Third-Party Characteristics and Intergroup Conflict Resolution

The bargaining behavior of 80 pairs of female undergraduates on a competitive reward‐allocation task was examined. The participants either bargained for themselves or represented the interests of a constituent as well as themselves. Representatives were given information indicating that their constituent expected them to win or to behave cooperatively, or they were given no information concerning their constituent's bargaining orientation. Consistent with previous research, the present findings indicated that representational role obligations tend to increase competition between negotiators. However, the findings also revealed, that this tendency is reduced when pressure to cooperate is applied by constituents to at least one of the representatives. Procedures that aid in the resolution of intergroup conflict were discussed.

This article examines the nature of intergroup conflicts and some of the psychological and communication processes that can facilitate their resolution. It focuses specifically on conflicts between individual members of different social identity groups and elaborates on the differences between interpersonal and intergroup conflict resolution. It continues with a presentation of the prevailing psychological conditions that exist prior to attempts to resolve intergroup conflict along with a series of psychological and communication processes that can be employed in small group settings to improve the climate for intergroup conflict resolution. It ends by discussing how people can be trained to recognize and take advantage of the beneficial effects of these psychological and communication processes in small group settings.

The effects of intragroup forces on intergroup conflict resolution

Supporters of the contact hypothesis have argued that positive intergroup contact is facilitated when participants have equal status with one another. However, the exact dimensions of equal status are often unclear, having been defined variously as equal occupational status, having close friends of another race, or having equal roles in the contact situation. This paper argues that cultural differences between groups must be taken into account, particularly when intergroup contact occurs in formal conflict resolution exercises. Non-Western participants will be at a disadvantage when attempting to find common ground with Western participants in conflict resolution exercises based on Western cultural practices. Based on a 6-year participant observation study of a Palestinian-Jewish dialogue group, this paper argues that familiarity and expertise in using the culture-based rules of interaction play an important but often subtle role in intergroup conflict resolution. Participants must have some basic equality in their ability to function within the dominant culture.

This volume on intergroup and international conflict resolution offers an overview of this social-psychological problem, and analyzes the factors involved in intergroup conflict.

This thesis explores the role of categorisation shifts in inter-group conflict resolution and collective action for social change from the previously un-investigated perspective of Indigenous Australians. Specifically, the study tested the hypothesis that framing the Stolen Generations at the inclusive human level (i.e., humans behaving badly to other humans) would result in more positive responses to contemporary White Australians compared to framing the Stolen Generations at the inter-group level (i.e., White/European Australians behaving badly to Indigenous Australians). It was also expected that increasing category inclusiveness, from the inter-group level to the all-inclusive human level, would weaken ethnic group identification, and in turn, the motivation for involvement in collective action for social change. Overall, consistent with hypotheses, the development of a common human identity led to increased forgiveness of contemporary White Australians for atrocities committed in the past and decreased ethnic group identification and willingness to engage in collective action for social change. The argument is made that psychological re-categorisation at a higher level of inclusiveness, while generally improving interracial evaluations, may simultaneously undermine collective action for social change and thereby inadvertently contribute to the maintenance of a disadvantaged group's position within society.

This article describes the development of a laboratory simulation designed to study the etiology, escalation, and resolution of intergroup conflict in a systematic and holistic manner. The Intergroup Conflict Simulation involves two groups of equal power and status, averaging four persons each, meeting for a series of five 2 hr sessions. The groups create development plans for five tracts of land from renewable or nonrenewable resource orientations. Negotiation by representatives, supplemented by caucusing, determines how tracts are divided, and this division determines the groups' individual and joint outcomes in terms of points awarded from payoff matrices. Results from 24 runs demonstrated that subjects became part of well-developed groups prior to negotiations, as shown by indices of group cohesion, atmosphere, identity, and loyalty. Measures of perceived threat and feelings of anger and frustration indicated that subjects in one group did feel that they were in competitive conflict with the ...

