DIVERSITY AND ETHNIC CONFLICTS LECTURE 10. Conflict What kindles conflict? Social psychological studies have identified several ingredients.

DIVERSITY AND ETHNIC CONFLICTS

LECTURE 10

Conflict

• What kindles conflict?

• Social psychological studies have identified several ingredients.

Conflict

• What’s striking is that the ingredients are common to all levels of social conflict, whether international, intergroup, or interpersonal.

Social Dilemmas

• Several of the problems that threaten the future – nuclear arms, global warming, overpopulation, and natural resource depletion -- arise as different parties pursue their self-interest, ironically, to their collective disadvantage.

Social Dilemmas

• For example, in some societies individuals benefit by having many children who, they assume, can help wit the family tasks and provide security in the parents’ old age.

• But if most families have many children, the result is collective overpopulation.

Social Dilemmas

• We therefore have an urgent dilemma:

• How can we reconcile individuals’ well being, including their right to pursue their personal interests, with communal well-being?

Social Dilemmas

• To isolate and illustrate this dilemma, social psychologists have used laboratory games that attempt to demonstrate real social conflicts.

Social Dilemmas

• By showing us how well-meaning people become trapped in mutually destructive behavior, they illuminate some interesting, yet troubling paradoxes of human behavior.

Social Dilemmas

• Consider two examples: the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

• Two prisoners are given a choice. If both confess, they 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.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

• If you were one of the prisoners, unable to communicate with your fellow prisoner, would you confess?

• To minimize their own sentences, many would confess, although confession elicits more severe sentences than mutual nonconfession.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

• In some 2,000 studies (Dawes, 1991) university students have faced some variation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

• By not cooperating, both parties end up far worse off than if they had trusted each other and thus had gained a joint profit.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

• This dilemma often traps each one in a difficult situation in which both realize they could mutually profit but, unable to communicate and mistrusting one another, become “locked in” to not cooperating.

• In such dilemmas, the unchecked pursuit of self-interest can be harmful to all.

Tragedy of the Commons

• Many social dilemmas involve more than two parties. For example, global warming stems from the carbon dioxide emitted by the world’s cars.

• A metaphor for this social dilemma is what Hardin (1968) called the “tragedy of the commons.”

Tragedy of the Commons

• He derived the name from the centrally located pasture areas in old English towns, but the “common” can be air, water, cookies, whales and so on.

Tragedy of the Commons

• Imagine 100 farmers surrounding a commons capable of sustaining 100 cows. When each grazes one cow, the common feeding ground is optimally used.

• But then someone reasons, “If I put a second cow in the pasture, I’ll double my output, minus the mere 1 percent overgrazing.”

Tragedy of the Commons

• So this farmer adds a second cow. So do each of the other farmers.

• The result? The Tragedy of the Commons – a grassless mud field.

• Many real predicaments parallel this story.

Tragedy of the Commons

• The elements of the commons dilemma have been isolated in lab games.

• Put yourself in the place of Arizona State University students playing Julian Edney’s Nuts Games (1979).

• You and several other students sit around a shallow bowl that initially has 10 metal nuts.

Tragedy of the Commons

• The experimenter explains that your goal is to accumulate as many nuts as possible.

• Each of you at any time may take as many as you want, and every 10 seconds the number of nuts remaining in the bowl will be doubled.

• Would you leave the nuts in the bowl to regenerate, thus producing a greater harvest for all?

Tragedy of the Commons

• Likely not. • Unless they were give time to devise and

agree upon a conservation strategy, 65 percent of Edney’s groups never reached the first 10-second replenishment.

• Often the people knocked the bowl on the floor grabbing for their share.

Tragedy of the Commons

• Is such individualism uniquely American?

• Kaori Sato (1987) gave students in a more collective culture, Japan, a similar experiment and found the result was like those in Western cultures.

Tragedy of the Commons

• The Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons have several similar features.

• Both tempt people to explain their own behavior situationally:

• “I had to protect myself against exploitation by my opponent.”

Tragedy of the Commons

• And both tempt people to explain their partner’s behavior dispositionally:

• “She was greedy.” “He was untrustworthy.”

Tragedy of the Commons

• Most people never realize that their counterparts are viewing them with the same fundamental error (Gifford & Hine, 1997).

Tragedy of the Commons

• Many real-life conflicts, like the Prisoners’ Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons, are non-zero-sum games.

• The two sides’ profits and losses need not add up to zero.

Tragedy of the Commons

• Both can win; both can lose.

• Each game pits the immediate interests of the individuals against the well being of the group.

Tragedy of the Commons

• Each is a diabolical social trap that shows how, even when individuals behave “rationally,” harm can result.

• No malicious person planned for the earth’s atmosphere to be warmed by a blanket of carbon dioxide.

Resolving social dilemmas

How can we induce people to cooperate for their mutual betterment?

• Establish rules that regulate self-serving behavior.

• Keep social groups small so people feel responsibility for one anther.

Resolving social dilemmas

• Enable communication.

• Reduce mistrust.

• Change payoffs to make cooperation more rewarding.

• Invoke altruistic norms.

Misperception

• Recall that conflict is a perceived incompatibility of actions or goals.

• Many conflicts contain but a small core of truly incompatible goals; the bigger problems are the misperceptions of the other’s motives and goals.

Misperception

• In earlier lectures I considered the seeds of such misperception.

• The self-serving bias leads individuals and groups to accept credit for their good deeds and shuck responsibility for bad deeds without according others the same benefit of the doubt.

Misperception

• A tendency to self-justify further inclines people to deny the wrong of their evil acts that cannot be shucked off.

Misperception

• Because of the fundamental attribution error, each side sees the other’s hostility as an evil disposition.

• One then filters the information and interprets it to fit one’s preconceptions.

Misperception

• Groups often polarize these self-serving, self-justifying, biasing tendencies.

• One symptom of groupthink is the tendency to perceive one’s own group as moral and strong, the opposition as evil and weak.

Misperception

• Terrorist acts that are despicable brutality to most people are “holy war” to others.

• Indeed the mere fact of being in a group triggers an in-group bias.

• And negative stereotypes, once formed, are often resistant to contradictory evidence.

Misperception

• So it should not be a surprise to us, to discover that people in conflict form distorted images of one another.

Mirror-image perceptions

• To a striking degree, misperceptions of those in conflict are mutual.

• People in conflict attribute similar virtues to themselves and vices to the other (Tobin & Eagles, 1992).

Mirror-image perceptions

• Reciprocal views of one another are often held by parties in ethnic conflicts.

• For example, each may view itself as moral and peace loving and the other as evil and aggressive.

Negative mirror-image perceptions

• Negative mirror-image perceptions have been an obstacle to peace in many places:

• Both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict insisted that “we” are motivated by our need to protect our security and our territory, while “They” want to obliterate us and take our land.

Negative mirror-image perceptions

• “We” are the indigenous people here; “they” are the invaders. “We” are the victims, “they” are the aggressors” (Heradstveit, 1979; Rouhana & Bar-Tal, 1998).

• Given such intense mistrust, negotiation is difficult.

Negative mirror-image perceptions

• At Northern Ireland’s University of Ulster, Hunter and his colleagues (1991) showed Catholic and Protestant students videos of a Protestant attack at a Catholic funeral and a Catholic attack at a Protestant funeral.

Negative mirror-image perceptions

• Most students attributed the other side’s attack to “bloodthirsty” motives but its own side’s attack to retaliation or self-defense.

Negative mirror-image perceptions

• Muslims and Hindus in Bangladesh exhibit the same in-group-favoring perceptions (Islaem & Hewstone, 1993).