The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed)

by Peter T Coleman

  Of course, it is within participants’ power to make this easy or less easy to accomplish. Not only can addressees try to look beyond the speakers’ words to the underlying communicative intention, but speakers can seek to express themselves in ways that will lead to the desired interpretation on their addressees’ part. This, of course, requires one to see the world through the eyes of another.

  The Perspective-Taking Paradigm

  Perspective taking assumes that individuals perceive the world from differing vantage points and that because the experiences of each individual depend to some degree on his or her vantage point, messages must be formulated with this perspective in mind. The late Roger Brown put the essential idea succinctly: “Effective coding requires that the point of view of the auditor be realistically imagined” (1965, p. 242). However, apart from the general admonition that the addressee’s perspective be taken into account, it is not always clear how one should go about implementing what is sometimes referred to as the principle of audience design—the idea that messages should be designed to accord with an addressee’s ability to comprehend them. In the best of circumstances, it is difficult to take the perspective of another accurately; the more unlike oneself the other happens to be, the more difficult the task becomes.

  In conflict situations, even more problematic than the absence of common ground may be the misperception of common ground—incorrect assumptions that communicators make about what their partners know. It is well established that people’s estimates of what others know, believe, or value tend to be biased in the direction of their own beliefs—what they themselves know. As a result, comprehending the intended meaning of an utterance may require knowledge one lacks, and this is particularly likely if the cultural situations of the parties involved are markedly different. In all probability, it would never have occurred to so confirmed a Marxist as Nikita Khrushchev that the context for the interpretation of his ill-received remark would be anything other than the doctrine of Marxism’s historic inevitability.

  Such misperceptions are common in conflict for two reasons. First, the magnitude of the perspectival differences that communicators must accommodate may itself be an important source of conflict. For an ardent pro-life activist, it may be difficult to conduct a discussion about abortion that is not grounded in the position that abortion is a kind of murder; messages grounded in this premise, directed at the activist’s pro-choice counterpart, are unlikely to ameliorate conflict.

  Second, conflict tends to make perceived distinctions among participants more salient and in so doing heighten the tendency to categorize them as members of in-groups or out-groups. The language people use in such situations reflects these distinctions. One manifestation of this is what Maass, Semin, and their colleagues have termed the linguistic intergroup bias (Maass and Arcuri, 1992; Maass, Salvi, Arcuri, and Semin, 1989). Any interpersonal act can be characterized at various levels of generality. For example, an observer might remark, “John carried Mary’s suitcase,” or “John helped Mary,” or “John is a helpful person,” all in reference to the same incident. A well-established research finding is that people describe the actions of in-group and out-group members with systematic differences. For an action that is negatively valent, the behavior of out-group members tends to be characterized at a relatively high level of abstraction, while that of in-group members is characterized more concretely. For positively valent behaviors, however, the pattern is reversed. Positively valent behavior of out-group members is characterized as a specific episode, while that of in-group members is characterized abstractly.

  One consequence of the linguistic intergroup bias is to make stereotypes resistant to disconfirmation, since behavior that is congruent with a negative out-group stereotype tends to be characterized as a general property (“Smith is aggressive”), while behavior that is inconsistent with the stereotype tends to be characterized in quite specific terms (“Smith gave CPR to an accident victim”). The enhanced salience of stereotypes in conflict situations enormously complicates the process by which, again in Brown’s words, “the point of view of the auditor [can be] realistically imagined,” and by so doing undermines the effectiveness of communication.

  Principle 4.

  When speaking, take your listener’s perspective into account.

  Just as the speaker must take pains to be aware of the possible constructions listeners may place on an utterance, listeners have to be sensitive to the alternative constructions an utterance might yield. Although we habitually respond to what others say as though it could mean one and only one thing, this is seldom the case.

  How insensitivity to this principle can affect communication is illustrated in a 1999 controversy involving Washington, DC, public advocate David Howard’s use of the word niggardly in a conversation with two aides. The aides, both African Americans, were unfamiliar with the obscure synonym for stingy and took it to be a form of a similar-sounding racial epithet, to which it is in fact etymologically unrelated. The ensuing flap (Howard, who is Caucasian, initially resigned but was then reinstated by Mayor Anthony Williams) polarized activists on both sides of the political spectrum. Although Howard was correct philologically, he was mistaken in assuming the word niggardly was in common ground. In retrospect, it seems clear that his choice of words was injudicious. Because the word was obscure, there was a good chance that at least some people would not know its meaning, and because of its similarity to a taboo word, the likelihood was great that it would be misinterpreted. Especially in situations where the addressee’s interpretation is consequential, an effective communicator tries to view his or her own utterances from the other’s perspective.

