Chapter 13 Conflict and Peacemaking

Conflict and Peacemaking

Chapter 13

Conflict and Peace

• Peace
• a condition marked by low hostility and aggression and mutually beneficial relationships.

• Conflict
• a perceived incompatibility of actions or goals.

Social Dilemmas

• Many problems that threaten our future (nuclear arms, climate change, overfishing, etc.) arise as various parties pursue their self-interests.
• How can we reconcile individual self-interest with communal well-being?
• Social trap
• a situation in which conflicting parties, each rationally pursuing its self-interest, become caught in mutually destructive behavior.
• Individually rewarding choices become collectively punishing.
• What are some choice people make?

Examples: the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons.

The Tragedy of the Commons

The Prisoner's Dilemma

The Classic Prisoner’s Dilemma

In each box, the number above the diagonal is prisoner A’s outcome. Thus, if both prisoners confess, both get five years. If neither confesses, each gets a year. If one confesses, that prisoner is set free in exchange for evidence used to convict the other of a crime bringing a 10-year sentence. If you were one of the prisoners, unable to communicate with your fellow prisoner, would you confess?

Social Dilemmas

• Both games—the Prisoner’s Dilemma and The Tragedy of the Commons—have features in common.
• Fundamental attribution error—both tempt people to explain their behavior situationally but their partner’s behavior dispositionally.

• Non-zero-sum games
• in which outcomes need not sum to zero.
• With cooperation, both can win; with competition, both can lose—also called mixed-motive situations.
• Ways to encourage mutual betterment:
• Regulation—safeguarding the common good.
• Making the group small so that each person feels more responsible and effective and identifies more with the group’s success.
• Communicating effectively.
• Change the payoffs (commuter lanes and electric car incentives).
• Appealing to altruistic norms (having an altruistic leader make an appeal).

Competition

• Hostilities often arise when groups compete for scarce jobs, housing, or resources.
• Perceived threats feed prejudice and conflict; and prejudice also amplifies the perception of a threat.
• Example: Sherif’s experiments with the Rattlers and Eagles boys’ groups.
• Win-lose competition produced intense conflict, negative images of the outgroup, and strong ingroup cohesiveness and pride.

Article: The troubling legacy of the Robbers Cave experiment.

There were no cultural, physical, or economic differences between the groups.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/apr/16/a-real-life-lord-of-the-flies-the-troubling-legacy-of-the-robbers-cave-experiment

Perceived Injustice

• People perceive justice as equity—the distribution of rewards in proportion to individuals’ contributions.
• If you contribute more and benefit less, you feel exploited.
• Some noncapitalist cultures define justice not as equity but as equality - everyone getting the same share or everyone getting the share they need.
• In Western capitalist countries, people follow the "equity" principle.
• Regardless, those with social power convince themselves and others that they deserve what they are getting.
• The "golden rule": whoever has the gold makes the rules.

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Misperception

• Conflict is a perceived incompatibility of actions and goals—so a big problem is misperceptions of others’ motives and goals.
• Seeds of misperception:

• Self-serving bias (taking credit for good deeds, but no responsibility for bad ones).
• Tendency to self-justify (I barely hit him!).
• Fundamental attribution error (The other side has evil dispositions).
• Preconceptions (We filter info to fit our perceptions).
• Groups polarize self-serving, self-justifying, and biasing tendencies.
• Groupthink (failing to act to keep the harmony of the group).
• Ingroup bias (favoring your own group...often to a fault).
• Persistent negative stereotypes of the outgroup.

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People in conflict form distorted images of one another.

• Social psychologists Ervin Staub and Daniel Bar-Tal argue a group in intractable conflict will have these qualities:
• Sees its own goals as supremely important.
• Takes pride in “us” and devalues “them.”
• Believes itself victimized.
• Elevates patriotism, solidarity, a loyalty to their group’s needs.
• Celebrates self-sacrifice.
• Suppresses criticism.

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Misperceptions of Those in Conflict are Mutual

• Mirror-image perceptions
• Parties in conflict often hold reciprocal views of each other.
• For example, each may view itself as moral and peace-loving and the other as evil and aggressive.
• Negative mirror-image perceptions have been an obstacle to peace in many places.
• Examples: Middle East perceptions; differing definitions of terrorism; the myside bias; political polarization in the U.S.

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Misperception

• Group conflicts are often fueled by an illusion that the enemy’s top leaders are evil, but their people are pro- "us".
• Evil leader-good people
• When tension rises, rational thinking becomes more difficult, and views of the enemy become more simplistic and stereotyped.

• Critical thinking is impeded.
• Misperceptions shift, appearing and disappearing as conflicts wax and wane.
• The same processes that create the enemy’s image can reverse it when the enemy becomes an ally.
• 10 wars from the past century were analyzed by Kurt Lewin and Ronald Lippit (2004) and each was marked by at least one of these three misperceptions:
• underestimating the strength of the enemy
• rationalizing one's motives and behavior
• demonizing the ememy

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How Can Peace Be Achieved?

• Sometimes hostilities transform into friendships. How?
• Social psychologists focus on four peacemaking strategies, easily remembered as the four Cs:

• Contact.
• Cooperation.
• Communication.
• Conciliation.

