The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed)

by Peter T Coleman

  Finally, automatic ethnocentricity—sometimes called mirror imaging—is a tendency to use our own groups’ ideas and values as a reference point, as in the expression “common sense.” While not associated with ethnicity per se, discourses of Republicans and Democrats in the United States are replete with examples of automatic culture-centricity whose application perpetuates the dialogue of the deaf that too often characterizes communication between them. Debates over gun control, abortion, capital punishment, and other controversial issues are difficult not only because they are complex public policy issues. They are also challenging because they become proxies for symbolic worldview clashes over freedom, power, agency, right relations between women and men and between people and government, and other deeply rooted ideas (Pearce and Littlejohn, 1997). The antidote to this tendency is genuine curiosity and engagement, along with a willingness to suspend confidence about givens. This is the opposite of what actually happens not only in too many parliaments and legislatures around the world, but in communities, organizations, and families.

  Avoiding these traps is essential to cultivate comfort with ambiguity. There will always be opacity across cultures; this is part of relating across difference. Not knowing is a necessary part of the process, and reducing anxiety associated with this not knowing can enhance functionality. Another good strategy is to internalize continua that can inform educated guesses as to what might be happening in any given interaction. One such continuum relates to how time is viewed (synchronous or sequential) and whether past, present, or future orientations are accented. Examining it in detail illustrates how tools like this can increase cultural fluency in conflict theorizing, practice, and pedagogy.

  Intercultural theorists have identified two orientations to time: monochronic and polychronic. Monochronic approaches to time are linear and sequential, and involve focusing on one thing at a time. These approaches are most common in the Western European–influenced cultures including the United States, though there are significant regional and contextual differences. Polychronic orientations to time involve simultaneous occurrences of many things and the involvement of many people. The time it takes to complete an interaction is elastic and more important than any schedule. This orientation is most common in Mediterranean and Latin cultures, as well as some Eastern and African cultures. Negotiators from polychronic cultures tend to

  Start and end meetings at flexible times

  Take breaks when it seems appropriate

  Be comfortable with a high flow of information

  Expect to read each other’s thoughts and minds

  Sometimes overlap talk

  View start times as flexible and not take lateness personally

  Negotiators from monochronic cultures tend to

  Prefer prompt beginnings and endings

  Schedule breaks

  Deal with one agenda item at a time

  Rely on specific, detailed, and explicit communication

  Prefer to talk in sequence

  View lateness as devaluing or evidence of lack of respect

  Another dimension of time relevant to negotiations is the focus on past, present, or future. National cultures, including those of Iran, India, and East Asia, lean to accenting the past, while the United States tends to be oriented to the present and the near future. Latin American peoples have both present and past orientations, while indigenous peoples in the Americas often use a past and future-oriented approach to time, stretching seven generations forward and back. Parties or third parties focused on the present should be mindful that others may see the past or the distant future as part of the present. Those for whom time stretches into the past or the future may need to remember that a present orientation can bring about needed change.

  Of course, no one group fits neatly on a continuum; we all have some capacity to move around. A traumatic event may catapult an entire group into a focus on the past once the immediate crisis is over; a society experiencing rapid economic growth may spend a lot of time contemplating the future that is fast approaching. Differences abound within groups not only in relation to generation, but also in relation to many other aspects of identity. At the same time, conflict is likely to escalate when those involved do not realize, or discount, the extent to which different relationships to time are confounding their communication.

  The importance of these differences in relation to time came home to me when I offered negotiation training in relation to land claims to representatives of two levels of government and First Nations people in British Columbia. During introductions, the First Nations people welcomed everyone to their traditional territory with a prayer in their language, then began a narrative account of their history with the preface: “Seven generations ago . . .” When the government representatives were asked to make introductory remarks, they projected PowerPoint slides of the steps for ratification and adoption of an eventual agreement. The vastly different starting points in relation to time also played out in the way the three groups wanted to structure meetings, their attitudes to punctuality, ideas of what constituted effectiveness, and their attributions about each other. Though the time-related differences were not a surprise to anyone, they still functioned to make communication and progress more difficult.

