Today I am reading Morton Deutsch’s The Resolution of Conflict: Constructive and Destructive Processes and will take some notes on its relationship to the Bridging Bot project.

There are a few sections that are particularly useful.

Introduction

An outline of variables affecting the course of conflict:

  1. The characteristics of the parties in conflict – their values and motivations, aspirations and objectives; their physical, intellectual and social resources for waging or resolving conflict; their beliefs about conflict etc.
  2. Their prior relationship to one another – their attitudes, beliefs and expectatins about one another, including each one’s belief about the oter’s view of him and the degree of polarization that has occurred on such evaluations as “good-bad”, “trustworthy-untrustworthy”.
  3. The nature of the issue giving rise to the conflict (its scope, rigidity, motivational significance, formulation, periodicity etc.)
  4. The social environment within which the conflict occurs (the facilitites and restraints, encouragements/discouragmenets in provides with regard to different strategies and tactics of waging or resolving conflict, including the nature of social norms)
  5. The interested audiences to the conflict. Many conflicts take place in a public spotlight, and the course of conflict may be greatly influenced by the participants’ conceptions of their audience and how it will react.
  6. The strategy and tactics employed by the parties in the conflict. Roughly – how do they attempt to convince one another / wage the conflict.
  7. The consequences of the conflict to each participant.

Benefits of Conflict

Deutsch, like Lederach, acknowledges that conflict has important positive functions, primarily as an agent of change and reconfiguration. For example it:

  • Stimulates interest and curiority
  • Is the medium through which problems can be aired and solutions arrived at and is at the root of personal and social change.

Additionally, conflict per se can be enjoyable if it stimulates the full use of ones capacities – e.g. as in intellecutal contests or athletic competitions. Conflict also plays a role in demarcating groupos from one another and therefore plays a role in group and individual identity formation. External conflict can foster internal cohesion.

Defining Terms

  • A conflict exists whenever incompatible activities occur.
  • Competition and conflict are not synonymous. Competition produces conflict, but not all instances of conflict reflect competition. Competition implies an opposition in the goals of the parties such that the probability of goal attainment for one decreases as the probability for the other increases. In other words, competition means that interests are “opposed” in some sense. However, conflict can occur even when there is no perceived or actual misalignment of goals. For example, could have conflict about the way to pursue a shared goal.
  • Importantly, conflict can occur in cooperative or competitive contexts.
  • Deutsch is concerned with situations where there is perceived conflict – i.e. conflict that exists in the minds of parties involved. It does not assume that these perceptions are always veridical or that “actual” incompatibilities are always perceived.
  • The presence or absence of conflict is “never rigidly determined by the objective state of affairs”, because there can always be misunderstanding or misinformation about that state of affairs. In other words, participants might view or understand the “objective” state of affairs different.The fate of the participants in a situation of conflict is not inevitably determined by the external circumstances in which they find themselves.

I take the centering of perceived conflict as useful and interesting for my purposes. Conflict exists when people think it exists.

Typology of Conflicts

Deutsch offers several ways of categorizing conflicts. The first and primary one is this five-category taxonomy.

  • Veridical conflict: This type of conflict exists objectively and is perceived accurately. It is not contingent upon some easily altered feature of the environment. E.g. real zero-sum situations where there is no alternative pathway.
  • Contingent conflict: The existence of the conflict is dependent upon readily rearranged circumstances, but this is not recognized by the conflicting parties. The contingent conflict would disappear if the available alternative resources for satisfying the “conflicting” needs were recognized. These are difficult to resolve only wnen perspectives are narrow and rigid for some reason.
  • Displaced conflict: Here parties are in conflict “about the wrong thing”. Manifest conflict that follows terrain of deeper unexplored “underlying” conflict.
  • Misattributed conflict: Conflict between the wrong parties and, consequently, the wrong issues. E.g. attributing issues to a competing group rather than the structural forces that put the groups in competition.
  • False conflict: This is the occurence of conflict when there is no objective basis for it. Such conflict always implies misperception or misunderstanding.

What are conflicts about?

