The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed)

by Peter T Coleman

  A search model (Simon, 1957) guides the discussion and discovery process. Sometimes a distinction is made between low- and high-priority interests, with the higher getting the weight of the attention in the search (Pruitt, 1981). The important dimension that distinguishes bridging is the focus on the underlying interests, reasons, concerns, or values that generate demands and positions. If those can be met, the demands and positions are satisfied.

  There are several types of bridging formulas, including alternation (Pruitt, 1981). In alternation, the parties take turns, which is especially useful when there is a time constraint. (With only one week of vacation, two people cannot do what they both want—go to the beach as well as go to the mountains—so this year they go to the beach and next year they will go to the mountains.) Another bridging formula is the contingent agreement, which entails building unknown futures into the agreement, which is especially useful if the parties differ in their expectations about the future. For example, one person thinks that the weather is going to be great at the beach, but the other thinks it will be horrible; so they build weather in as a contingency: if the weather is good, they go to the beach, but if the weather is bad, they head for the mountains.

  Lax and Sebenius (2002) give several interesting examples of contingent agreements including the earnout, in which a buyer and seller of a company structure the agreement to reflect their different appraisals of future earnings or risk. The more optimistic party gets a future payment contingent on the future income; the less optimistic party is happy with the arrangement because he thinks that the future income will not be so much. “Without the earnout, an otherwise mutually beneficial deal may well languish” (p. 17).

  Type 6: Cut the Costs.

  If one party is resistant to agreement because what the other proposes has costs and these costs can be identified and reduced, then agreement is likely. The agreement is integrative not due to a change in position or trade-off on issues, but because one party does not suffer so much. Cost cutting is a form of compensation, but it is specific in the sense that the compensation addresses the exact value that formed the basis of resistance. An example was provided by a student:

  I had the habit of staying up really late at night to finish assignments for class, and eventually finish my work at around 3 a.m.; but my roommate would go to sleep much earlier than that. I tried very hard to keep the light from my desk shining near my roommate’s bed, but unfortunately she had difficulty sleeping at night and she asked me not to stay up so late. I felt bad for keeping her awake. . . . I went out and bought her an eye mask so that the light wouldn’t disturb her as she tried to sleep. She thanked me, used the mask, and was able to sleep through the night while I was still able to continue burning the proverbial midnight oil!

  In their discussion of “dealcrafting,” Lax and Sebenius (2002) give an interesting example of joint cost cutting: two manufacturing companies in a joint venture deal pooled their resources so that each had lower costs. As a result, they made a greater profit—individually and together—than they would without such a deal. In Pruitt’s words, joint cost cutting is “reducing the cost to both parties of baking a pie of fixed size.” Sometimes the costs are cut by the parties themselves, and sometimes by third parties. Sometimes the costs are associated with precedents and future implications, in which case those precedents can be decoupled (Pruitt, 1981).

  Type 7: Compensation (Nonspecific).

  With nonspecific compensation, one side goes along with what the other wants and does so because it receives something of value. What it receives is outside the issues and thus nonspecific to the matter at hand. For example, the sister who wants to wear the other’s shirt offers to do all the other’s house chores for a day, and the shirt-wealthy sister agrees; she finds that the compensation overcomes her resistance to loaning out her shirt. Often what one party receives is itself subject to negotiation about what is appropriate compensation. Foa (1971) developed a theory of resources about how suitable one resource is for exchange with another (e.g., money, love); the theory posits that resources that are closer to one another conceptually (e.g., how tangible they are, such as money and goods versus money and love) are more likely to be exchanged. In any compensation scheme, it is very useful to know what the other values, as well as a way to calibrate appropriate amounts of compensation.

  Logrolling can be seen as a form of nonspecific compensation, where one side’s concession on its low-priority issue is compensation for the other side’s concession on the other’s low-priority issue; in this case, the parties stay within the set of issues rather than reach out for new issues or dimensions of value.

  Type 8: Superordination.

  Sometimes agreement is reached when the differences in interest that gave rise to the conflict are superseded or replaced by other interests. The use of compensation, as described, is a form of this but usually applied to just one party to a conflict; the compensated party gives up its resistance because the interest served by the compensation replaces the initial interest that drove its resistance to the other’s demand.

  In superordination, both parties drop their initial interests and positions in light of changed circumstances or goals, a revised view of the conflict, or an enticing new opportunity. Consider two children quarreling over a TV show to watch, but then they hear the ice cream truck go by, and both have a new interest in ice cream that replaces their interest in the TV, and the quarrel about the TV ends. Sometimes a third party affects the change in interest, as when a parent offers the quarreling children a trip to McDonald’s. Or the couple trying to decide on the location of a vacation—mountain or beach—decides instead not to take a vacation but instead use the week for buying new furniture and redecorating their house. In these cases, new matters arise that replace or supersede the interests that gave rise to the initial differences. Sometimes the added costs in a “hurting stalemate” redirect the parties’ interests away from that which drove their initial positions (Zartman, 2001).