Scholars and political commentators have long noted that domestic or internal politics can play a significant role in the development of foreign (or other intergroup) relations. In the context of international (or other intergroup) conflicts, the literature notes that such features as disparate interests within a group or leader–constituent dynamics can impede the prospects for intergroup conflict resolution. Scholarly writing on the topic, however, tends to be cabined along disciplinary lines. This article is interdisciplinary and draws lessons from different fields, particularly from political science and social psychology, to describe various intragroup structures and dynamics that can constitute barriers to intergroup conflict resolution. Among other observations, the article notes the unintended effect that statements directed towards one audience in a conflict setting (i.e. the negotiating adversary or key outside actors in the international community) may have on the other audience (i.e. the speaker's domestic constituency), and how these effects can serve to diminish the prospects for conflict resolution.

The desire for justice can escalate or facilitate resolution of intergroup conflicts. Two studies investigated retributive and restorative notions of justice as the mediating factor of the effect of perceived outgroup sentience-an aspect of (mechanistic) dehumanization referring to the emotional depth attributed to others-on intergroup conflict resolution. Study 1 showed that for Palestinians, who see themselves as victims, perceived sentience of Israelis decreased retributive but increased restorative notions of justice, which, ultimately, increased support for conflict resolution by negotiation rather than political violence. Study 2 partially replicated Study 1's findings with Jewish Israelis. The role of perceived sentience and its relationship to retributive and restorative notions of justice in protracted and nonprotracted conflicts and their resolution is discussed.

Dealing in hope: Does observing hope expressions increase conciliatory attitudes in intergroup conflict?

A collective neuroscience lens on intergroup conflict.

The term interactive conflict resolution refers to a collection of small‐group discussion approaches to the analysis and resolution of intergroup conflict that bring together members of conflicting parties in dialogue and problem solving facilitated by a team of knowledgeable and skilled social scientists. The invention of this method is attributed to John Burton and his colleagues at University College, London in the mid‐1960s. They creatively combined the forum of an academic seminar with group problem solving such that the participants could enter into a mutual analysis of the sources and dynamics of their conflict, followed by the development of ideas and options that could be fed into official peace negotiations. Burton initially labeled this workshop approach as controlled communication in order to denote the non‐adversarial, open and supportive atmosphere created by the third party, but later used the term problem solving to distinguish the method from traditional negotiations (Burton, 1969).

In the rich and evolving research of trust, there are two opposite theoretical approaches. One in the tradition of Alexis de Tocqueville (1835), Robert Putnam (1993), Francis Fukuyama (1995) and other considers trust as a quality of interpersonal relations emerging from below, turning into shared cultural resource and producing viable democracy and prosperous economy. The causal vector is from micro to macro, from interpersonal networks to organizations, institutions, and the state. This is the dominant approach. But there is also an alternative perspective which claims that trust is facilitated or even enforced by the “civilized public sphere” (Papakostas 2012), or “institutionalized skepticism” (Cleary and Stokes 2006), i.e., the rational political and economic organization, and particularly the clear, stable, transparent, and consistent law universalistically and efficiently applied and executed. Here the causal vector is from the state, organizations, and institutions toward interpersonal trust, from macro to micro. Both approaches should not be considered as competing but rather as complementary. They have also different but complementary implications concerning the resolution of intergroup conflicts by building trust. For example, the earlier suggests cultivating trust from below by encouraging personal contacts, mutual acquaintance, cooperation, participation in common voluntary ventures by hostile groups. The latter approach would rather emphasize the need for enforcing trustworthiness by overarching, higher level structure of organizations, institutions and laws assuring accountability, stability, transparency of social relations, through control and surveillance of both feuding parties. It is only the parallel employment of emergence and enforcement of trust that opens the possibility of gradual resolving of intergroup conflict.

The discipline of social psychology has evidenced a long-term interest in the understanding and resolution of intergroup conflict within the broader study of intergroup relations

An eclectic model of intergroup conflict presents a multilevel, interactive, process-orientated, longitudinal picture of the development, escalation, and resolution of intergroup conflict. As such, the model is congruent with a general call in social psychology for the development of middle range theories that integrate variables from different levels of analysis (Fisher, 1982). In McGuire’s (1973, 1979) terms, there is a need for “miniature systems theories” specifying the relationships among a variety of theoretically important variables. Particularly in the field of intergroup conflict, there is a clear need for integrating existing independent theories into a comprehensive systems theory having both descriptive and predictive power (Thomas, 1976; Sherif & Sherif, 1979). However, once such a need is identified, a related deficiency immediately becomes apparent: the social sciences and social psychology in particular have failed to develop the required research methodologies to test and refine such models!