The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed)

by Peter T Coleman

  Our behavior is regulated by feedback loops that are organized hierarchically. Superordinate loops attend to longer-term, abstract goals. Embedded within them are subordinate loops for short-term tasks. Long-term goals, such as the future of our children and our planet, require that we use long-term mental tools. We create or maintain unnecessary destructive conflict when we allow lower-order phylogenically more immediate and automated emotional processes to override higher-order, more abstracted regulatory processes. In turn, conflict situations themselves, with their increased levels of stress, may cause us to override those loops and let older parts of the brain leap into action.

  Emotions serve at least three functions: they monitor our inner world, our relationships with the outer world, and help us act. The second function can cause us to make grave mistakes, because the outer world entails both our ecological and social environments. Our desire for belonging and recognition may entice us to over-hastily turn untested observations and opinions into firm beliefs and create unnecessary conflicts while leaving necessary conflicts unaddressed. The problem lies in that beliefs serve not only our reality testing and understanding of the world but also our psychological and social needs to live with ourselves and others (Jervis, 2006). Nicos Poulantzas (1936–1979), a Greco-French political sociologist in Paris, was one of Pol Pot’s teachers. Seeing what he had instigated, he later committed suicide (personal communication with Kevin Clements, August 21, 2007). Pol Pot had turned Poulantzas’s academic reflections into rigid ideology, ruthlessly implemented it in his homeland, Cambodia, and in that way created immense unnecessary suffering.

  In today’s world, challenges such as global climate change and unsustainable economic models are necessary conflicts that wait to be addressed. One underlying obstacle is the culture of ranked honor. Human history has shown that narratives of honor have never been very functional with regard to reality testing. Hitler’s allegiance to honor made him lose his connection with reality. In general, the common good of all is undercut and sound reality testing undermined when people forge strong emotional allegiances to cultural scripts that suggest that “worthier beings” merit privileged access to resources and domination over “lesser beings.” In human history, this arrangement has manifested by way of direct force, but also indirectly, as via “success” in accumulating monetary resources. As a result, in 2012, 21 million people live in slave-like situations, and several planets would be needed to continue the present overuse of resources.

  Emotions are hardwired and malleable. There is the hardwired physiological response and negative state of “feeling bad” and, at the psychological level, “this is bad for me,” or “feeling good” and “this is good for me.” Elaborated emotions such as rejection and enmity, as well as affection, attachment, loyalty, cooperation, and other positive emotions, are no longer automatic but context dependent. Spiders or worms are greeted as welcome delicacies in some cultures and in others with disgust. For a vegetarian, eating meat is sickening, while it is a joy for a nonvegetarian. In social contexts influenced by human rights values, the term domestic chastisement has transmuted into the negative concept of “domestic violence.” In five hundred years or so, this century will perhaps be decried as a dark century of unsustainable social and ecological arrangements. In all cases, the same sequence of behavior that once was regarded as “good for everybody” is later deemed to be “bad for everybody.”

  Neuroimaging may show Adam’s left anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortices being activated by his social dominance orientation (the preference for social hierarchy over egalitarianism) and his lack of empathy (Chiao et al., 2009). However, such orientations are not to be taken as fixed states. They are embedded into meta-emotions that guide us in how we feel about feelings (Gottman, Katz, and Hooven, 1997). These meta-emotions emerge within social contexts. Since it is human nature to be social and cultural, efforts to create a new culture of dignity are not in vain.

  It would be easy to overwhelm readers with an overabundance of concepts and terms at this point. Goals, attitudes, affects, feelings, emotions, emotional states, moods, consciousness, self, psyche—the list of terms is endless, and often scholars do not agree on their definitions. For our purposes, it is sufficient to understand that we have to give up any quest for rigid context-free classifications of complex elaborated emotions. Elaborated emotions are multifaceted clusters embedded in culture and history.

  THE INTERACTION BETWEEN EMOTION AND CONFLICT

  This section begins with the subject of fear as a basic emotion processed in our “old” brain. From there, we move on to more complex emotions.

  Fear, and How It Affects Conflict and Is Affected by Conflict

  The voice of intelligence is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of shame. It is biased by hate and extinguished by anger. Most of all, it is silenced by ignorance.

  —Karl Menninger

  In 1998, I interviewed Adam Bixi in Somaliland as part of my doctoral research. He described growing up in the Somali semidesert, learning as a very small boy to be constantly alert, even at night, for dangerous animals and “enemies” from other clans. He learned to be ready for fight or flight in a matter of seconds at any time, day or night. Continuous emergency preparedness meant that all other aspects of life had to wait. Emergency trumped everything else. As a consequence, Bixi admitted, he felt he had not lived life.

  Modern managers often feel the same way. Continuous emergency alertness diminishes the zest for life. It may even lead to cardiac failure. This is also valid for societies. The reason is the neglect of essential maintenance that is vital in the long term.

  Fear and humiliation carry the potential to link up in particularly disastrous ways. In Rwanda, fear of future humiliation, based on the experience of past humiliation, was used as justification for genocide. In his speeches, Hitler peddled the fear of future humiliation by the world Jewry. The Holocaust was his horrific “solution.”

