Conflict and Peacemaking Notes

Conflict and Peacemaking

  • Conflict arises from a perceived incompatibility of actions or goals.

  • Nations often prioritize peace but arm themselves due to mistrust, leading to massive spending on arms while critical needs go unmet.

  • Conflict exists at various levels, from international relations to interpersonal interactions.

  • Managing conflict through understanding can resolve disputes and foster peace.

  • Genuine peace results from creatively managed conflict, where differences are reconciled.

Sources of Conflict

Social Dilemmas

  • Many global issues (nuclear arms, climate change) stem from parties pursuing self-interests to collective detriment.

  • Individual choices that are rewarding can become collectively punishing.

  • Social trap: a situation when conflicting parties are caught in mutually destructive behavior.

Prisoner's Dilemma

  • Two suspects are incentivized to confess to a crime.

  • Confessing yields a better outcome for the individual regardless of the other's choice.

  • Mutual non-cooperation leads to worse outcomes for both parties than mutual cooperation.

  • Figure 1 illustrates the classic prisoner's dilemma.

  • Figure 2 illustrates the laboratory version of the prisoner's dilemma involving rewards for cooperation or defection.

  • Punishment for non-cooperation can escalate conflict.

  • Retaliation often exceeds the initial offense due to perception biases.

Tragedy of the Commons

  • Multiple parties exploit a shared resource to their individual benefit.

  • If all parties overuse the resource, it leads to depletion and harm for everyone.

  • Environmental pollution is the accumulation of minor pollutions, benefiting individual polluters more than stopping benefits the collective.

  • Individualism can lead to the tragedy of the commons.

Fundamental Attribution Error

  • People attribute their own behavior to external factors and others' behavior to internal dispositions.

  • Examples: Muslims killing Americans are attributed to evil dispositions, while an American soldier killing Afghans is attributed to external stressors.

  • Violence explanations differ based on whether the act is by or toward one's own group.

Evolving Motives

  • Motives shift from making money to minimizing losses and saving face.

  • Conflict can become self-perpetuating and a source of purpose.

Non-Zero-Sum Games

  • Most real-life conflicts are non-zero-sum, meaning both sides can win or lose.

  • Immediate individual interests are often pitted against group well-being.

  • Self-serving behavior doesn't always lead to collective doom; it can sometimes benefit the community.

Resolving Social Dilemmas

Regulation

  • Societies enforce rules and taxes to safeguard the common good.

  • Examples: Stay-at-home orders, mask mandates, fishing regulations.

  • Regulation involves costs and diminished personal freedom, which result in political questions regarding the balance between cost and benefits.

Small Groups

  • Smaller groups foster a sense of responsibility and effectiveness.

  • People in larger groups are more likely to feel their actions don't make a difference.

  • Residential stability strengthens communal identity.

  • Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar suggests an optimum group size of around 150 people for mutual support and monitoring.

Communication

  • Communication enables cooperation by forging group identity, establishing norms, and facilitating commitment.

  • Suspicion of others' intentions can drive behavior.

  • Communication reduces mistrust and facilitates mutually beneficial agreements.

Changing Payoffs

  • Cooperation increases when the payoff matrix rewards cooperation and discourages exploitation.

  • Incentives can alter cost-benefit calculations.

Altruistic Norms

  • Appealing to altruistic motives can promote the common good.

  • Charismatic leaders can inspire cooperation.

  • Defining situations to invoke cooperative norms can increase altruism.

Competition

  • Conflict often arises when groups compete for scarce resources.

  • Perceived threats increase intolerance and prejudice.

  • Prejudice amplifies the perception of threats.

  • Sherif's Robber's Cave experiment demonstrated how competition can lead to conflict and hostility between groups.

  • In competition-fostering situations, groups behave more competitively than individuals.

Perceived Injustice

  • Conflicts often stem from feelings of unfairness.

  • Equity theory: people define justice as the distribution of rewards proportional to contributions.

  • Perceptions of inequity can lead to feelings of exploitation and irritation.

  • Those with social power often justify their advantages.

Misperception

  • Conflicts often involve misperceptions of the other's motives and goals.

  • People in conflict form distorted images of one another.

Mirror-Image Perceptions

  • Conflicting parties often have similar misperceptions of each other.

  • Negative mirror-image perceptions can hinder peace.

  • People display a "myside" bias, favoring their own group.

  • Political polarization involves seeing benevolence on one's own side and evil on the other.