  Agreement by superordination has a parallel in the effect discovered by Sherif and Sherif (1969) in their famous field studies of intergroup conflict. Using a summer camp for boys, they created the conditions for groups to compete with one another and saw the competition escalate to overt hostility. They discovered that the escalation reversed when the children had a superordinate goal, that is, they had a common objective that required them to work together cooperatively. One such goal was created when a camp water tower ostensibly collapsed, and the groups of boys, who were thirsty, needed to work together to get it fixed. As a result, the conflict between the groups lessened and the relationships between boys across the groups improved. Considerable evidence points to the multiple effects of superordinate goals; for example, they can help bonds form between people across groups. But an important effect is that the superordinate interests overshadow or supplant the initial interests that led the groups to fight in the first place.

  Perhaps the most powerful form of superordinate interest is working together to fend off a common enemy. Third parties often know this and use it in the effort to foster cooperation, as Henry Kissinger mentioned to Israeli and Egyptian leaders that a real threat in the Middle East was intervention by the Soviet Union (Rubin, 1981). Another form of superordination is the common enticing opportunity: the possibility of a higher standard of living, better hospitals, cleaner water, access to international capital for better roads, and so on might supplant some of the concerns that gave rise to the initial differences in a conflict. The new matters become so important that they eclipse the original matters, and the result is cooperation and agreement because people make gains on other, important dimensions of value.

  CREATIVE PRODUCTS FROM CREATIVE PERSONS IN A CREATIVE PROCESS

  Much of the behavioral research in social conflict and negotiation is about delineating the relationship between characteristics of the people involved, the processes that occur, and the outcome (the products) (compare Simonton, 2003, 2004). Soc
ial psychologists who study negotiation and social conflict tend to emphasize how people interact in and are affected by context and environmental constraints, for example, negotiating as a group or alone or negotiating under high time pressure. Much of this work is designed to understand the conditions or circumstances that either move people from the pursuit of destructive aims in conflict, from contentious, win-lose pursuit of asymmetric outcomes, to problem-solving processes and balanced agreement, or move people from pursuit of simple compromise agreements to the more creative, integrative forms of agreement. But there is a third set of questions, not at all well addressed in the empirical literature, and this is about the conditions or circumstances that move people to pursue one form of integrative agreement over another. This is a matter of predicting the type of integrative agreement that will emerge, given that one will emerge in the first place.

  Flexible Thinking and Idea Generation

  One set of processes that is likely to encourage the more information-rich, complex forms of integrative agreement is related to the notion of flexible thinking. Lewin (1951) wrote that conflict can produce a “freezing” of cognition, and subsequent evidence supports this. For example, Carnevale and Probst (1998) had people expect to enter a cooperative or contentious negotiation; just before doing this, they evaluated material that assessed cognitive organization, for example, a “functional fixedness” task and a task that had them rate category exemplars. The fixedness task required, for a creative solution, that people separate two concepts normally fixed, for example, the concept “box of tacks” is separated so that the box can be used as a platform to hold a candle, which solves the task. People who expected contentious conflict were less likely to “unfix” the concepts and less likely to see creative solutions. In the category exemplars task, people rated the goodness of items such as “camel” as examples of the category “vehicle.” People who expected contentiousness rather than cooperative negotiation were less likely to see a camel as an example of the vehicle category. Both effects suggest that expected contentiousness can produce a narrowing of vision and a general change in cognition that extends beyond that associated with the particular items.

  Of course, conflict can, under other conditions, enhance creativity (compare Beersma and de Dreu, 2005; de Dreu and Nijstad, 2008), and this suggests that the trick is to manage the process so that positive effects emerge. One way of generating creative alternatives in conflict might stem from brainstorming (Osborn, 1957), particularly if a third-party mediator assists. A mediator may be able to foster conditions in which people feel comfortable listening to one another and do this in an “active” way (see chapter 34; Pruitt and Carnevale, 1993). Sometimes a third party can help uncover information, especially in private meetings with one side, the caucus. The caucus is an effective third-party vehicle for uncovering the parties’ concerns, and there is evidence that problem-solving discussions start in the caucus and then migrate to joint sessions (Welton, Pruitt, and McGillicuddy, 1988). Caucuses may help attenuate biases and assumptions, for example, the assumption that interests are completely opposed, an assumption that so many studies have shown can interfere with the development of integrative agreements (Pruitt and Lewis, 1975).