  During a conflict, to reap the potential advantage of fear, enhanced alertness, we need to cool down and help our opponents to calm their fears. In negotiations, operating with threats—making others afraid—may undermine constructive solutions rather than provide advantages. Today’s politically polarizing talk media are doing society a disservice when they evoke fear for the sake of profit from drama.

  At some point Eve and Adam seek counseling. Adam is afraid to lose power and Eve is afraid to be empowered. The therapist succeeds in nurturing respect, love, understanding, empathy, and patience in an atmosphere of warmth, firmness, and safety in their larger social support network. Slowly their fears translate into deep personal growth for both.

  Anger and Hatred, and How They Affect Conflict and Are Affected by Conflict

  Victory breeds hatred. The defeated live in pain.

  Happily the peaceful live, giving up victory and defeat.

  —Gautama Buddha

  We easily get angry when we feel hurt. Sometimes we even kick a chair that stands in our way and get a bruise. Still, anger is a more composite set of mental processes than fear. Our brain does three things. First, it maps a comprehensive representation of the thing, animal, or person who has hurt us; second, it maps the state of our body, for example, our readiness to fight; and third, it maps the kind of relationship we have to the perpetrator and how we might respond. For example, we presumably would refrain from hitting a sumo wrestler.

  We react with anger—rather than sympathy—when we believe that the other person, through either neglect or intentionally, treats us with disrespect. The more we feel hurt, the more we get angry. We get angry when we deem that the person who hurts us has sufficient control over the situation to avoid harming us (the so-called controllability dimension). We get even angrier when we infer that the other intended to hurt us. Indeed, research shows that we want to harm others, either overtly or covertly, when we believe they could have avoided hurting us. It is one thing t
o be pushed accidentally by a drunken man, another to be harmed deliberately by an apparently clearheaded man.

  Our beliefs as to why others behave as they do are being addressed by attribution theory, one of the basic paradigms in social psychology. Fritz Heider is regarded as the first attribution theorist. (For further discussion of attribution theory, see Gilbert, 1998; Jones and Davis, 1965; Kelley, 1967; Ross, 1977.) During a contentious conflict, the fundamental attribution error, for example, may lead each side to overestimate the other’s hostility as well as one’s own benign attitude. We tend to attribute others’ hostile remarks to their personality dispositions (“they simply hate us” or “they are unworthy, lazy, and primitive people”) rather than to transient circumstances (“we belittled them first”), while making opposite attributions for ourselves. Reactive devaluation is another insidious bias: we tend to reject even the best solutions when “the enemy” suggested them.

  Adam is angry that Eve is not submissive enough, while Eve does not dare to be angry at his wrath; frightened by him, and the possibility and the strength of her own anger, she seeks relief in renewed subservience. Psychiatrist Jean Baker Miller (1986) emphasized that anger, if duly acknowledged and transformed, can lead to constructive conflict and growth. The therapist invites Adam to relinquish using anger as an easy-to-use escape route and helps him to instead face deeper feelings of hurt and pain. She encourages Eve and Adam to explore the new normative universe of mutual respect for equal dignity that defines concepts such as love, loyalty, cooperation, connection, and relationship in profoundly new ways. It is important for Eve to dare to feel anger, at least sometimes—not frantic rage and hatred but the confident firmness of being authentic.

  If we consider intergroup or international relations, the world will benefit from everybody firmly standing up in the face of abuse instead of passively standing by (Staub, 1989). If we wish to produce constructive results, however, this anger must be channeled into the conscientization of consciousness and conscience that Paulo Freire suggested, and then into Gandhi- or Mandela-like strategies for action.

  Humiliation, and How it Affects Conflict and Is Affected by Conflict

  It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honored by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

  —Mahatma Gandhi

  Fear is basic, anger more complex, and humiliation even more so. Humiliation refers to feelings, acts, and systemic structures. The act of humiliation involves putting down, holding down, and rendering the other helpless to resist the debasement. The feeling of being humiliated emerges when one is unable to repel the degradation and deems it to be not just unwanted but illegitimate. Apartheid was humiliation qua system. The humiliating effects of feudalism were brilliantly unmasked by Lu Xun (1881–1936), considered the founder of modern Chinese literature.

  What counts as humiliation and what it leads to—the consequences of humiliation—is determined by emotional scripts that vary from one historical period to another, from one cultural realm to another, from one person to another, and even within a single person as he or she reacts at different times to the same humiliation.

  Morton Deutsch (2006) observes, “By his persistent public refusal to be humiliated or to feel humiliated, Mandela rejected the distorted, self-debilitating relationship that the oppressor sought to impose upon him. Doing so enhanced his leadership among his fellow political prisoners and the respect he was accorded by the less sadistic guards and wardens of the prison” (p. 39).

  My research suggests that feelings of humiliation may acquire the quality and strength of obsession and addiction and can be seen as the “nuclear bomb of the emotions” (Lindner, 2006). Also Avishai Margalit (2002) warns of addiction to the emotion of humiliation, as this secures the “benefits” of the victim status and an entitlement to retaliation. Vamik D. Volkan (2004) in his theory of collective violence set out in his book Blind Trust, puts forth that when a chosen trauma is experienced as humiliation and is not mourned, this may lead to feelings of entitlement to revenge and, under the pressure of fear or anxiety, to collective regression.