  • Self-confirming, mirror-image perceptions characterize intense conflict.

Simplistic Thinking

  • Tension can lead to simplistic and stereotyped views of the enemy.

Shifting Perceptions

  • Perceptions of enemies can change rapidly when conflicts wane.

  • Misperceptions can lead to distorted images of antagonists.

Achieving Peace

  • Peacemaking strategies: contact, cooperation, communication, and conciliation.

Contact

  • Contact can reduce prejudice by:

    • Reducing anxiety

    • Increasing Empathy

    • Humanizing others

    • Decreasing threats

  • Positive contact is more commonplace, but negative experiences have a greater effect.

Contact Predicting Attitudes

  • Contact predicts tolerance.

  • Mere exposure to other-race faces improves attitudes toward other races.

  • Online exposure via social media sites can also decrease prejudice.

Desegregation and Racial Attitudes

  • Desegregation does not always improve racial attitudes.

  • Racial attitudes may not change with desegregation.

Friendship

  • Friendship can reduce anxiety around interracial interaction.

  • Lack of mixing may stem partly from pluralistic ignorance. Many whites and Blacks say they would like more contact but misperceive that the other does not reciprocate their feelings.

  • Prolonged, personal contact has been true of intergroup contact programs in Northern Ireland, Cyprus, and Bosnia.

Equal-Status Contact

  • It's important that the contact be equal-status contact, like that between the store clerks, the soldiers, the neighbors, the prisoners, and the summer campers.

Cooperation

  • Common goals unite, while competitive contact divides.

Common External Threats Build Cohesiveness

  • Having a well-defined external threat helps solidify WE.

  • This is not always the best path, because to cause we-feeling can be unethical.

Superordinate Goals Foster Cooperation

  • Superordinate goals unite all in a group and require cooperative effort.

Cooperative Learning Improves Racial Attitudes

  • Students in 148 studies across 11 countries achieve more, get along, and have more positive relationships.

Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson, and the Integration of Baseball

  • Create a perception that change is inevitable.

  • Establish equal-status contact with a superordinate goal.

  • Puncture the norm of prejudice.

  • Cut short the spiral of violence by practicing nonviolence.

Group and Superordinate Identities

  • To reduce prejudice and conflict, we had best initially minimize group diversity, then acknowledge it, then transcend it.

  • Ethnic Group Identification, Majority Group Identification.

    • Strong: Bicultural

    • Weak: Assimilated

    • Strong

    • Weak: Separated

    • MarginalSource:

  • “diversity within unity,” an omnicultural perspective, all members of a given society will fully respect and adhere to those basic values and institutions that are considered part of the basic shared framework of the society. At the same time, every group in society is free to maintain its distinct subculture

Communication

Bargaining

  • Being tough is therefore a potential lose-lose scenario.

  • If the other party responds with an equally tough stance, both may be locked into positions from which neither can back down without losing face.

Mediation

  • Third-party mediators can assist and give suggestions.

  • Third-party mediators make it easier for people to meet concessions.

  • Compared with compromises, in which each party sacrifices something important, integrative agreements are more enduring, mutually rewarding, and also lead to better ongoing relationships.

Unraveling Misperceptions with Controlled Communications

  • How to argue constructively

    • clearly outline the issue

    • use knowledge of the other person to hit blow the belt and humiliate

    • divulge positive and negative comments

    • welcome feedback about your behavior

    • feign agreement while habiting resentment

Arbitration

  • Disputants usually prefer to settle their differences to allow retain outcomes that would prefer themselves instead of the opposition.

  • Settled with “final-offer arbitration so it motivates each party better.
    Final offer isn’t always followed to a reasonable standard.

Conciliation

GRIT

  • GRIT requires one side to initiate de-escalatory actions, after announcing a conciliatory standard. To do so it’s possible by drawing upon social-psychological concepts.

  • GRIT = graduated and reciprocated initiatives in tension reduction

  • The initiator states their desire to reduce tension, declares each conciliatory act before making it, and invites the adversary to reciprocate.
    Lindskold was not contending that the world of the laboratory experiment mirrors the more complex world of everyday life.

    • the Kennedy experiment
      To many, the most significant attempt at GRIT

Concluding Thoughts: The Conflict Between Individual and Communal Rights

  • Many social conflicts are a contest between individual and collective rights.

  • Hoping to blend the best of individualist and collectivist values, some social scientists have advocated a communitarian synthesis that aims to balance individual rights with the collective right to communal well-being.