Collective responsibility is a concept or doctrine, according to which individuals are to be held responsible for other people’s actions by tolerating, ignoring, or harboring them, without actively collaborating in these actions.

The concept is also present in Western literature, most notably in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, a poem telling the tale of a ship’s crew who died of thirst because they approved of one crew member’s killing of an albatross.

Collective responsibility, in the form of group punishment, is often used as a disciplinary measure in closed institutions, e.g. boarding schools, military units, prisons, psychiatric facilities, etc. The effectiveness and severerity of this measure may vary greatly, but it often breeds distrust and isolation among their members, and is almost always a sign of authoritarian tendencies in the institution or its home society.