I consider myself to be a considerate, level-headed, and rational person in public — I ensure my grocery cart doesn’t block fellow shoppers and keep my eyes on the road when a souped-up F250 driver flips me off for going the speed limit.
But when I arrive back at my apartment complex to find a strange car parked in my reserved, shaded space that I pay a hefty monthly fee for — which happens often — any semblance of emotional maturity goes out the window. In the rare instances I catch the culprit, I resort to my reactive, hormonally turbulent pre-teen self, spewing profanities at them (which they’ll sometimes hurl back). I have also expeditiously called a tow company, knowing full well it’ll cost the owner hundreds of dollars to retrieve their vehicle.
Deep down, I know that my blinding rage isn’t really about my ability to park at all (I could simply leave my car in an unreserved spot and move on with my life). There’s something a lot deeper and more psychological brewing when it comes to neighbor feuds. “Where we live is where we form our identity, the story we tell ourselves about who we are,” Bob Bordone, author of the book Conflict Resilience: Negotiating Disagreement Without Giving Up or Giving In and former director for the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program, tells Vox. “A lot of times, neighbor conflicts are about more than whatever it is we may be disagreeing on.”
Here’s exactly why neighbor feuds tend to bring out the worst in us — and what you can do if you feel like you’re going to completely explode on the person across the street.
Surface-level tiffs have deeper roots, and are often about our sense of identity and morality
Americans are, at a baseline, fairly suspicious of others, and things have gotten worse over time: The number of adults in the US who believe “most people can be trusted” dipped from 46% in 1972 to 34% in 2018, according to numbers from the General Social Survey from Pew Research Center. Pew also notes that people who do trust others are more likely to engage in neighborly tasks that facilitate relationships, like bringing in the mail or watering plants.
The pandemic also shifted the way we view strangers, with some data suggesting it caused us to be less trusting of others. And the presence of Ring cameras and other doorbell cams, which 62 percent of respondents in a 2025 US News & World Report survey said they owned, probably aren’t helping. As Allie Volpe recently reported for Vox, though the surveillance tools are designed to help people feel safer in their homes, they might make you more paranoid and fearful. “If you don’t have actual relationships with your neighbors, you may become suspicious of them, too. Suddenly, everyone is a potential suspect,” she explained.
But that mounting distrust really starts with the political and societal polarization that has become a defining characteristic of interpersonal relationships in the US in the past decade — and that has the potential to take neighbor disputes into a realm far beyond fears about property values. “Maybe someone doesn’t like the fact that their neighbor puts up a Trump sign or [shows visible] support for Palestine,” Robert Sampson, a professor of sociology at Harvard University, tells Vox. “These more identity-based and social norm-based disputes are real, and that may be related to this generalized polarization in American life, but also a decline in trust in general.” Some research suggests that, when people perceive their communities to be more polarized, they feel others can’t “be trusted to do the right thing.” That belief is going to affect whether and how you interact with, say, the person who is leaving their trash in the hallway.
Your home is also your place of respite, Saba Harouni Lurie, a therapist and founder of Take Root Therapy in Los Angeles, tells Vox — it’s where you “seek safety and calm.” So when your next-door neighbor throws a Tuesday night shindig that creeps into Wednesday morning, it might seem like a personal attack.
“It feels violating,” she explains. “I also believe that we’re animals and that we resource-guard. That can be really threatening.” And when said neighbor is blasting a music genre you hate, and proudly flying a flag representing a political cause you don’t agree with, and you can barely afford your rent or mortgage (as is the case with so many Americans), the chance for blood-curdling fury skyrockets.
Cass Dallas, a psychotherapist and founder of Cass Dallas Psychotherapy & Training, tells Vox that the common stressors of life in 2026 can make these interactions a lot more tense and complicated. “I think we are all working very hard to stay afloat and take care of ourselves in challenging times, which makes us more tired and have less energy for managing relationships,” they explain. “We don’t have a lot of control, if any, over who our neighbors are, or necessarily a lot in common with them on the surface.”