  A serious complication of perspective taking in conflict situations derives from what is called the multiple audience problem. It is not uncommon for a communication to be designed to simultaneously convey different messages to different listeners, and this seems particularly likely to occur in conflict situations. For example, a mayor negotiating a salary increase with the teachers’ union may feel it is necessary to “send a message” to other municipal unions that he is willing to run the risk of a strike. Or the leader of the union may go to great lengths to ensure that a reasonable concession, part of the normal give-and-take of negotiation, is not seen by union members as a sign of weakness. The number of different (and sometimes contradictory) perspectives that a speaker may feel obliged to take into account can make public or open negotiations extremely difficult. Other things being equal, participants would be well advised to reduce the number of audiences to which their messages are addressed.

  Of course, another person’s perspective is not always self-evident. It probably is in the best interests of the parties to expend some effort ascertaining what is and is not in common ground, and if necessary enlarging its contents. Such mutually cooperative efforts to ensure coordination on meaning is the essence of a dialogic approach to communication (discussed next). Participants deeply enmeshed in an acrimonious and apparently intractable conflict may find it difficult to achieve the degree of sensitivity to the other that such an approach requires. But without it there can be no communication of any consequence.

  The Dialogic Paradigm

  Thus far, our discussion has depicted communication as an unremittingly individualistic process—the product of contributions by what Susan Brennan has called “autonomous information processors.” Speakers and addressees act with respect to one another, but they act as individual entities. Communication consists of a set of discursively related but independent episodes. This kind of depiction may be appropriate for certain communications, such as the process by which writers communicate with their readers and broadcasters with their audiences, but it seems to miss the essence of what happens in most of the situations in which people communicate.

  Participants in conversations and similar highly interactive communicative forms behave less like autonomous information processors and more like participants in an intrinsically cooperative activity. Cla
rk and Brennan (1991) have made the point nicely: “It takes two people working together to play a duet, shake hands, play chess, waltz, teach, or make love. To succeed, the two of them have to coordinate both the content and process of what they are doing. . . . Communication . . . is a collective activity of the first order” (p. 127).

  What we call the dialogic paradigm focuses on the collaborative nature of communicative activity. Perhaps the most fundamental respects in which the other three paradigms we have discussed differ from the dialogic is where they locate meaning. For the encoding-decoding paradigm, meaning is a property of messages; for the intentionalist paradigm, it resides in speakers’ intentions; for the perspective-taking paradigm, it derives from the addressee’s point of view.

  In dialogic perspective, communication is regarded as a joint accomplishment of the participants, who have collaborated to achieve some set of communicative goals. Meaning is socially situated—deriving from the particular circumstances of the interaction—and the meaning of an utterance can be understood only in the context of those circumstances. Because the participants are invested in understanding, and being understood by, each other, speakers and addressees take pains to ensure that they have similar conceptions of the meaning of each message before they proceed to the next one.

  An encoding-decoding approach to communication puts the listener in the role of a passive recipient whose task is to process the meaning of the transmitted message, but a participant in a communicative interchange is not limited to this role. Active listeners raise questions, clarify ambiguous declarations, and take great pains to ensure that they and their counterpart have the same understanding of what has been said. It is instructive to observe the person who is not speaking in a conversation in which the participants are deeply involved. Typically, such listeners are anything but inactive. They nod, interject brief comments (“uh-huh,” “yes,” “right, right,” “hmmm”), and change their facial expressions to mirror the emotive content of what is being said. These actions—sometimes called communicating in the back channel—are one means by which participants demonstrate their involvement in the interaction and their understanding of what has been said. Considerable research has shown that the absence of back-channel responses makes communication significantly more difficult (Krauss, 1987). Effective communication requires that listeners be responsive.

  Principle 5.

  Be an active listener.

  This recommendation seems to ask parties involved in an unresolved conflict to behave cooperatively; indeed, that is precisely what they do. Communication is intrinsically a cooperative activity. As the dialogic perspective makes clear, in communication the participants must collaborate to create meaning, and one reason that communication between conflicting parties so often is unavailing is that the parties are unable to collaborate to that degree. As Bismarck might have remarked, communication becomes a continuation of conflict by verbal means. Of course, the cooperation necessary for effective communication is of a minimal sort, and participants may collaborate to express (one hopes regretfully) their inability to see a resolution that is mutually acceptable. Nevertheless, that communication can be a first step, and developing lines of communication can be the foundation on which a solution ultimately rests. A paradoxical fact about human nature is that few things are as effective in inducing conflicting parties to cooperate as a common foe. In communication, the common foe is misunderstanding, and in collaborating to vanquish this enemy, the parties to a conflict may be taking the first step toward reducing their differences.

  Principle 6.

  Focus initially on establishing conditions that allow effective communication to occur; the cooperation that communication requires, once established, may generalize to other contexts.