Deutsch also offers a taxonomy of five common issues that conflicts often center around:

  1. Control over resources. Who gets space, money, property, power, prestige, food etc.
  2. Preferences and nuisances. E.g. conflicts over tastes/preferences, sensitivies, sensibilities.
  3. Values. What “should be” in the world, especially in systems of law, government etc. Conflict arises not from the disagreement in values but the question of which should dominate or be institutionalized etc.
  4. Beliefs. Conflicts over what “is”, over what is the fact of the matter. Not all discrepancies in belief lead to conflict; conflict can result if need to act jointly based on beliefs, or come to think that beliefs should dominate, or are so fundamental to view of reality that challenges need to be elimated.
  5. Nature of the relationship between parties. E.g. two people who both want to be “dominant”, or want different things from relationship.

I am wondering which of these are most common in online conversations on a platform like Reddit. Presumably conflicts over values and beliefs are most likely and common. Though versions of “control over resources” conflicts probably arise too; I guess that I am not entirely sure where the line is between a conflict about “values” and a conflict about “control over resources”. Presumably “control over resources” conflicts are often tied up with differing values.

Constructive vs. Destructive Conflict

Deutsch importantly and centrally distinguishes between the notions of destructive and constructive (or sometimes productive) conflict. Basically, these are defined in terms of how participants view and understand the consequences of the conflict:

  • A conflict has destructive consequences if its participants are dissatisfied with the outcomes and feel that they have lost as a result of the conflict.
  • A conflict has productive consequences if the participants all are satisfied with their outcomes and feel that they have gained as a result of the conflict.

The key question of Deutsch’s book is then: how do we prevent conflict from being destructive? The point is not how to eliminate or prevent conflict but rather how to make it productive. This is a point we emphasize in motivating Bridging Bot, and should be attributed to Deutsch.

Deutsch is primarily interested when conflict arises in situations where there is a mix of cooperative and competitive interests, where a variety of outcomes of gain & loss are possible.

So restate of key question: the question is about the conditions under which a cooperative or competitive relationship will evolve among participants who have a mixture of cooperative and competitive interests in regard to one another.

Characteristics of Cooperative and Competitive Processes

Deutsch gives a series of relevant characteristics of the distinctions between cooperative and competitive processes across a number of dimensions:

  1. Communication:
    • Cooperative: open and honest communication of relevant information; each is interested in informing and being informed by the other.
    • Competitive: Either lack of communication or misleading communication. Rise of espionage or other ways of getting information that the other is unwilling to communicate. Interest in providing discouraging or misleading information.
  2. Perception:
    • Cooperative: Increase sensitivity to similiarities and common interests while minimizing the salience of difference. Stimulates a convergence and conformity of beliefs and values.
    • Competitive: Increased sensitivity to differences and threats while minimizing the awareness of simnilarities. Stimulates sense of complete opposite: you are bad, I am good etc. Produces stronger bias toward misperceiving the other’s neutral or conciliatory actions as malevolently motivated.
  3. Attitudes towards one another:
    • Cooperative: trusting, friendly attitude, and an increased willingness to respond helpfully to other’s needs and requests.
    • Competitive: Suspicious, hostile attitude, and increased readiness to exploit the other’s needs and respond negatively to requests.
  4. Task orientation:
    • Cooperative: participants approach the mutually acknowledged problem in a way that utilizes their special talents and enables them to substitute for one another so that duplication of effort is reduced. Enhancement of mutual power and resources is objective; define conflicting interests as a mutual problem to be solved by collaborative effort. It facilitates the recognition of the legitimacy of each other’s interests and of the necessity of searching for a solution that is responsive to the needs of all. Attempts to limit rather than expand scope of conflict. Attempts to inflence the other are focused on persuasion.
    • Competitive: View only solutions as those that are imposed by one side or other. Enhancement of one’s own power and minimization of the legitimacy of the other is the primary interest. Expansion of the scope of the issues in conflict to focus on general principles rather than localized focus. Intensified emotional involvement and signficance. Defeat becomes less acceptable. Duplication of effort so that the competitors become mirror-images of one another. Coercive processes used to attempt influence.

Important claim revisited later: each process tends to be “self-confirming” so that the experience of cooperation will induce a benign spiral of increasing cooperation, while competition will induce a vicious spiral of intensifying competition. This is true, according to Deutsch, within some constraints.