Neighbor relationships aren’t a priority
I don’t know a damn single one of my neighbors. Marc J. Dunkelman, senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute, fellow at the Watson School for International and Public Affairs at Brown University and author of Why Nothing Works, tells Vox that I’m (unfortunately) in good company. He says people don’t necessarily want those relationships to go wrong, but we’re not invested enough in them going right, either. “Maybe your neighbor would be more on your mind when you were like, ‘I would like to vacuum late at night,’ and you wouldn’t do it if you knew the people who lived below you,” he explains. “And if you knew and appreciated the person who lived above you, maybe you would be more cognizant that they work 70 hours a week and the only time they can vacuum is late at night.”
He adds that it’s become common to associate“good” neighborly behavior with minding your own business. “The definition of the word neighborly has evolved. Decades ago, it meant warmth. It meant bringing over a plate of cookies when someone moves in next door and introducing yourself,” Dunkelman says. “Today, to be neighborly means when you overhear something through the walls, you don’t mention it to the person when you see them…It’s like a sense of alienation to be neighborly by not imposing yourself in someone’s business.”
Smartphones are messing with our empathy
When I scroll through TikTok, it doesn’t take long to find content that validates my anger toward parking spot thieves — and I can recognize that my own inclination to call a tow company might have spawned from the belief that a lot of other angry renters do the same. Spats of any kind (neighbor ones included) tend to go gangbusters on algorithmic platforms, feeding into our craving to “Karenize” (a term I just made up, for the record) others. Humans crave seeing trainwrecks, taking sides, and watching the (so-called) villain lose, research suggests.
As Bordone points out, social feeds are a perfect, algorithm-driven curation of your personal preferences. But once you leave the house, you lose control. He says that, “with social media, we can cancel away or otherwise block people we don’t like or agree with.” Obviously, you can’t just block your neighbor mid-dispute like you would do to someone online. That realization alone could make you feel trapped (and make beef with them all the more high-stakes).
“If you come home from a day where you were being badgered by your boss and you missed a deadline and you slept poorly the night before, and maybe you’re hungry, and then [your neighbor is] vacuuming, you’re likely to have a far greater reaction,” Lurie explains.
As I recently reported for Vox, getting to know your neighbors — even just being aware of who they are — can boost your health, and theirs, considerably. These relationships have power and meaning, so it’d behoove you both to handle a tense situation tenderly. “I know this may sound really naive, but it’s actually evidence-based to pause and to breathe,” Bordone stresses, explaining that it can give your mind a chance to catch up with your body’s fight-or-flight response so you can “do something purposeful instead of reactive.”
Lurie warns against slipping a little note under their door — words can easily be misinterpreted, and it’s hard to convey tone. “When we’re face-to-face with someone, we tend to be more thoughtful, more aware of the way that they’re responding and maybe better able to actually speak to them with some care and kindness,” Lurie says. You might say something like, “Hi there! I live downstairs and I just wanted to come by and introduce myself! I also wanted to mention that, you probably don’t realize it, but when you vacuum, I can hear it right above my bed. I work an early schedule, so it can make it difficult to sleep if you do it late at night. I was wondering if there was a time that might work best for both of us, for you to do your chores? I know you work odd hours, too!”
It’s worth noting, however, that the best way to avoid these situations is to proactively get to know who lives next to you before there is a problem — trying to change a pissed-off neighbor’s mind could be a losing battle, says Lurie.
While having empathy for strangers in your community might feel easier said than done, consider my personal parking space warfare. A while back, my 73-year-old mom came to stay with me. The next morning, when helping her with her luggage to her car, I realized she had unwittingly parked in a reserved spot, belonging to a neighbor I recognized.
Thankfully, they had enough empathy for my mom (and me) not to call a tow truck.
The post Why neighbor feuds bring out the absolute worst in us appeared first on Vox.