  FORM VERSUS SUBSTANCE: BOTH MATTER

  Each of the four paradigms reveals pitfalls that an effective communicator should avoid (noise, third-party transmitters, multiple audiences, and so on). The discussion thus far has mainly focused on the inherent complexity of communication and how its misuse can engender or exacerbate conflict. At first glance, the picture it presents is bleak. Tallying all the ways a communicative interchange can go awry leads one to wonder whether communication can ever have an ameliorative effect. Nevertheless, we all know that at least some disputes do get resolved peacefully, that long-standing adversaries can become allies, and that even seemingly irresolvable conflicts can be isolated, allowing parties to “agree to disagree.” In this section, we consider some simple behaviors that can enhance (though not guarantee) the ameliorative effects of communication.

  Given a genuine desire to resolve the conflict, communication, artfully employed, can help achieve that end. Obviously what is most critical is the substance of the communication—the quality of the proposals and counterproposals that each participant makes. It would be foolish to expect others to accept solutions not in their best interests just because of “good communication.” However, quite apart from substance, the form that messages take can have (sometimes unintended) consequences. The very flexibility that makes communication so adaptable a tool also allows for more and less effective ways of achieving the same ends. For example, “Shut the door,” “Would you mind closing the door?” and “I wish we could leave the door open, but it’s so noisy” could (in appropriate contexts) be instances of utterances understood to have the same intended meaning. Although they differ in grammatical type and in the particular words they employ, all are understood as directives—attempts to induce the addressee to do something.

  Utterances often are described in terms of the speech acts (Austin, 1962) they represent. Like physical actions, the things we say are intended to accomplish certain purposes; but unlike physical actions, they accomplish their purposes communicatively rather than directly. As we have just illustrated, the same speech act can be accomplished by a variety of utterances. Nevertheless, although “Shut the door” and “Would you mind closing the door?” both represent directives to close the door, they differ in another respect. The latter is an indirect speech act (one whose literal and intended meanings differ), while the former is a direct speech act that represents its meaning literally. Generally, indirect speech acts are perceived as more polite than direct ones, probably because the two kinds of directive have implications for the status or power differential of requester and requestee. Although different versions of the same speech act may be identical insofar as the message’s explicit content (construing that term narrowly) is concerned, it behooves a communicator to ensure that the form of the message does not undermine the information it conveys.

  Principle 7.

  Pay attention to message form.

  CONCLUSION

  We conclude this discussion with a point we alluded to earlier. Communication is not a panacea, and in the absence of genuine desire to resolve conflict, it is as likely to intensify the parties’ disagreement as to moderate it. Although the point may seem too obvious to warrant mentioning, conflicts often serve multiple functions, and the parties may approach resolution with some ambivalence. They may find that the perceived benefits of continuing conflict outweigh its costs. In such cases, communication aimed at resolving the conflict may be unavailing—and could conceivably make things worse.

  In a study published more than forty-five years ago, Krauss and Deutsch (1966) provided subjects in a bargaining experiment with an opportunity to communicate. The bargaining problem they confronted in the experiment was a relatively simple one to solve. However, allowing participants the means by which they could obstruct each other’s progress complicated matters considerably, typically resulting in poorer outcomes for both. The means of obstruction transformed participants’ focus from jointly solving a simple coordination problem to devising individual strategies that would defeat the other. Giving them a verbal communication channel did not materially improve matters; indeed, in some cases it made things worse.

  The results of this experiment underscore the naiveté of regard
ing communication as the universal solvent for conflict, one whose application is certain to improve matters. More realistic is a view of communication as a neutral instrument—one that can be used to convey threats as well as offers of reconciliation, to put forth unreasonable offers as well as acceptable ones, to inflame a tense situation as well as to defuse it.

  Given a genuine desire to resolve a conflict, communication can facilitate achieving this goal. Although we can affect others (and be affected by them) through communication, we can affect them (and be affected by them) only so much. The fruit of communication is to establish understanding, but beyond this, communication can do little (directly) to change the state of affairs or sway the outcome of a conflict based on irreconcilable goals. Good communication cannot guarantee that conflict is ameliorated or resolved, but poor communication greatly increases the likelihood that conflict continues or is made worse.

  Note

  1. In this chapter, we try to summarize very briefly a large body of theory and research on the social psychology of communication as it relates to conflict. Space limitations prevent us from doing much more than skimming the surface, and in so doing we present a picture that is distorted in certain respects. Detailed treatments of these issues can be found in Krauss and Fussell (1996) and Krauss and Chiu (1998).

  References

  Asch, S. E. “Forming Impressions of Personality.” Journal of Personality and Social–Psychology, 1946, 41, 258–290.

  Asch, S. E. Social Psychology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1952.