The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed)

by Peter T Coleman

  IMPLICATIONS FOR TRAINING AND PRACTICE

  We suggest that rather than being taught separately, in different training programs, problem-solving and decision-making approaches to cooperative conflict resolution should be taught together in integrated fashion. In the previous section, we made an argument for considering the conflict resolution process in roughly four phases, incorporating problem solving and decision making throughout. We also recommend the development of training programs and intervention designs that approach the process in the same way. In this section, we briefly highlight a few factors that should be part of such efforts.

  Conditions That Encourage Problem Solving

  Training in problem-solving approaches should include information about the conditions that are likely to lead to parties’ willingness to engage in problem solving. We know, for example, that a psychological climate characterized by cohesion, fairness, recognition of success, and openness to innovation encourages people to choose problem-solving and persuasion strategies, and less likely to engage in bargaining and politicking (Strutton, Pelton, and Lumpkin, 1993). Training for mediators, designs for organizational alternative dispute resolution programs, and conflict resolution programs for high schools, to name a few, could all make use of this information.

  In addition, encouraging problem solving through cultivating concern for the other can be important (e.g., Carnevale and Pruitt, 1992; Pruitt and Kim, 2004). One common approach is to engage parties in perspective taking to help them see the other’s concerns as legitimate. Our work on social perspective coordination (Weitzman and Weitzman, 2000) suggests not only that people must learn to take the perspective of the other but also that attention must be paid to translating perspective-taking ability into the choice of conflict resolution strategy. (See chapters 1 and 3 for more on the conditions that encourage conflict resolution.)

  Although working to improve conditions that encourage problem solving is important, it is also essential to provide people with the tools to do it well. Trainings and intervention plans should include the sorts of specific problem-solving techniques referred to earlier, such as expanding the pie, logrolling, nonspecific compensation, and bridging. Furthermore, a consideration of some of the issues raised here can lead to novel approaches to intervention. To take an example from our practice, we were asked to mediate a community dispute in which there were known to be many “sides” with different perspectives. A consideration of the concern discussed as a critique, that people may not agree on a definition of the problem in the first place and that this alone can undermine conflict resolution efforts, led to an approach based on the very issue of problem definition. A group of about thirty community members were asked to begin the “mediation” session by engaging in brainstorming definitions of “the problem” they were facing. As the session proceeded, the group gradually worked toward a mutually agreed definition of the problem. By the time the group reached agreement on a definition of the problem, the solution was close to obvious and was easily agreed to.

  Teaching the Lessons from the Decision-Making Literature

  The information from the decision-making literature that would be particularly helpful if built into conflict resolution training includes the concepts of anchors, frames, and reference points. Kahneman (1992) suggests what he calls the Lewinian prescription, based on the concept of loss aversion: concessions that eliminate losses are more effective than concessions that improve on existing gains. Mediators as well as negotiators could learn to look for these opportunities.

  Earlier, we presented selected information about the decision-making phenomena that help explain and predict disputant behavior. Such information is often incorporated into negotiation training aimed at “winning” in competitive negotiations, but it seems, at least anecdotally, much less often to be a part of mediation training. Yet understanding issues such as the impact of stress, power imbalance, disclosure of information, egocentric interpretations of fairness, and preferences for relative outcomes, as well as the role of issues of risk taking and the factors that influence risk-taking propensity, would seem to be of enormous value for mediators.

  One more approach from the decision-making literature needs introduction here. Building on the sort of literature described earlier, Brett argues for “transforming conflict in organizational groups into high quality group decisions” (1991, p. 291) and prescribes techniques for doing so. Her approach is based in the assumption that by harnessing negotiation and decision theory, one can bring conflict to a constructive outcome through a decision-making approach. Her prescriptions include

  Criteria for determining if a high-quality decision has been reached

  Guidelines for improving the decision-making process

  Methods for integrating differing points of view

  Tactics for creating mutual gain, coalition gain, and individual gain

  Choosing decision rules that maximize integration of information

  Guidelines about when to use mutual gain, individual gain, and coalition gain approaches

  This approach offers concrete, structured advice, based solidly in the research literature, for applying decision-making techniques to resolving group conflict. These techniques can be helpful at many of the decision-making moments identified in the PSDM model.

  In a similar vein, Janis and Mann’s approach (1977) suggests that parties sit down together and analyze their conflict as a difficult decision. Their book offers devices such as the decisional balance sheet, a form for listing choice criteria (the things that matter to each party), assigning numerical values and valences (1 or 2) to each, and manipulating the results. In this approach, disputants sit down together with a decisional balance sheet, carefully consider their own and the other’s concerns, and look for a solution that maximizes each side’s benefit and minimizes cost. With reference to the PSDM model presented here, such techniques might be helpful at the stage of either generating alternatives or choosing among alternatives; in fact, it bridges the two.

  Approaches such as those of Brett (1991) and Janis and Mann (1977) represent formalized, detailed technologies that can and should be taught more widely than they currently are. Though we have criticized some underlying assumptions of some of these approaches (questioning, for example, the common currency assumptions in the Janis and Mann approach), they remain tools that can be of great value if applied appropriately and as tools integrated into a problem-solving and decision-making approach. Our training programs would benefit from offering students more in the way of such concrete, specified techniques for incorporation into their tool kits.

