The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed)

by Peter T Coleman

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  CHAPTER SEVEN

  COMMUNICATION AND CONFLICT

  Robert M. Krauss

  Ezequiel Morsella

  Battle, n. A method of untying with the teeth a political knot that would not yield to the tongue.

  —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)

  When neighbors feud, lovers quarrel, or nations war, the predictable remedy prescribed by the voices of reason is communication. The prevailing view is that, faced with conflict, communicating is always the right thing to do: the UN Security Council encourages hostile countries to “hold talks,” and marriage counselors advise quarreling couples to “express their feelings.” So commonplace is the prescription that advice to the contrary seems anomalous; it’s difficult to imagine the secretary general imploring hostile nations to refrain from dialogue. The positive role of communication in ameliorating conflict seems so obvious that the premise is seldom given serious examination. Why should communicating be so helpful? Under what conditions does communication reduce conflict?

  An attempt to answer such questions is the main burden of this chapter. In large part, the answers derive from considering what communication entails and what its instantiation precludes, that is, what it brings to, and demands of, particular situations. To understand the complex interplay between communication and conflict, we describe four paradigms of communication—four models of the communication process—and consider how each relates to conflict.1 We briefly examine communicative mishaps that are potential sources of conflict and consider how and why communication can ameliorate conflict. Finally, we discuss some inherent limitations of communication as a peacemaker, limitations that result from the realization that understanding, the cardinal goal of communication, does not imply agreement, as Bierce’s definition illustrates.

  FOUR COMMUNICATION PARADIGMS

  Before we begin discussing the intricate interplay of conflict and communication, it is important to specify what we mean by the latter term. The concept of communication is an important focus for fields as diverse as cell biology, computer science, ethology, linguistics, electrical engineering, sociology, anthropology, genetics, philosophy, semiotics, and literary theory, each of which employs the term in its unique way. Indeed, communication has been used in so many ways and in so many contexts that, as sociologist Thomas Luckman observes, it “has come to mean all things to all men.”

  Common to all conceptualizations of communication is the idea of information transfer. Information that originates in one part of a system is formulated into a message that is transmitted to another part of that system. As a result, information residing in one locus comes to be replicated at another. In human communication, the information corresponds to what are loosely referred to as ideas or, more scientifically, mental representations. In its most elemental form, human communication may be construed as the process by which ideas contained within one mind are conveyed to other minds. Though attractive because of its simplicity, this description fails to capture the true richness and subtlety of the process by which humans communicate, an enterprise that involves far more than automatically transferring ideas.

  The Encoding-Decoding Paradigm

  The most straightforward conceptualization of communication can be found in the encoder-decoder paradigm, in which communication is described as transferring information via codes. A code is a system that maps a set of signals onto a set of meanings. In the simplest kind of code, the mapping is one-to-one: for every signal there is one and only one meaning, and for every meaning there is one and only one signal. Such is the case for Morse code. The sequence dot dot dot dot signifies the letter H, and only H; conversely, the letter H is uniquely represented by the sequence dot dot dot dot, and only that sequence.

  Much of the communication in nonhuman species is based on the encoding-decoding principle. For example, vervet monkeys have two distinctive vocalizations for signaling the presence of their main predators, eagles and snakes. When one or the other signal is sounded, the vervets respond quickly and appropriately, scanning the sky in the first case, and scanning the grass around them in the second. Just as the Morse code dot dot dot dot invariably designates the letter H, the vervet “aerial predator call” unambiguously signals the presence of predacious eagles.

  Viewing human communication as encoding and decoding assumes a process in which an abstract proposition is (1) encoded in a message (i.e., transformed into a signal whose elements have a one-to-one correspondence with the elements of the proposition) by the sender, (2) transmitted over a channel to the receiver, and (3) decoded into an abstract proposition that, it is believed, is isomorphic with the original one. For example, a speaker may formulate the proposition [John] [give book] [Mary] and thus transmit the message, “John, please give Mary the book.” After receiving and processing the message, John presumably understands that he has been asked to give a particular book to someone named Mary.

