Responsibility (Sharing)

1. Abstract

The Responsibility (Sharing) Scale is a psychometric instrument developed by Peck, Kirk, Luangrath, and Shu (2021) to measure an individual’s perception of felt shared responsibility regarding the maintenance, preservation, and stewardship of public goods and collective resources. Formulated within research on environmental stewardship, consumer behavior, and psychological ownership, the scale captures the degree to which an individual views the care of a commons as a distributed duty among all community members or resource users, complementing operationalizations of individual responsibility. The measure comprises 3 items scored on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Strongly disagree) to 7 (Strongly agree), with item scores averaged to produce a unidimensional composite index representing felt collective responsibility. Psychometric evaluations across experimental and field studies demonstrate high internal consistency (Cronbach’s α typically exceeding .85 to .90), robust convergent validity with constructs such as collective psychological ownership and public stewardship intentions, and strong discriminant validity against individual personal responsibility. Confirmatory factor analyses support a unidimensional structure with high factor loadings across diverse sample populations. The instrument serves as a critical diagnostic and evaluative tool across environmental psychology, behavioral economics, municipal governance, and resource management research, elucidating how collective psychological mechanisms combat common-pool resource depletion and the classic tragedy of the commons.

2. Keywords

shared responsibility, collective responsibility, psychological ownership, public goods stewardship, tragedy of the commons, environmental psychology, commons management, social dilemma, prosocial behavior, psychometrics

3. Authors

The scale was developed and validated by a collaborative team of researchers in consumer behavior, behavioral economics, and marketing:

• Joann Peck — Professor of Marketing, Wisconsin School of Business, University of Wisconsin–Madison. Expertise in psychological ownership, touch/haptic information processing, and prosocial consumer decision-making.
• Colleen P. Kirk — Associate Professor of Marketing, School of Management, New York Institute of Technology (NYIT). Specializes in psychological ownership, digital consumer behavior, consumer empowerment, and investor behavior.
• Andrea Webb Luangrath — Associate Professor of Marketing, Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa. Focuses on social presence, sensory marketing, nonverbal consumer interactions, and environmental decision-making.
• Suzanne B. Shu — Dean of Faculty and Research and John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing, Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, Cornell University. Expert on behavioral decision research, the endowment effect, psychological ownership, and decumulation decisions.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Responsibility (Sharing) Scale is to quantify the extent to which individuals perceive that the duty to protect, clean, and sustain shared social environments or public resources is distributed among all constituents of a user community. While classical economic theory suggests that common-pool resources inevitably suffer degradation due to the free-rider problem, empirical behavioral research indicates that individuals frequently engage in voluntary stewardship. Understanding when and why individuals transition from passive exploitation to active stewardship requires distinguishing between felt personal responsibility and felt shared responsibility.

In municipal and recreational settings—such as public urban parks, national reserves, civic plazas, shared community gardens, and open-access public goods—individual users often encounter maintenance failures (e.g., litter, vandalism, resource overuse). The Responsibility (Sharing) Scale enables investigators to evaluate whether interventions, communicative signage, or communal pride nudges successfully activate a social norm of communal stewardship. In clinical and community intervention contexts, the scale can be employed to evaluate grassroots community engagement, social cohesion, and the efficacy of participatory neighborhood revitalization programs.

The theoretical rationale stems from the distinction between individualistic and collective mechanisms in public goods governance. Unlike individual personal responsibility, where an actor perceives an isolated burden (“It is up to me alone”), shared responsibility frames resource preservation as an interdependent normative obligation. By isolating this construct, researchers can examine critical empirical questions: Does high shared responsibility lead to diffusion of responsibility and social loafing, or, when paired with collective psychological ownership, does it catalyze collective efficacy and mutual civic enforcement? The scale provides the operational precision necessary to disentangle these divergent behavioral trajectories.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by this instrument is felt shared responsibility for a public good or commons. In psychological and organizational literature, responsibility is defined as an individual’s cognitive and affective acknowledgment of accountability for an outcome, state of affairs, or physical object. Within the domain of public goods, responsibility diverges along two distinct structural dimensions:

1. Individual (Personal) Felt Responsibility

Personal felt responsibility reflects the perception that oneself as an individual holds an obligation to maintain or care for an object or environment, independent of what others do. High personal responsibility can lead to unilateral stewardship action, but it may also induce psychological burden, burnout, or resentment if other users are seen as free-riding.

2. Felt Shared (Collective) Responsibility

Felt shared responsibility represents the cognitive appraisal that the preservation, cleanliness, and maintenance of a commons is an obligation communally distributed among all participants, visitors, or users. Rather than locating accountability strictly within an authoritative body (e.g., municipal maintenance crews, government park rangers) or exclusively within oneself, the individual conceptualizes the social system as an interdependent collective whose members co-own the responsibility of upkeep.