  It is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore other cultural continua identified by interculturalists. Interested readers are directed to the online web resource Beyond Intractability (http://www.beyondintractability.org/), especially the essay on cross-cultural communication (LeBaron, 2003). Other continua address a wide range of starting points, including these:

  Spatial orientation—how close it is comfortable to stand, how furniture should be arranged, who should be seated where

  Affiliation and agency—individual autonomy versus group decision making

  Communication content and approach—directness and indirectness and the related ideas of high and low context, the degree to which things are named explicitly (low context) or to which the context is used to communicate what is not said (high context)

  Axiology and epistemology—including whether the universal or the particular is emphasized, as in the difference between mass production and one-of-a-kind creation; also, whether there is a reliance on specificity and diffuseness as in the difference between decision making based on empirical data or intuition

  Permissibility and kind of touch—greeting and parting rituals and the range of acceptable behavior across genders and generations and within and between groups

  Meanings associated with nonverbal communication—including eye contact, specific gestures, and particular facial expressions, as well as comfort or discomfort with silence

  Attitudes toward fate and personal responsibility—whether personal accountability is expected or people anticipate that many things are outside their control

  Face and face-saving—important in virtually every culture but manifested differently across and within world regions

  Power distance—the degree to which people are comfortable with vertical hierarchies

  Uncertainty avoidance—the degree to which people avoid risk and associated uncertainty

  For more about these concepts, readers are directed to Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars (2000) and Edward T. Hall (1990) and the scholars cited in these books, which are gold mines for culturally fluent practitioners. They deepen self-understanding, increase awareness of the cultural assumptions embedded in theory and practice approaches, and scaffold mental maps that can significantly improve practitioner guesses about what might be going on when cultural misunderstanding occurs.

  Other helpful tools in cultivating cultural fluency are poetry, metaphors, rituals, and narratives. These tools are windows into cultural influences on the conscious and even unconscious motivations and actions of individuals and groups. They have shaped and thus reflect ingrained and emerging behavioral patterns and collective identities across generations. We come back to these toward the end of the chapter in the discussion of pe
dagogical approaches. For now, we consider how new work in neuroscience may contribute to culturally fluent conflict work.

  NEUROSCIENCE AS CONFLICT RESOLUTION RESOURCE

  Neuroscience is a new frontier, daily generating insights that relate to conflict resolution. Although many conflict resolution scholars are investigating this nexus, few have considered how neuroscience relates to cultural fluency. In this section, I summarize recent advances and pose questions about their implications for culturally fluent processes and pedagogy. Neuroscientists’ conflict-relevant work spans a wide range, including the physiology of emotion, communication, receptivity, attunement, empathy, and creative thinking. This fast-changing corpus has already yielded important insights into the intertwined and complex relationship between cognitive and embodied states, as well as how change happens in attitudes and behavior. Cultural patterns and habits, too, interact with nervous system physiology in ways not yet fully understood.

  One important finding related to culture is that the brain is more malleable than originally thought; it is more like plastic than like iron, hence the term neuroplasticity. The ubiquitous machine-brain metaphor is thus being replaced with the understanding that the brain is actually more like muscle tissue, as it literally rewires itself in relation to external stimuli. Because brains can rewire quickly, the theories of change that animate conflict work come into question. Given that individual or collective shifts need not be painstaking and drawn out, conflict resolution processes of relatively short duration, designed with brain functioning in mind, may be powerful catalysts for change (Pascual-Leone et al., 1995; Doidge, 2007).

  Also of interest from a cultural perspective, neuroplasticity reveals that neurons that fire together are wired together and those that fire apart remain wired apart. Repeated instances of associated neurons firing in particular patterns create pathways in the brain that become neural superhighways, relegating the untraveled back roads of unfamiliar pairings to increasingly less accessibility and use. In the pressure and anxiety of conflict, we may fall back on familiar thought patterns, chains of reason, and group-approved behaviors and have greater difficulty perceiving alternatives—what Tidwell calls “trained incapacity.” He cautions that “through [our] own training [and experience, we may] become blind to alternatives . . . [and] become so habituated to one set of behaviors that no others seem possible” (1994, p. 4). We literally get locked in to habitual perceptions, communication patterns, and behaviors despite their limitations and their associations with impasse. Add cultural patterning and group pressure to conform to the mix, and the challenge of accessing neuroplasticity is even greater.

  While much neuroscientific work pertains to individual brains, provocative questions arise about the effects of rapid brain rewiring on collective thinking and consciousness. Research in this area has the potential to reshape conflict intervention as it reveals ways that cultural patterns and collective attitudes can shift in the midst of intense conflict, catalyzing relational change among former enemies, even in the face of cultural pressure to distance from “the other.” Are there ways to influence the malleable brain toward cooperation and peaceful coexistence? And can this be done on a collective scale? The very plasticity that enabled the formation of entrenched patterns offers the possibility for future change—and relatively rapid change at that (Wexler, 2008).

  Other recent work in neuroscience on subjects as diverse as embodiment, empathy, and bicameral brain functioning is also potentially fertile for work on cultural dynamics (Siegel, 2010; Beausoleil and LeBaron, 2013), as are discoveries about perception. Perception is always a factor in culture and conflict. Who we perceive ourselves—and others—to be relates to the very existence or absence of conflict. It is important to remember that perception is not a function of the present moment; memories stored and processed in the body also shape and limit perceptions and related responses. Even forgotten childhood or traumatic memories—individual and collective—are carried in the body, having bypassed the hippocampus, where memory consolidation occurs. These unconscious impressions influence how the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, which regulate emotions such as calmness, tension, openness, or fear, are activated. In this way, implicit memories stored in the body contribute to “enduring structural changes” in the limbic and autonomic nervous systems that affect perception, interpretation, and behavior (Schore, 2002, p. 9; Porges, 2009).

