The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed)

by Peter T Coleman

  There are a number of roles that each participant needs to assume adequately: researcher, advocate, devil’s advocate, learner, perspective taker, and synthesizer. Participants need to be effective advocates, persuasively presenting the best case possible for their positions. Participants also need to be effective devil’s advocates, critically analyzing opposing positions, pointing out their weaknesses and flaws in information and logic. No position should be unchallenged. Participants need to be able to learn thoroughly the opposing positions and their rationales. This facilitates their critical analysis as devil’s advocates, but also facilities their performance of the role of perspective taker. Finally, participants need to be effective synthesizers, integrating the best information and logic from all positions into a new, novel position that all participants can agree to.

  Participants need to adhere to a set of normative expectations. Participants need to follow and internalize the norms of seeking the best reasoned judgment, not winning; being critical of ideas, not people; listening to and learning everyone’s position, even if they do not agree with it; differentiating positions before trying to integrate them; and changing their mind when logically persuaded to do so.

  Structuring Concurrence Seeking.

  In concurrence seeking, individuals present their position and its rationale. If it differs from the dominant opinion, the dissenters are pressured by the majority of members to conform to the dominant opinion; if the dissenters do not, they are viewed as nonteam players who obstruct team effectiveness and therefore subjected to ridicule, rejection, ostracism, and being disliked (see Johnson and Johnson, 2007). If they concur, they often seek out confirming information to strengthen the dominant position and view the issue only from the majority’s perspective, thus eliminating the possible consideration of divergent points of view. Thus, there is a convergence of thought and a narrowing of focus in members’ thinking. A false consensus results, with all members agreeing about the course of action the group is to take, while privately some members may believe that other courses of action would be more effective. Concurrence seeking is structured in these ways:

  A cooperative context is established (i.e., structuring positive interdependence). Participants are to come to an agreement based on the dominant position in the group.

  The concurrence-seeking procedure is established. The dominant position is determined, and all participants are encouraged to agree with it. Both advocacy of opposing positions and critical analysis of the dominant position are avoided. Participants are to “be nice” and not disagree with the dominant position. Doubts and misgivings are to be hidden and outward conformity in supporting the dominant position, whether you believe in it or not, is encouraged.

  There are a number of roles that each participant needs to assume adequately: Supporter, persuader. Participants need to be supporters of the dominant position and persuaders of dissenters to adopt the dominant position.

  There is a set of normative expectations that participants need to adhere to. Participants need to follow and internalize the norms of hiding doubts and criticisms about the dominant position, being willing to quickly compromise to avoid open disagreement, expressing full support for the dominant position, never disagreeing with other group members, and maintaining a harmonious atmosphere.

  PROCESSES OF INTERACTION

  Constructive controversy and concurrence seeking promote different processes of interaction among individuals, which in turn promote different outcomes (Johnson and Johnson, 1979, 1989, 2000, 2003, 2007, 2009; Johnson, Johnson, and Johnson, 1976) (see table 4.1 and figure 4.1).

  Constructive Controversy

  The process through which constructive controversy creates positive outcomes involves the following theoretical assumptions:

  When individuals are presented with a problem or decision, they have an initial conclusion based on categorizing and organizing incomplete information, their limited experiences, and their specific perspective. They have a high degree of confidence in their conclusions (i.e., they freeze the epistemic process).

  When individuals present and advocate positions to others (who are advocating opposing positions), they engage in cognitive rehearsal, deepen their understanding of their position, and use higher-level reasoning strategies. The more they attempt to persuade others to agree with them, the more committed they may become to their position. The intent is to convert the other group members to one’s position. Knowing that the presenting individual is trying to convert them, the other individuals involved may scrutinize the person’s position and critically analyze it as part of their resistance to being converted. Hearing opposing views being advocated stimulates new cognitive analysis and frees individuals to create alternative and original conclusions. Even being confronted with an erroneous point of view can result in more divergent thinking and the generation of novel and more cognitively advanced solutions because they unfreeze the epistemic process.