Factors Influencing the Resolution of Conflict

I now jump forward to part 3 of the book which reiterates and expands some related taxonomic ideas and engages further with ideas of conflict resolution.

Destructive Conflict

Destructive conflict is characterized by a tendency to expand and escalate.

Such conflict often becomes independent of its initiating causes and is likely to continue.

Expansion occurs along the various dimensions of conflict:

  • The size and number of the immediate issues involved
  • The number of motives and participants implicated on each side of the issue
  • The size and number of principles and precedents that are perceived to be at stake
  • The costs that the participants are willing to bear in relation to the conflict
  • The number of norms of moral conduct from which behavior toward the other side is exempted
  • The intensity of negative attitudes towards the other side

It seems that in Bridging Bot case, these features of a conversational trend could be important and possible to watch out for; compeittive register is not (just) about the static features of a conversation at a particular moment, but also about the evolution of a conversation over time.

In addition to expansion of scope of conflict, competitive conflicts are also characterized by:

  • Increased reliance upon the strategy of power
  • Increased reliance on threat, coercion, and deception.
  • Decreased reliance on persuasion, from the tactics of conciliation, minmization of differences, and enhancement of mutual understanding and goodwill.
  • Increased pressure for uniformity within conflicting groups.

Why do conflicts escalate?

  • Competitive processes
  • Processes of misperception and biased perception
  • Processes of commitment arising out of pressures for cognitive and social consistency

What factors can limit or encapsulate conflict so that spiraling escalation is avoided?

  • Number and strength of existing cooperative bonds,
  • Cross-cutting identifications
  • Existence of values, institutions, procedures and groups that are organized to help limit and regulate conflict.
  • Salience and significance of the perceived costs of escalating conflict.

Productive / Constructive Conflict

Deutsch offers a hunch that “the major features of productive conflict resolution would be similar, at the social level, to the processes involved in creative thinking”.

Why? Key psychological processes in creative thinking:

  1. Arousal of an appropriate level of motivation to solve the problem.
  2. Development of the conditions that permit the reformulation of the problem once an impasse has been reached.
  3. The concurrent availability of diverse ideas that can be flexibly combined into novel and varied patterns.

These seem to roughly map on to possible features of constructive conflict.

For example, on (1) – a benefit of conflict in general, is that it creates the arousal of motivation to address a problem.

Conditions for (2) are varied, but Deutsch mentions limiting sense of “threat” and the need to provide the individual with an environment in which they do not feel threatened or under pressure – “relaxed but alert”.

Threat induces defensiveness and reduces tolerance to ambiguity and reduces openness to new and unfamiliar ideas.

On (3): ideas are important to creative resolution of conflict and so “any factors that braoden the range of ideas and alternatives cognitively available to the participants will be useful”. So this incldues things like:

  • Intelligence
  • Exposure to diverse experiences
  • An interest in ideas
  • Preference for the novel and complex
  • Receptivity for metaphors and analogies
  • Capacity to make remote associations
  • Independence of judgment These are all things that characterize creative problem solvers.

Social conditions that could matter: social atmosphere that values innovation or exploration of new ideas; availability of new ideas.

Why do cooperative processes give way to productive conflict resolution?

  1. Aids open and honest communication. Freedom to share information and ideas.
  2. Encourages the recognition of the legitimacy of the other’s interests. Tends to limit rather than expand the scope of conflicting interests and minimizes need for defensiveness.
  3. Leads to a trusting, friendly attitude which increases sensitivity to similarities and common interests, while minimizing the salience of differences. Stimulates a convergence of beliefs and values.

Returning to key question of what determines the direction that a conflict takes? Duetsch offers “Deutsch’s crude law of social relations”:

Deutsch’s Crude Law of Social Relations: the characteristic processes and effects elicited by a given type of social relationship (cooperative or competitive) tend also to elicit that same type of social relationship.

So basically, there is a feedback loop between behaviors and types of social relationships. If you can induce cooperative behaviors, you will tend to elicit cooperative relationships and vice versa.

Put simply in Deutsch’s terms: “cooperation breeds cooperation, while competition breeds competition”. Though he says “such a summary is much too condensed”.