  CONCLUSION

  We have suggested that problem solving and decision making are processes interwoven in many cooperative conflict resolution procedures and have proposed an integrated PSDM model reflecting four general phases: (1) diagnosing the conflict, (2) identifying alternative solutions, (3) evaluating and choosing a mutually acceptable solution, and (4) committing to the decision and implementing it. This integrated model offers a way of thinking about the opportunities for applying both problem-solving and decision-making knowledge and techniques. An understanding of how problem-solving approaches work, are helpful, and can be encouraged in various contexts can be a critical component of training, intervention, and dispute-resolution program design. Similarly, an understanding of decision-making biases and strategies for overcoming them can be a vital component of both conflict resolution education and practice. Furthermore, a consideration of the issues raised here, and even of some of the critiques of these approaches, can lead to new approaches to intervention, training, and program design.

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  CHAPTER TEN

  INTERGROUP CONFLICTa

  Ronald J. Fisher

  Intergroup conflict is expressed in many forms and in many different settings in all societies. In organizations, poorly managed differences between departments or between factions within the same unit can dampen morale, create animosity, and reduce motivation and productivity. In community settings, schisms between interest groups on important social issues can lead to polarization and hostility, while low-intensity conflict between ethnic, racial, or religious groups finds expression in prejudice, discrimination, and social activism to reduce inequity. At the societal level, high-intensity conflict between such identity groups on a broader scale can break out into ethnopolitical warfare, which engages the international community as well as local actors. At all levels of human interaction, poorly handled conflict between authorities and constituents or between majorities and minorities can lead to frustration and alienation on both sides. In fact, the potential for destructive intergroup conflict exists wherever there are important differences between groups.

  Destructive intergroup conflict is only one major form of relationship in the wider domain of intergroup relations, that is, interactions among individuals that occur in terms of their group identifications. The study of intergroup relations is concerned with all manner of relationships among groups, including cooperative interactions and competitive ones, as well as constructive intergroup conflict. In most ongoing intergroup relationships in all manner of settings, cooperative relations exist and conflict is handled in a more or less constructive manner to the satisfaction of the parties involved. However, when this does not occur around incompatible goals or activities and the parties work to control or frustrate each other in adversarial and antagonistic ways, the scene is set for destructive intergroup conflict. Given that such conflicts can be very costly to the parties involved as well as the wider system, especially at the intercommunal and international levels, it is essential to understand them and look for ways of managing and resolving them, the focus of this chapter.

  From the point of view generally held in the social sciences, intergroup conflict is not simply a matter of misperception or misunderstanding. It is based in real differences between groups in terms of social power, access to resources, important life values, or other significant incompatibilities. These realistic sources of conflict are typically exacerbated by subjective processes in the ways that individuals see and interpret the world and in the ways that groups function in the face of differences and perceived threat. As individuals and within groups, human beings are not well equipped to deal with important differences between themselves and others
, and often they engage in behaviors that make the situation worse unless social processes and institutions are available to them to manage their incompatibilities effectively. When differences are handled constructively, such conflict can be a source of learning, creativity, and social change toward a more pluralistic, harmonious, and equitable world.

  Although intergroup conflict finds innumerable expressions, this chapter focuses on the general processes of causation, escalation, and resolution that are applicable to these many forms. However, it needs to be understood that each organizational, community, cultural, political, and societal setting requires further analysis in order to truly understand the intergroup conflicts at that level of interaction and within that particular context, prior to suggesting avenues for handling these constructively. In addition, the general concepts and principles that are available from Western social scientific research and practice have to be interpreted, modified, and augmented in culturally sensitive ways in order to have utility in different cultural settings. In some cases, general prescriptions will be inappropriate and counterproductive, and application will need to await further developments in theory and practice, both local and global.

  While compatible with much theory and research in the social sciences on intergroup conflict, this chapter draws especially on work in social psychology, an interdiscipline between sociology and psychology that seeks to integrate understanding of individual processes, especially in perception and cognition, with knowledge of social processes, particularly those at the group and intergroup levels. Original studies of the development and resolution of intergroup conflict over time—for example, with boys’ camp groups (Sherif, 1966), management personnel in training workshops (Blake and Mouton, 1961), volunteers in a prison simulation (Haney, Banks, and Zimbardo, 1973), and university students in a simulated community conflict over resources and values (Fisher et al., 1990)—have illuminated our understanding of the processes and outcomes that can arise from realistic group incompatibilities. Much of this understanding has been captured in general treatments of conflict—its sources, its tendency to escalate, and general strategies directed toward its management (see, e.g., Deutsch, 1973, 1983, 1991; Fisher, 1990; Kriesberg and Dayton, 2012; Pruitt and Kim, 2004). Knowledge is also drawn from theories of social identity (Tajfel and Turner, 1986), realistic group conflict and ethnocentrism (Levine and Campbell, 1972), social dominance (Sidanius and Pratto, 1999), and intergroup relations (Taylor and Moghaddam, 1994; Moghaddam, 2008). In addition, social and organizational psychologists have contributed to the development of methods to manage and resolve intergroup conflict in various settings (Bar-Tal, 2011; Blake and Mouton, 1984; Blake, Shepard, and Mouton, 1964; Brown, 1983; Fisher, 1994, 1997; Haney, Banks, and Zimbardo 2013; Tropp, 2011).