  The Mix

  Another set of processes likely to encourage the more information-rich forms of integrative agreement is the mixture of people and strategies on each side of the negotiation table. A good deal of work now points to the notion that mixtures of strategies and mixtures of types of people can be especially effective in negotiation. For example, groups tend to be more contentious in negotiation, more likely to hold onto aspirations, and yet be better at problem solving (Morgan and Tindale, 2002). Moreover, a mixture of hawks and doves on one side is more likely to produce an integrative agreement in between-group negotiation (Jacobson, 1981). A similar effect is seen in the good-cop/bad-cop strategy (Hilty and Carnevale, 1993): the tougher partner (the “bad cop” or the “hawk”) conveys an image of firmness that cannot be exploited, whereas the more cooperative partner (the “good cop” or the “dove”) conveys an impression that cooperation will succeed, that agreement can be reached. The mix is more effective than either is alone.

  But the mix is not always sanguine: sometimes dissension on a negotiation team is an impediment to effective between-group negotiation. Consider the comment made by former Middle East envoy Dennis Ross on Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat at Camp David in July 2000: “What’s more, in the completely closed environment of Camp David, he did nothing to control the fratricidal competition in his delegation, effectively giving license to those who were attacking other members who were trying to find ways to bridge the differences” (Ross, 2001). It seems reasonable to suppose that people who try to bridge differences between groups will need leadership support and should as well be protected from the spoilers who have a less cooperative agenda. Carnevale (2005) argued that mediators should work to foster within-group cooperation, solving problems within each side, in the effort to facilitate between-group negotiation.

  An interesting perspective on the mixture of group process is found in Cronin, Argote, and Kotovsky’s (2002) analysis of partitioning cognition in group problem solving. These authors found that groups were better—had more insight and better insight—when they divided roles among the group members so that one person in the group focused on the design of a problem solution and the others in the group focused on implementing the design. Such partitioning has quite a history in the study of group creativity (March, 1991). Cronin et al., as well as others in the group creativity area, suggest that the literature in negotiation and social conflict and in group creativity have considerable points of contact and considerable potential for integration.

  Locations for Creativity

  Coleman and Deutsch (see chapter 20 in this Handbook) note that time and space are essential elements of creative problem solving, that people need sufficient time to open up and be creative, as well as a physical space: “A new environment (particularly a confidential one) can allow disputants some degree of freedom to try out new perspectives, behaviors, or ways of working with a problem.” The right environment can provide the opportunity for incubation and play. Creativity scholars suggest that incubation is especially helpful for insight problems such as integrative agreements (Simonton, 2003). It may be helpful for negotiators to take a break and let ideas incubate. If “play becomes the midwife of creative change,” then the problem becomes how to implement play in the heat of conflict. Again, one mechanism for this is the use of the caucus, with a third party holding a private meeting with one side of the dispute.

  Seeing the Other’s Point of View

  The ability to take the point of view of the other is an important element of the collaborative, creative enterprise, and this is seen clearly in the clever experiments developed by Gruber (1990; chapter 19 in this Handbook). Sometimes, however, the point of view of the other is a detriment: in some cases, too much information about the other can interfere with agreement, particularly when that information underscores large value differences (Rubin, 1980).

  Cooperative and Creative

  There is evidence that some people are more likely to be creative in conflict than others. Pruitt and Lewis (1975, experiment 2) found that asking and giving truthful information about the issues were positively related to integrativeness of the agreements but only for negotiators who were high in cognitive complexity (which reflects an individual’s consideration of alternative conceptions of situations and better use of information for decisions). It was interesting that the overall levels of information exchange did not differ between high- and low-complexity negotiators, suggesting that the high-complexity negotiators had a lower threshold for information, that is, they were able to understand more with less. de Dreu and Carnevale (2003) argue that persons who have epistemic motives—a desire to better understand the world—will be especially adept at avoiding biases and being creative in negotiation.

  CONCLUSIO
N

  Carnevale and Wall (2009) collected data relevant to the Agreement Circumplex. They asked, first, if it is possible to reliably categorize agreements, using the taxonomy, from very brief descriptions of disputes and outcomes provided by mediators. They had a sample of about six hundred agreement descriptions, written by mediators in community disputes from eleven countries (the United States, Turkey, Taiwan, India, Malaysia, China, Philippines, Thailand, Japan, Korea, and Israel). An example dispute from India was: “A conflict between two families over arranged marriage of their children. The future husband fled the village because he didn’t want to marry the destined woman. The wife’s family had made wedding arrangements and asked to discuss this matter with the groom’s family. Outcome: The wife was found a different groom from the village and the wedding took place.” Carnevale and Wall asked coders to evaluate the agreements and then assign them to one of the circumplex eight types of agreement. They asked, in the analysis of the coding (which, by the way, was done reliably), if some types of agreement were more common than others. And they asked as well if there was country sample (possibly cultural) variation in types of agreement. The answer in each case was yes. One interesting note from this study was that only about 7 percent of the agreements codes were of the logrolling type, when virtually all of the social psychological inspired work on integrative agreements derives from studies of logrolling tasks.