  Due to their potency, feelings of humiliation lend themselves above all other emotions to being used to unleash mass violence. When people are determined—either genuinely or through manipulation—to perpetrate atrocities, costly military weaponry may no longer be needed. In Rwanda in 1994, everybody had machetes at home for agricultural use, with which neighbors could be hacked to death. The only resource required was Radio Mille Collines to disseminate the necessary propaganda. As a result, within a time span of a few weeks, almost 1 million people were being viciously humiliated, literally, by being “cut short” from allegedly arrogating superiority, and then brought to death. As it seems, the only true “weapons of mass destruction” are hearts and minds that translate feelings of humiliation into acts of humiliation.

  Until very recently, few researchers have studied humiliation explicitly, and even when doing so, it is often used interchangeably with shame or conceptualized as a variant of shame. However, particularly the rise of human rights ideals changes the position of humiliation in relation to concepts such as shame and humility and makes humiliation more salient. In the English language, “the earliest recorded use of to humiliate meaning to mortify or to lower or to depress the dignity or self-respect of someone does not occur until 1757” (Miller, 1993, p. 175). As in the case of Nelson Mandela, people who face humiliating treatment may sternly reject feeling humiliated or ashamed. And even if they feel humiliated, victims of torture and maltreatment recount that part of their success in being resilient was not to feel ashamed while indeed feeling humiliated.

  The view that humiliation may be more than just another negative emotion, but may indeed represent a particularly forceful phenomenon, is supported by the research of a number of authors, including James Gilligan (1996), Jennifer Goldman and Peter Coleman (2005), Linda Hartling and Tracy Luchetta (1999), Donald Klein (1991), Helen Lewis (1971), Evelin Lindner (2000, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2012a), Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen (1996), and Thomas Scheff and Suzanne Retzinger (1991).

  Considering feelings of humiliation may shed more light on violence or terrorism than other explanations. Conditions such as inequality, or conflict of interest, or poverty are not automatically perceived as negative. As long as all players accept justifications (poverty as “divine order,” for example, or as karma), there might be pain, but no shared awareness of a problem that needs fixing, no conflict, and no violent reactions. And conflict, even if it becomes open, is not automatically destructive either; it can be solved mutually and creatively. It is when feelings of humiliation emerge that rifts are created and trust destroyed. If feelings of humiliation are not overcome constructively, cooperation fails. In the worst-case scenario, violence ensues.

  Research on mirror neurons indicates that witnessing others’ feelings makes us experience these feelings ourselves. We feel humiliated when we see media coverage of other people we identify with experiencing humiliation, even if they live far away and our life circumstances are radically different. “Everyone knows how the Muslim country bows down to pressure from the west. Everyone knows the kind of humiliation we are faced with around the globe,” said Faisal Shahzad, who planted the Times Square bomb (Elliott, Tavernise, and Barnard, 2010). Mirror neurons are perhaps the most potent “globalizing agent” of our emotions, for better and worse. They can make us help earthquake victims in Haiti, or become “warriors of terror,” wherever we are on this planet.

  At the current historic juncture, two new forces—globalization in concert with the rise of the human rights ideals—increase the significance of feelings of humiliation (Lindner, 2006). “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” means that all human beings are part of one family and equal in dignity. When the underprivileged of this world, and those who identify with them, see how the gap between the poor and the rich grows wider, when they suspect the rich and powerful of peddling empty hu
man rights rhetoric only to maintain and even increase their dominant position, then life at the bottom turns from karma into humiliation and the powerful become humiliators. There is nothing as humiliating as empty promises of equal dignity.

  Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist, states (2003), “If I’ve learned one thing covering world affairs, it’s this: The single most underappreciated force in international relations is humiliation.”

  Based on many years of research on humiliation, I suggest that the desire for recognition unites the human family and thereby provides us with a platform for cooperation. Ethnic, religious, or cultural differences or conflicts of interests can lead to creative cooperation and problem solving, and diversity can be a source of mutual enrichment, but only within relationships characterized by respect. When respect and recognition fail, those who feel victimized are prone to highlight differences to ‘justify’ rifts caused by humiliation. ‘Clashes of civilizations are not the problem, but clashes of humiliation are’” (Lindner, 2006, p. 172).

  What happens when feelings of humiliation emerge? Blema Steinberg (1996) posits that feelings of humiliation may trigger narcissistic rage and acts of aggression meant to lessen pain and increase self-worth. Steinberg analyzes political crises and cautions that international leaders who have been publicly humiliated may instigate mass destruction and war. Roy Baumeister (1996) suggests that perpetrators of violent crime combine high self-esteem, albeit brittle, with poor self-regulation, particularly when it is challenged. Walter Mischel, Aaron DeSmet, and Ethan Kross (2006) explain that rejection-sensitive men may even get hooked on situations of debasement in which they can feel humiliated.