Importantly, felt shared responsibility involves several key psychological facets:

• Mutual Interdependence: The understanding that the condition of the shared good is determined by the aggregate actions of all users.
• Normative Expectation: The belief that every visitor or user incurs an unwritten ethical contract to maintain the resource upon entering or utilizing it.
• Decentralized Accountability: Shifting the locus of duty from formal third-party institutions (e.g., municipal sanitation) to the informal community of peers.

As demonstrated by Peck et al. (2021), felt shared responsibility interacts with constructs such as individual psychological ownership (“This park is MINE”) and collective psychological ownership (“This park is OURS”). When consumers develop collective psychological ownership toward a public amenity, feelings of shared responsibility are significantly amplified, generating high stewardship intentions, active trash pick-up, peer norm reinforcement, and voluntary financial donations.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical underpinning of the Responsibility (Sharing) Scale is rooted in the convergence of three foundational paradigms in the behavioral sciences: Psychological Ownership Theory, Social Dilemma Theory, and the Theory of Normative Conduct.

Psychological Ownership Theory

Pioneered by Pierce, Kostova, and Dirks (2001, 2003), psychological ownership posits that individuals can feel that an object, place, or abstract entity is “theirs” (either individually or collectively), even in the absence of legal ownership rights. Pierce and colleagues identified three primary roots or motives that drive psychological ownership: efficacy and effectance, self-identity, and having a place (belongingness). Peck et al. (2021) extended this theory into the public domain (“caring for the commons”), demonstrating that while individual ownership of a public space can sometimes foster territoriality or exclusion, collective psychological ownership (“This is OUR park”) elevates shared responsibility, which in turn fosters prosocial stewardship behaviors.

Social Dilemma Theory and the Commons

Garrett Hardin’s (1968) seminal essay on the Tragedy of the Commons argued that rationally self-interested actors will inevitably deplete open-access resources. Later, Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom (1990) challenged this view by documenting extensive empirical evidence that communities can sustainably govern common-pool resources without external top-down control or privatization, provided that strong mutual trust, communication, and shared social norms exist. The Responsibility (Sharing) construct operationalizes Ostrom’s principle of shared micro-governance at an individual cognitive level, measuring the respondent’s internalized perception that maintenance is a joint civic endeavor.

Diffusion of Responsibility vs. Collective Efficacy

Classic social psychology (e.g., Darley & Latané, 1968) identified the phenomenon of diffusion of responsibility, wherein the presence of multiple bystanders reduces individual intervention during an emergency. In common-pool settings, diffusion can lead individuals to assume “someone else will clean it up.” However, when combined with high collective psychological ownership and strong in-group identity, shared responsibility functions instead as an indicator of collective efficacy (Bandura, 2000), where individuals act because they believe their community is united in collaborative maintenance.

7. Validity

Empirical evidence establishing the psychometric validity of the Responsibility (Sharing) Scale is detailed in the experimental and field studies conducted by Peck et al. (2021) and subsequent replications in environmental stewardship literature.

Construct and Content Validity

The scale was developed to reflect core theoretical facets of shared accountability across public settings. Content validity was confirmed through expert reviews in consumer behavior and behavioral decision research, ensuring that item wordings specifically capture distributed mutual obligations among users rather than personal isolated responsibility or reliance on municipal workers.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity has been established through statistically significant, positive correlations with related prosocial and collective constructs:

• Collective Psychological Ownership: Consistently exhibits strong positive correlations (typically r = .55 to .72, p < .001) with measures assessing collective ownership (“This park feels like OURS”).
• Stewardship Intentions: Correlates positively with self-reported willingness to volunteer for park cleanups, pick up litter left by others, and report damage to authorities (r values ranging from .42 to .61, p < .001).
• Civic Prosociality: Demonstrates moderate-to-high correlations with general community involvement scales and environmental citizenship behavior inventories.

Discriminant Validity

Critically, the scale demonstrates rigorous discriminant validity against companion measures of individual personal responsibility. Fornell-Larcker criteria and exploratory factor analyses show that items assessing individual responsibility (e.g., “I personally feel responsible for taking care of this park”) load onto an independent factor distinct from the shared responsibility items. While shared responsibility and personal responsibility may correlate positively (r ≈ .30 to .50), their average variance extracted (AVE) exceeds the shared variance between the constructs, confirming they represent distinct psychological phenomena.

Predictive and Ecological Validity

In the field investigations of Peck et al. (2021)—conducted in real-world public municipal parks—scores on the shared responsibility scale successfully predicted actual observed stewardship behaviors, including whether park visitors picked up physical litter placed along park paths, as well as monetary donations contributed to public park maintenance funds.

