Yesterday, I was thinking about what it is, that involuntarily makes a community stick together. It seems like a group of people without any relation can, under the right conditions, mutually agree that it is best to go about a recurring activity as a community. They have the option to partake in the activity individually — but there is usually a force that compels them to join the group.

For instance, if you’re on the subway/metro line past 9pm, you see commuters concentrated in certain compartments of the vehicle. People part of the exodus after the partition in India left in giant organized lines, together as a caravan, across vast desert. In more casual settings, nobody wants to go about activities of an uncertain nature by themselves; they search for their mates and prefer to go about it in groups.

Community movements

There is an acknowledgement of a certain level of physical/emotional harm that is possible. Nobody knows how, when, or where — but they all understand by default, that individual level risk gets shared by the direct community they are in. To us, this is comfort; it’s a hedge against the uncertain. In fact, the real reason that members of a caravan of travellers stick together, is that there is a shared agreement that people on the edges of the travel party are more prone to risk. Pirates and other thieves were more likely to target people at the end of a long line — and so travellers agreed that in the case of theft or loss of possessions, the rest of the community owed you something of their own, in exchange for shouldering the riskiest portion of the system.

There is an agreed community rule for sharing individual level risk, which acts as the incentive for all individuals to collaborate/communicate within the community

Though this seems trivial in hindsight, it could be crucial if proactively used while dealing with people. As we seek to build products, teams, communities and cities, you might not have to nudge people with incentives to be a net positive contributor in society. You might just have to show them the possibility of mitigating their individual level risk, sharing it amongst the community (like the story of the caravan travellers), and hence hedging away the consequences of uncertainness. By default, this brings about a sense of belonging and participation, which could serve as a basis for stronger intergroup relations. After all, this is what we fear the most — being brought down by something we weren’t prepared for.