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Contact

• Proximity boosts liking, and attitudes follow behavior.
• In general, contact predicts tolerance.

• Increased contact, even indirect (such as via social media sites), leads to decreased prejudice.
• Especially true in individualistic cultures
• Sometimes desegregation improves racial attitudes, and sometimes it does not.
• When it might not: self-segregation.
• Or forced interactions.
• When students of a different race are paired as roommates or partners, they are less likely to engage in self-disclosure than those in same-race relationships.
• Pluralistic ignorance
• Wanting to "mix" with those from another group but misperceiving that the other group does not reciprocate these feelings.

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Desegregation Doesn't Mean Contact

After this Scottburgh, South Africa, beach became “open” and desegregated in the new South Africa, Blacks (represented by red dots), whites (blue dots), and Indians (yellow dots) tended to cluster with their own race.

Source: From Dixon & Durrheim (2003).

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Interracial Contact

• Interracial contact produces numerous benefits, especially with the formation of friendships.
• Reducing anxiety: more contact brings greater comfort
• Increasing empathy: contact helps people put themselves in others' shoes
• Humanizing others: enabling people to discover their similarities
• Decreasing perceived threats: alleviating overblown fears and increasing trust
• Group salience (visibility)
• If you are Black and have a White friend and don't think of them as White, your attitude toward White people probably won't be impacted.
• So, it's essential to recognize your friend's membership in that group.
• Don't say, "I don't see color".

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Contact

• Positive contact boosts liking. However, negative contact increases disliking. And negative contact has more impact even though we mostly have positive interactions.
• It’s important that the contact be equal-status contact—that is, contact on an equal basis.

• Just as a relationship between people of unequal status breeds attitudes consistent with their relationship, so do relationships between those of equal status.
• To reduce prejudice, interracial contact should ideally be between persons equal in status.

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Cooperation

• In conflicts at all levels, shared threats and common goals breed unity.

• Having a common enemy can unify groups.
• Superordinate goals foster cooperation.
• Subordinate goal
• a shared goal that necessitates a cooperative effort, a goal that overrides people's differences from one another (Sherif's creating a problem with the water supply).
• Cooperative learning improves racial attitudes.
• Survey data from 2,400 students in 71 US high schools showed that students of different races who played and worked together were likelier to report having friends of another race.
• 3,200 middle-school students who were in schools that had interracial "learning teams" vs. those who promoted competition had more positive racial attitudes

"I couldn't help but say to [Mr. Gorbachev], just think how easy his task and mine might be in these meetings that we held if suddenly there was a threat to this world from some other species from another planet. [We'd] find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this earth together" - Ronald Reagan 1985 speech

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External Threats Breed Internal Unity

As President George W. Bush’s approval ratings illustrate, national conflicts mold public attitudes.

Source: Gallup, 2006.

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Cooperation: Group and Subordinate Identities

• In everyday life, we often recognize our subgroup identity and then transcend it.
• Ethnic heritage; and larger communal or national identity.
• In ethnically diverse cultures, people balance their ethnic and national identities and may have a bicultural or omnicultural identity.
• Debate continues over the ideals of multiculturalism versus assimilation.
• Celebrating diversity versus meshing one’s values and habits with the prevailing culture.

• Question: Does multiculturalism ensure that all citizens get to keep their identities, or does it enhance hostility between groups?

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Communication

• Bargaining
• seeking an agreement to a conflict through direct negotiation between parties.
• Tough bargaining may lower the other party’s expectations, making them willing to settle for less, but it can sometimes backfire.
• Mediation
• an attempt by a neutral third party to resolve a conflict by facilitating communication and offering suggestions.

• Integrative agreements
• Mediators try to establish win-win agreements that reconcile both parties’ interests to their mutual benefit.
• Communication often helps reduce self-fulfilling misperceptions.
• Ex: the sisters and the orange.

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How Couples Can Argue Constructively

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Communication

• Key factor in successful communication is trust.
• Even simple behaviors can enhance trust.
• Mediation comes into play when the two parties mistrust each other and communicate reproductively.
• Arbitration: resolution of a conflict by a neutral third party who studies both sides and imposes a settlement.
• Used when mediation does not help resolve the conflict.
• If people know they will face an arbitrated settlement if mediation fails, they often try harder to resolve the problem and are more likely to reach agreement.

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Conciliation

• People who are 100% cooperative are often exploited
• GRIT
• acronym for “graduated and reciprocated initiatives in tension reduction”—a strategy designed to de-escalate international tensions.

• One side initiates a few de-escalatory actions after announcing a conciliatory intent, and then the initiator carries out, exactly as announced verifiable conciliatory acts.
• This intensifies the pressure to reciprocate
• The remaining aspects of the plan protect each side’s self-interest by maintaining retaliatory capability.
• The initial conciliatory steps involve small risks, but do not jeopardize each side's security. So, the steps are calculated to being edging both sides down the tension ladder.

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Concluding Thoughts: The Conflict Between Individual and Communal Rights

• Some social scientists have advocated a communitarian approach to balancing individual rights with the collective right to communal well-being.
• Propose a middle ground between individualism and collectivism.

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