  When individuals challenge the positions of opposing advocates, they attempt to refute opposing positions while rebutting attacks on their own position. To do so, they critically analyze one another’s positions in attempts to discern weaknesses and strengths. Individuals tend to evaluate information more critically. In other words, dissenters tend to stimulate divergent thinking and the consideration of multiple perspectives. Members start with the assumption that the dissenter is not correct. If a dissenter persists, however, it suggests a complexity that stimulates a reappraisal of the issue. The reappraisal, often including additional information, involves divergent thinking and a consideration of multiple sources of information and ways of thinking about the issue. It also breaks the tendency of groups to try to achieve consensus before all available alternatives have been thoroughly considered. On balance, challenging and being challenged tend to increase knowledge and understanding, the creativity of thinking, and the quality of decision making.

  When individuals are confronted with different conclusions based on other people’s information, experiences, and perspectives, they become uncertain as to the correctness of their own views, and a state of conceptual conflict or disequilibrium is aroused. Hearing other alternatives being advocated, having one’s position criticized and refuted, and being challenged by information that is incompatible with and does not fit with one’s conclusions leads to conceptual conflict, disequilibrium, and uncertainty. The greater the disagreement among group members, the more frequently disagreement occurs, the greater the number of people disagreeing with a person’s position, the more competitive the context of the controversy, and the more affronted the person feels, the greater the conceptual conflict, disequilibrium, and uncertainty the person experiences.

  When individuals are faced with intellectual opposition within a cooperative context, they tend to ask one another for more information, seek to view the information from all sides of the issue, and use more ways of looking at facts. Conceptual conflict motivates an active search (called epistemic curiosity) for more information and new experiences (increased specific content) and a more adequate cognitive perspective and reasoning process (increased validity) in hopes of resolving the uncertainty. Indexes of epistemic curiosity include individuals’ actively searching for more information, seeking to understand opposing positions and rationales, and attempting to view the situation from opposing perspectives.

  By adapting their cognitive perspective and reasoning through understanding and accommodating new information as well as the perspective and reasoning of others, individuals derive a new, reconceptualized, and reorganized conclusion. Novel solutions and decisions that on balance are qualitatively better are detected. The positive feelings and commitment of individuals as they create a solution to the problem together is extended to each other, and interpersonal attraction increases. A bond is built among the participants. Their competencies in managing conflicts constructively tend to improve. The process may begin again at this point, or it may be terminated by freezing the current conclusion a
nd resolving any dissonance by increasing confidence in the validity of the conclusion.

  When overt controversy is structured by identifying alternatives and assigning members to advocate the best case for each alternative, the purpose is not to choose one of the alternatives. Rather, is to create a synthesis of the best reasoning and conclusions from all the alternatives. Synthesizing occurs when individuals integrate a number of different ideas and facts into a single position. It is the intellectual bringing together of ideas and facts and engaging in inductive reasoning by restating a large amount of information into a conclusion or summary. Synthesizing is a creative process that involves seeing new patterns within a body of evidence, viewing the issue from a variety of perspectives, and generating a number of optional ways of integrating the evidence. This requires probabilistic (i.e., knowledge is available only in degrees of certainty) rather than dualistic (i.e., there is only right and wrong and authority should not be questioned) or relativistic thinking (i.e., authorities are seen as sometimes right but right and wrong depend on your perspective). The dual purposes of synthesis are to arrive at the best possible decision and find a position that all group members can commit themselves to implement. When consensus is required for decision making, the dissenting members tend to maintain their position longer, the deliberation tends to be more robust, and group members tend to feel that justice has been better served.

  Concurrence Seeking

  The process through which concurrence seeking creates outcomes involves the following theoretical assumptions (Johnson and Johnson, 2007) (see figure 4.1):

  When faced with a problem to be solved or a decision to be made, the group member with the most power (i.e., the boss) or the majority of the members derive an initial position from their analysis of the situation based on their current knowledge, perspective, dominant response, expectations, and past experiences. They tend to have a high degree of confidence in their initial conclusion (they freeze the epistemic process).

  The dominant position is presented and advocated by the most powerful member in the group or a representative of the majority. It may be explained in detail or briefly, as it is expected that all group members will quickly agree and adopt the recommended position. When individuals present their conclusion and its rationale to others, they engage in cognitive rehearsal and often reconceptualize their position as they speak. In addition, their commitment to their position increases, making them more closed-minded toward other positions.

  Members are faced with the implicit or explicit demand to concur with the recommended position. The pressure to conform creates evaluation apprehension that implies that members who disagree will be perceived negatively and rejected. Conformity pressure is also used to prevent members from suggesting new ideas, thereby stifling creativity. The dominant person or the majority of the members tend to impose their perspective about the issue on the other group members, so that all members view the issue from the dominant frame of reference, resulting in a convergence of thought and a narrowing of focus in members’ thinking.

