People Can Be Resilient, But Can Communities?

In their stimulating target article, Bonanno, Romero, and Klein (this issue) ask whether we can measure— and perhaps facilitate—the psychological resilience of communities, buffering them against the adverse effects of traumatic stressors. Just as some anthropologists (e.g., Robben, 2005) and sociologists (e.g., Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser, & Sztompka, 2004) speak of societal and cultural trauma, Bonanno et al. propose that the concept of resilience may likewise be usefully applied to social units larger than the individual. Their article raises several interesting issues. First, is the resilience of a community nothing more than the sum (or average) of the resilience of its individual members? If so, then community resilience would amount to a mathematical abstraction devoid of any additional meaning. As Margaret Thatcher once remarked, “There is no such thing as society,” adding that there are only “individual men and women and their families” (The Spectator, April 8, 2013). Her view implies that properties attributable to societies or communities are entirely parasitic on those possessed by their constituent members. Yet Bonanno et al. seem dissatisfied with construing community resilience in this way. One might express such dissatisfaction by echoing the Gestalt psychologist, Kurt Koffka, (1935) who wrote “It has been said: The whole is more than the sum of its parts. It is more correct to say that the whole is something else than the sum of its parts, because summing is a meaningless procedure, whereas the whole-part relationship is meaningful” (p. 176). This implies that a community, contra Thatcher, is different from merely the head count of its members, and accordingly has its own distinctive, emergent properties. Just as perceptual gestalten are emergent phenomena that are “something else” than the sum of their parts, emergent properties may assume predicates that do not apply to their parts and vice versa. Water is wet, but it makes no sense to say hydrogen and oxygen are themselves wet. Wetness applies to the emergent whole, not to its constituents. These part-whole considerations point to two (informal) fallacies that sometimes arise when predicates relevant to one level of analysis are applied to entities either above or below it. The mereological fallacy occurs when characteristics possessed by the whole are improperly applied to its parts (Bennett & Hacker, 2003; Smit & Hacker, 2014). Such language sometimes occurs in cognitive neuroscience when people attribute predicates to the brain that apply only to the whole person (e.g., the “creative brain”). Anyone speaking of resilient brains, genes, and so forth would be committing the mereological fallacy. Potentially more relevant to community resilience is the fallacy of composition—the error of assuming that what applies to the individual necessarily applies to the group. This need not be the case. A baseball fan who stands up at the ballpark gains a better view of the game, but if everyone does so, the visual advantage disappears for all. In other cases, matters become worse for everyone as Hardin’s (1968) “tragedy of the commons” illustrates. Thus, a farmer greatly benefits by grazing his cattle in the commons of a rural community, but if every farmer does likewise, the soil is ruined and everyone is worse off than before. What is good for the individual can be bad for the group. Finally, the opposite can occur. Sometimes what is “bad” at the level of the individual may be “good” at the level of the group. As Smith (1776) emphasized, people all pursuing their own selfish interests can unintentionally produce a socially beneficial, vibrant economy as if they were “led by an invisible hand” (p. 477). As these examples illustrate, we cannot automatically assume that predicates appropriate to one level of analysis apply in the same way, if at all, to other levels. Alert to these issues, we can consider whether extrapolating the concept of resilience to communities is sensible and fruitful. In defense of extrapolation, we might note that the concepts of stress and resilience are themselves metaphors imported from engineering into psychology. We are so accustomed to applying these terms to people that it is easy to forget that they originally described inanimate materials. Moreover, as Greenwood (1999) has persuasively argued, once psychologists abandoned attempts to provide operational definitions of theoretical terms in favor of (merely) providing operational measures of them, our field began making major theoretical advances, as the computational metaphor of the mind