But basically, see the above set of features of cooperative and competitive processes. If you can induce cooperative behaviors, you will tend to elicit cooperative, constructive conflict. However, an important modulus is these other sets of factors that determine the direction of conflict (outlined above). They are:

  1. Prior relationship
  2. Nature of the conflict: a. Conflict Size in the sense of the expected difference in the value of the outcomes of winning vs. losing. b. Centrality of the issues c. Rigidity of the issues d. Number of issues involved. e. Consensus on issue importance. f. Degree to which the conflict is acknowledged.
  3. Characteristics of the parties involved: ideologies, personalities, social positions, personal resources.

In relation to the items in (2), Deutsch expands on each theme and discusses a couple of possible interventions that are suggested as helpful.

  1. Dimininishing the perceived opposition in values and interests of the conflicting parties, or decreasing the perceived opposition in their beliefs and policies about achieving common values.
    • Various techniques for this (e.g. role reversal), but basically all assume: “perceive opposition can be reduced if the conflicting parties can be led to see how much they have in common” or if their differences can be seen in the context of their similarities and agreements.
    • Also assume that if misunderstandings are eliminated through improved, open , direct communication, then perceived differences will decrease. D notes that while this is often the case, also removal of understanding can sharpen the awareness of conflicting interests or beliefs.
  2. “Issue control” or shrinking the perceived importance of what is at stake in the conflict. Basically idea is that localized, “here-now-this” conflicts are much easier to resolve than conflicts that are defined in terms of principles, precedents, or abstract values.
    • “When a quarrel starts to center on personalities or group membership rather than specific actions, it usually takes a nonproductive turn”.
  3. “Issue rigidity”. Perceived lack of satisfactory alternatives or substitutes for the methods of achieving the outcomes or for the actual otcomes initially at stake in the conflict. Limits possibilities for creative solutions.
  4. Centrality of the issues. Conflicts over issues that are considered to be central by both sides are often most irreconcilable – things that are “vital to a person’s physical well-being, socio-economic position, self-esteem, or defense against anxiety”.
  5. Consensus on issue importance. Could have difference of emphasis that can influence course of resolution.
  6. On recognition of the conflict. See “displaced conflict” above and latent or repressed conflicts.

Role of Third Parties

Finally, toward the second half of section 3, Deutsch discusses the role of third parties in conflict resolution. Some various points.

  • Intervention of a third party can be constructive by unifying the conflicting parties against a common outsider.
  • First section is mainly discussion of institutions of conflict regulation (vs. e.g. individual mediators) more broadly and when they are likely to emerge and be effective.
  • However, on page 382, some more discussion of the roles of mediators and more micro interventions. Common functions of mediators:
    • Helping the conflicting parties to identify and confront the issues in conflict. What are the issues about which the parties disagree exactly and how can they be confronted? Includes pushing through repressed or displaced conflicts (e.g. surface conflicts that are actually about some underlying issue).
    • Helping provide favorable circumstances for confronting the issues.
      • Provide neutral ground.
      • Help regulate the degree of tension or “heat”. Create restraints on destructive behavior. Encourage constructive behavior.
    • Helping remove blocks and distortions in communication so that mutual understanding can develop. This includes things like:
      • Stimulating sufficient communication from both parties so that both are able to express their views
      • Translating so that the communications are understood the same way by both parties.
      • Training the conflict parties how to communicate better, and to check whether they are being understood by the other party.
      • “A skilled third party will understand the sociocultural differences that lead one side to misunderstand the other and will not only serve as a translator but will also help the two sides understand the contexts and frameworks that give the other’s communications their meaning. In addition, he will train them to use feedback to check how well they are understanding the other by verifying, from time to time, that the other has said what one thinks he has said and, similarly, that the other has understood what one has intended to communicate.”
    • Helping to establish norms for rational interaction such as mutual respect, open communication, the use of persuasion rather than coercion, the desirability of reaching a mutually satisfying agreement.
    • Helping determine what kinds of solutions are possible and making suggestsions about possible solutions.
    • Helping make a workable agreement acceptable to the parties in conflict.
    • Helping make the negotiators and the agreement that is arrived at seem attractive to audiences.

    There is a range of follow on research that I have explored that thinks about what mediators do, how they do it, and when/whether they are effective. I will return to this.