  One reason the received message may not be identical to the transmitted one is that all communication channels contribute some degree of noise (any undesired signal) to the message. The more signal there is relative to the amount of noise (the signal-to-noise ratio), the closer the transmitted message is to the received message; hence the more similar the received proposition is to the original one. A low signal-to-noise ratio can distort the meaning of a message or even render it incomprehensible.

  Noise, of course, has a deleterious effect on all communication, but its effect in the arena of conflict can be especially pernicious because it forces the recipient of a message to fill in information the noise has distorted. Given the antagonistic interpersonal orientation that parties in such situations often have, the filled-in information is more likely to worsen conflict than reduce it.

  As an example of how noise may be introduced into communication, consider what happens when using third (or fourth or
fifth) parties to transmit messages, in contrast to direct communication. As in the children’s game of Telephone, each party’s successive retelling of a message is likely to introduce some distortion, so that when it arrives at the ultimate destination, it may bear little resemblance to the original. There may be times when discussing delicate subjects is inadvisable in environments where misunderstanding is likely to occur. Also, whenever distortion is likely, redundancy (multiple encoded messages) can be helpful. Restating the same idea in different forms does not guarantee its acceptance, but it should increase the probability of correct understanding.

  Principle 1.

  Avoid communication channels with low signal-to-noise ratios; if that is impossible, increase redundancy by restating the same idea in various forms.

  Noise is not the only factor that can compromise communication. Even if the transmitted and received messages are identical, the retrieved proposition may vary significantly from the original. Speaker and listener may be employing codes that differ subtly, and this may lead to misunderstanding. For example, lexical choice often reflects a speaker’s implicit attitude toward the subject of the utterance. In a given situation, any one of several closely related terms (woman, lady; Negro, black, African American; crippled, handicapped, disabled, physically challenged) might serve adequately to designate or refer to a particular individual, yet each term may be associated with a somewhat different conceptualization of its referent as part of a complex ideology or network of attitudes and values. If such ideologies or values are not shared, application of a term may be construed as antagonistic.

  For example, at the height of the Cold War, an offhand comment made by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to a British diplomat was translated as, “We will bury you.” According to linguist Alan K. Melby, Khrushchev’s remark, made in the context of a conversation about the competition between communism and capitalism, was essentially a restatement (in considerably more vivid language) of Marx’s claim of communism’s historic inevitability. Although “we will bury you” is an acceptable literal rendering of Khrushchev’s words, an equally accurate, and contextually more appropriate, translation would have been, “We will be present at your burial.” Such a rendering is consistent with Khrushchev’s comment later in the same conversation that communism did not need to go to war to destroy capitalism, since the latter would eventually self-destruct. In the United States, the common interpretation of “we will bury you” was that “we” referred to the USSR, “you” meant the United States, and “bury” denoted annihilate. For many, especially those who viewed communism as a malign doctrine, the phrase became prima facie evidence of the USSR’s malevolent intentions toward the United States.

  The controversy over proper translation of Khrushchev’s remark reveals a serious shortcoming of the encoder-decoder account of human communication: although language is in some respects a code, in other respects it is not. The fact that “we will bury you” could yield two equally “correct” renderings that differed so radically underscores the fact that humans do not use language simply as a set of signals mapped onto a set of meanings.

  The Intentionalist Paradigm

  The Khrushchev episode dramatically illustrates why the process of encoding and decoding is not a good characterization of human communication. There was no question about the specific words Khrushchev had uttered, and competent translators did not differ on the ways the Russian utterance might be rendered in English. At issue was a more complicated question: What had Khrushchev intended the utterance to mean?

  The view of communication implicit in the encoder-decoder position is that meanings of messages are fully specified by their elements—that meaning is encoded, and that decoding the message is equivalent to specifying its meaning. However, it is easy to demonstrate that this is often not the case. Unlike the vervet’s aerial-predator call, which has an invariant significance, in human communication the same message can be understood to mean different things in different circumstances, and this fact necessitates a distinction between a message’s literal meaning and its intended meaning. “Do you know what time it is?” is literally a question about what the addressee knows, but it is usually understood as a request. Although its grammatical mood is interrogative, it is conventionally taken to be an imperative; a reasonable paraphrase might be, “Tell me the time.” However, not all sentences of the form Do you know X? are intended as requests; “Do you know C++?” is likely to be understood as a question about familiarity with a programming language.