  When stress, threat, or shame is experienced, the autonomic nervous system unconsciously increases adrenaline and cortisol, which limits blood flow to the frontal lobes of the brain. This is why access to thinking functions or previous knowledge is limited in the midst of intense emotions and why it is more difficult to remain receptive to unfamiliar people or ideas or to enact novel responses to conflicts. The brain is, quite literally, short-circuited (Porges, 2004). When the body senses safety, the autonomic nervous system supports a state of “open receptiveness.” This state is essential to both learning and integrating new information, as well as preventing retraumatization when recalling past experiences (Siegel, 2010). It remains to be seen whether these phenomena also operate in groups. That is, does the short-circuiting of an individual’s brain make it more likely that others in the vicinity will follow suit? Do the physiological processes associated with stress and resistance to change operate collectively in ways that are shaped by, or even transmitted through, culture? Work on mirror neurons and transgenerational brain patterns suggests that individual states are indeed mirrored in others nearby and reproduced over time (Wexler, 2008). The neurobiology of culture is a frontier of much significance for culturally fluent conflict resolution scholars.

  Because receptivity is integral to transforming conflict, neuroscientific work is important and potentially game changing. It directs our attention not only to culture and its influences, but the way that cultural dynamics affect individual and collective attitudes, values, thoughts, and behaviors. As well, it draws essential attention to the phenomenology of physical experience as we realize that rigid patterning can be carried and transmitted intergenerationally. It also brings us to a focus on the neurobiological state we hold as third parties and individual parties. What if our analytic and communication techniques are less potent unless we find ways to shift into more receptive states before using them? Too often, we work with conflict parties when they are in states that block or severely truncate the possibility of change. If individual parties’ neural habits, reinforced and held in place by the forces of tradition and collective patterns, involve perceiving and responding to each another as a threat, further entrenchment and distance can be expected from engagement. To shift to openness to learning and change, it is vital to find ways to shift out of unhelpful neural feedback loops and into those associated with increased plasticity and change. An example comes from a problem-solving workshop held twenty years ago in Ireland.

  In 1993, a group of diplomats from many parts of the world gathered near Dublin to problem-solve about one of the most intractable conflicts of our time: Israel-Palestine. The challenge for the facilitators was to move them out of the well-worn superhighways of reflexive statements, repetitive framings, and limiting assumptions. For two days, the process followed a conventional problem-solving format, and little new was revealed.

  On the third day, a bus trip to Belfast gave participants opportunities to look down Falls Road, searching in a “pre-Good-Friday-agreement Northern Ireland” for ways to address intractable differences. Jostled in the bus, the previously restrained participants began to see each other as more multidimensional and complex. As they uncovered commonalities and shared passions, they began to relate more playfully. Dialogue with Northern Irish peacemakers and visits to bicommunal projects deepened camaraderie within the group. As the bus headed back to Dublin following a group meal, participants sang together under the comforting cover of darkness. Only after this excursion did conversations enliven, originality emerge, and imaginative possibilities for shifting intractable con
flict in Israel-Palestine begin to reveal themselves.

  Reflecting on this experience, facilitators wondered how conflict transformation processes could be intentionally structured (or unstructured) to invite physiological and psychological states and mutual openness conducive to creativity and innovation. Without the neuroscientific understandings described above, we speculated that people step out of habitual perceptions and limiting understandings to welcome nuance and texture when they step out of business as usual. Creative imaginations are more easily engaged in the midst of an open and relaxed state than in the midst of a focus on thought and analysis alone. Yet shifting workshop designs and getting buy-in from participants is difficult: in the already-tense terrain of conflict, people are understandably reluctant to step outside their comfort zones in ways that might seem risky or embarrassing.

  An obvious hidden-in-plain-sight truism occurred to us: everyone attending had real-life bodies with creative capabilities and a love of play and beauty. Why state these obvious facts? Because this workshop, like dozens of others, was designed as if everyone existed from the neck up; as if brilliant analysis would flow directly from careful selection among a range of cognitively generated alternatives; as if facilitators had only to nudge people to “think creatively, outside the box,” and new spirals of fecund possibility would unfurl themselves, unfettered by previous inhibitions, perceptual and cognitive habits, or norms of interaction. Neuroscientific work has confirmed the hunch that physical movement is a huge catalyst to attitude change in ways we are only beginning to realize (Ramsbotham, Woodhouse, and Miall, 2011).