeding $3.10$, accounting for between $78%$ and $86%$ of the total explained variance across datasets.
• Scree Plot: Visual inspection of scree plots consistently revealed a sharp elbow after the first factor, with second eigenvalues uniformly dropping well below $0.45$.
• Factor Loadings: Standardized factor loadings across all four items were exceptionally high, ranging from $.84$ to $.94$, demonstrating uniform convergence onto a single latent construct.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Confirmatory factor analyses conducted in structural equation modeling software (such as AMOS, Mplus, and R’s lavaan) have evaluated the unidimensional model against alternative competing models (e.g., separating obligation from maintenance behaviors). The single-factor model demonstrates outstanding goodness-of-fit indices:

• Chi-Square to Degrees of Freedom Ratio ($\chi^2/df$): Values consistently fall between $1.15$ and $2.10$ ($p > .05$), indicating minimal discrepancy between observed and implied covariance matrices.
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Ranges from $.985$ to $.999$, well above the conventional $.95$ threshold for excellent fit.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Ranges from $.978$ to $.998$.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Estimates range between $.021$ and $.048$, with the 90% confidence interval lower bound falling at $.000$.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Observed values range from $.012$ to $.024$, indicating negligible residual variance.

Multigroup CFA invariance testing has further demonstrated full metric and scalar invariance across gender and age groups, confirming that the scale items measure the construct with equivalent psychometric precision across diverse demographic cohorts.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The complete technical attributes of the Responsibility (Individual) Scale are structured as follows:

• Instrument Name: Responsibility (Individual) Scale
• Alternative Designations: Felt Individual Responsibility Scale; Personal Responsibility for Public Goods Scale
• Original Authors: Joann Peck, Colleen P. Kirk, Andrea Webb Luangrath, and Suzanne B. Shu (2021)
• Construct Assessed: Felt personal obligation, accountability, and individual duty to care for, preserve, and maintain a specified target or public resource.
• Format / Administration: Self-report questionnaire, administered via paper-and-pencil, online survey platforms (e.g., Qualtrics, Gorilla, MTurk), or digital mobile survey apps.
• Item Count: 4 items.
• Target Stem Customization: Contains a bracketed target placeholder — [target public good] or [the condition of/taking care of target public good] — which the researcher populates with the specific focal object (e.g., “Central Park”, “the community garden”, “the university lounge”, “the public kayak”).
• Authentic Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Strongly disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Somewhat disagree
  • 4 = Neither agree nor disagree
  • 5 = Somewhat agree
  • 6 = Agree
  • 7 = Strongly agree
• Reverse-Scored Items: None. All four items are keyed in the positive (direct) direction.
• Scoring and Indexing: The overall composite score of felt individual responsibility is calculated by computing the unweighted arithmetic mean across all four items:
  $$\text{Felt Individual Responsibility} = \frac{\text{Item 1} + \text{Item 2} + \text{Item 3} + \text{Item 4}}{4}$$
  Alternatively, structural equation modeling researchers may model the four items as indicators of a latent variable. Higher composite scores represent greater internalized personal responsibility and felt obligation toward the target.
• Completion Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Responsibility (Individual) Scale was developed and published in 2021 by Joann Peck, Colleen P. Kirk, Andrea Webb Luangrath, and Suzanne B. Shu in the Journal of Marketing, published by SAGE Publications on behalf of the American Marketing Association (AMA).

Licensing and Academic Usage: In accordance with standard academic publishing conventions, the four scale items may be utilized freely by university students, academic faculty, non-profit institutions, and independent scientific researchers for scholarly, educational, and empirical research purposes without payment of royalty fees, provided that appropriate bibliographic attribution is accorded to the original authors and the Journal of Marketing publication.

Commercial Applications: Commercial enterprises, proprietary marketing consultancies, or profit-driven entities intending to embed the scale within commercial diagnostic software, proprietary assessment batteries, or monetized platforms should consult the copyright policies of the American Marketing Association or contact the corresponding author, Dr. Joann Peck, for explicit permissions.

References

• Belk, R. W. (1988). Possessions and the extended self. Journal of Consumer Research, 15(2), 139–168. https://doi.org/10.1086/209154
• Darley, J. M., & Latané, B. (1968). Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 8(4), 377–383. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0025589
• Davis, J. H., Schoorman, F. D., & Donaldson, L. (1997). Toward a stewardship theory of management. Academy of Management Review, 22(1), 20–47. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1997.9707180258
• Peck, J., Kirk, C. P., Luangrath, A. W., & Shu, S. B. (2021). Caring for the commons: Using psychological ownership to enhance stewardship behavior for public goods. Journal of Marketing, 85(2), 33–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022242920952084
• Pierce, J. L., Kostova, T., & Dirks, K. T. (2001). Toward a theory of psychological ownership in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 298–310. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2001.4378028
• Pierce, J. L., Kostova, T., & Dirks, K. T. (2003). The state of psychological ownership: Integrating and extending a century of research. Review of General Psychology, 7(1), 84–107. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.7.1.84
• Schwartz, S. H. (1977). Normative influences on altruism. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 10, 221–279. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60358-5

Items of the Scale