  Understanding consists of recognizing communicative intentions—not the words used, but rather what speakers intend those words to mean. The intentionalist paradigm highlights the danger of participants’ misconstruing each other’s communicative intentions.

  Principle 2.

  When listening, try to understand the intended meaning of what your counterpart is saying.

  What might be called the Humpty Dumpty approach to communication (“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”) is a formula for disaster. In fact, communicators in a conflict situation should assume precisely the opposite of what Humpty Dumpty’s maxim advises.

  Principle 3.

  When formulating a message, consider what the listener will take your words to mean.

  Had Khrushchev prefaced, “We will bury you,” with an allusion to Marx’s claim of communism’s historic inevitability, it is unlikely that the remark would have fanned the flames of the Cold War.

  In conflict, misunderstandings are especially likely because individuals interpret utterances to be consistent with their own attitudes. More than half a century ago, Solomon Asch (1946) demonstrated that the same message (“I hold that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms are in the physical”) would be interpreted quite differently depending on whether it was attributed to V. I. Lenin or to Thomas Jefferson (its actual author). The word rebellion can be interpreted in more than one way. Respondents’ knowledge of the purported author was an important determinant of their interpretation of the word, and hence of the message’s intended meaning.

  The problem can become considerably more problematic when the parties to the conflict use different languages to communicate, as the furor caused by Khrushchev’s remark illustrates. The translator had provided a literal English rendering of a Russian phrase that was intended to be understood figuratively. Nonliteral usage is a pervasive feature of language use. It adds enormously to our ability to formulate colorful and nuanced messages, but it does pose particular problems for a translator. In the first place, correctly apprehending the intended meaning of a nonliteral expression often requires cultural knowledge that goes beyond just technical mastery of the language. Understanding the significance of Ronald Reagan’s challenge to Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev—“Go ahead, make my day!”—requires at least a vague awareness of the Clint Eastwood film it echoes, Dirty Harry. It can require considerable cognitive effort to apprehend a speaker’s communicative intention, but the effort must be expended if the parties are to understand each other. In the absence of this effort, communication can become bogged down in a cycle of misinterpretation and denial:

  PARTY 1: You said X.

  PARTY 2: Yes, but it should have been obvious that I meant Y.

  PARTY 1: Well, how was I to know you didn’t mean X?

  Given the flexible relationship between the literal and intended meanings of an utterance, it is remarkable how well we understand each other. Utterances that are intended to be understood nonliterally are a common feature of everyday language use. Although some canonical forms of nonliteral usage are so salient that they have names (irony, metaphor, hyperbole), more mundane examples of nonliteral usage pervade everyday talk. When we say that we understand what others say, we are implicitly claiming to comprehend what they intend for us to understand. The decoded meaning of the utterance certainly contributes to that intended meaning, but it is o
nly part of it. Occasionally misunderstandings do occur (as when an addressee interprets an ironic statement literally), but for the most part, we understand nonliterally intended utterances correctly, usually without being consciously aware of possible meanings that such an utterance could have in other contexts.

  Despite facility in accomplishing this, the process by which a listener constructs the intention of an utterance is exceedingly complex and a matter of some contention among psycholinguists. In large part, it depends on the existence of knowledge that is shared between speaker and addressee, or common ground, as it is often called.

  The most elemental kind of common ground communicators rely on is knowledge of the language they are speaking. But as many an embarrassed tourist has discovered, much of the common ground that underlies language use derives from a complex matrix of shared cultural knowledge. Without this knowledge, many utterances are incomprehensible or, perhaps worse, interpreted incorrectly. This point is particularly relevant to use of language in conflict situations, especially when the conflict stems from differences in intention, goal, value, and ideology. To the extent that such variations derive from a lack of mutually shared knowledge, communication suffers. Understanding the importance of common ground in interpreting utterances points to one of the drawbacks of relying too heavily on an intentionalist interpretation of communication: the addressee cannot derive the intended meaning from a message if the meaning resides outside the realm of shared knowledge. Moreover, since what is common ground for a given speaker varies as a function of the addressee (i.e., it varies from addressee to addressee), the speaker is obliged to generate only those utterances that he or she believes the addressee is capable of understanding.