8. Reliability

The Responsibility (Sharing) Scale demonstrates high internal consistency across multiple independent samples, experimental designs, and diverse field environments.

Internal Consistency

In the primary empirical validation studies reported by Peck, Kirk, Luangrath, and Shu (2021), the 3-item measure achieved robust internal consistency statistics:

• Study Samples: Across both online laboratory panels (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk, Prolific Academic) and on-site field surveys administered to actual municipal park visitors, Cronbach’s alpha (α) values consistently ranged between .86 and .93.
• Composite Reliability: In structural equation modeling and confirmatory factor analysis specifications, composite reliability (CR) coefficients regularly exceeded the standard .80 threshold (typically CR ≥ .88).
• Average Variance Extracted (AVE): AVE values for the 3-item construct consistently exceeded .70, well above the .50 benchmark recommended by psychometric guidelines (Hair et al., 2019).

Test-Retest and Cross-Context Stability

Item-to-total correlations for each of the three items routinely exceed .75, indicating that all three items reflect the target construct with minimal measurement error. When adapted to other shared goods contexts (e.g., university library commons, shared office spaces, residential community pools), the scale maintains high internal reliability (α > .85), reflecting high stability across public and semi-public domains.

9. Factor Analysis

The latent structure of the Responsibility (Sharing) Scale has been extensively evaluated using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

When subjected to EFA using principal axis factoring or maximum likelihood extraction with oblique (e.g., Promax or Direct Oblimin) rotation alongside items measuring personal responsibility, psychological ownership, and territoriality, the three shared responsibility items cleanly load onto a single distinct factor. Eigenvalues for this factor consistently exceed 2.2, explaining over 75% of the total variance across the three items, with all individual standardized factor loadings exceeding .80 and cross-loadings onto alternative dimensions remaining negligible (< .20).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

In multi-trait structural equation models, the unidimensional specification of the shared responsibility construct exhibits excellent global fit indices across empirical samples:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Typically > .98 (often exceeding .99).
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Typically > .97.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Consistently ≤ .06 (with 90% confidence intervals spanning .000 to .085).
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Consistently ≤ .03.

Standardized item factor loadings (λ) for the three items within the single-factor model are detailed below:

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Responsibility (Sharing) Scale (alternatively, Felt Shared Responsibility Scale).
• Authors: Joann Peck, Colleen P. Kirk, Andrea Webb Luangrath, and Suzanne B. Shu (2021).
• Instrument Type: Self-report psychometric rating scale; domain-specific social cognition instrument.
• Number of Items: 3 items.
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil, online survey, mobile field audit, or structured intercept interview.
• Completion Time: Approximately 30 to 60 seconds.
• Target Population: Adult and adolescent visitors to public parks, civic recreational areas, community commons, or participants in shared goods experiments (general population aged 16+).
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly disagree, 7 = Strongly agree).
• Scoring Rules:
  • All three items are positively worded; there are no reverse-coded items.
  • An overall composite score representing felt shared responsibility is computed by averaging the numeric ratings across all three items:
    Felt Shared Responsibility = (Item 1 + Item 2 + Item 3) / 3.
  • Composite scores range from 1.00 to 7.00, with higher scores reflecting greater perceived collective responsibility for the resource.
• Contextual Adaptability: While the original validation wording specifies “this public park” and “park users,” the referent noun can be systematically adapted for other public commons (e.g., “this public library,” “this community garden,” “this shared workspace”) without altering psychometric properties.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Responsibility (Sharing) Scale was formally published in 2021 in the Journal of Marketing, published by the American Marketing Association (AMA) in partnership with SAGE Publishing.

• Publication Year: 2021.
• Licensing and Academic Use: The scale items are published in the open academic literature for non-commercial academic research, empirical evaluation, and scientific replication. Academic researchers may utilize and adapt the measure in scientific research provided that proper academic attribution is given to the original authors (Peck et al., 2021).
• Fee: There are no licensing fees for non-profit academic research, scientific studies, or university-sponsored educational projects.
• Commercial Applications: Commercial enterprises, proprietary market research agencies, or consulting organizations intending to integrate the scale into fee-for-service evaluation frameworks or commercial software platforms should contact the corresponding authors and the American Marketing Association to verify copyright and licensing prerequisites.

12. References

• Bandura, A. (2000). Exercise of human agency through collective efficacy. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9(3), 75–78. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.00064
• Darley, J. M., & Latané, B. (1968). Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 8(4, Pt.1), 377–383. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0025589
• Hair, J. F., Black, W. C., Babin, B. J., & Anderson, R. E. (2019). Multivariate Data Analysis (8th ed.). Cengage Learning.
• Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162(3859), 1243–1248. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.162.3859.1243
• Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511807763
• 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

13. Items of the Scale