  When a member does not agree with the recommended position, he or she has a choice: concur with the majority opinion or voice dissent and face possible ridicule, rejection, ostracism, and being disliked. This creates a conflict between public compliance and private belief, which can create considerable distress when the dissenter keeps silent, and perhaps even more stress when the dissenter voices his or her opinion. Dissenters realize that if they persist in their disagreement, they may be viewed negatively and will be disliked and isolated by both their peers and their supervisors, or a destructively managed conflict may result that will split the group into hostile factions, or both. Because of these potential penalties, many potential dissenters find it easier to remain silent and suppress their true opinions.

  Members concur publicly with the dominant position and its rationale without critical analysis. In addition, they seek supporting evidence to strengthen the dominant position and view the issue only from the dominant perspective, thus eliminating the possible consideration of divergent points of view. Dissenters may adopt the majority position either because they assume that truth lies in numbers (i.e., the majority is probably correct) or they fear that disagreeing openly will result in ridicule and rejection. They also search for information in a biased manner to confirm the majority position. As a result, they are relatively unable to detect original solutions to problems.

  All members agree about the course of action the group is to take. while some members privately may believe that other courses of action would be more effective.

  Benefits of Constructive Controversy

  He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.

  —Edmund Burke, Reflection of the Revolution in France

  The research on constructive controversy has been conducted over the past thirty-five years by several researchers in a variety of settings using many different participant populations and many different tasks within an experimental and field experimental format (see table 4.2). (For a detailed listing of all the supporting studies, see Johnson and Johnson, 1979, 1989, 2000, 2003, 2007, 2009.) All studies randomly assigned participants to conditions. The studies have all been published in journals (except for one dissertation), have high internal validity, and have lasted from one to sixty hours. The studies have been conducted on elementary, intermediate, and college students. Taken together, their results have considerable validity and generalizability. A recent meta-analysis provides the data to validate or disconfirm the theory (Johnson and Johnson, 2007).

  Table 4.2 Meta-Analysis of Academic Controversy Studies: Weighted Effect Sizes

  Source: Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, R. (2007). Creative controversy: Intellectual conflict in the classroom. Edina, MN: Interaction Book Company. Reprinted with permission

  Quality of Decision Making, Problem Solving, and Learning.

  Effective decision making and problem solving includes higher-level reasoning, accurate understanding of all perspectives, creative thinking, and openness to influence (i.e., attitude change). Compared with concurrence seeking (ES = 0.68), debate (ES = 0.40), and individualistic efforts (ES = 0.87), constructive controversy tends to result in higher-quality decisions (including decisions that involve ethical dilemmas) and higher-quality solutions to complex problems for which different viewpoints can plausibly be developed. Skillful participation in a constructive controversy tends to result in significantly greater mastery and recall of the information, reasoning, and skills contained in one’s own and others’ positions; more skillfully transferring of this learning to new situations; and greater generalization of principles learned to a wider variety of situations than do concurrence seeking, debate, or individualistic efforts. Being exposed to a credible alternative view results in recalling more correct information, more skillfully transferring learning to new situations, and generalizing the principles they learned to a wider variety of situations. The resolution of a controversy is likely to be in the direction of correct problem solving even when the initial conclusions of all group members are erroneous and especially when individuals are exposed to a credible minority view (as opposed to a consistent single view) even when the minority view is incorrect.

  An interesting question is whether the advocacy of two conflicting but wrong solutions to a problem can result in a correct solution. The value of the constructive controversy process lies not so much in the correctness of an opposing position as in the attention and thought processes it induces. More cognitive processing may take place when individuals are exposed to more than one point of view, even if one or more of the points of view is incorrect. A number of studies with both adults and children have found significant gains in performance when erroneous information is presented by one or both sides in a constructive controversy. Thus, the resolution of the conflict is likely to be in the direction of correct performance. In this limited way, two wrongs came to make a right.<
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  Cognitive Reasoning.

  When difficult issues are being discussed and effective decisions are needed, higher-level reasoning strategies are needed. Controversy tends to promote more frequent use of higher-level reasoning strategies than do concurrence seeking (ES = 0.62), debate (ES = 1.35) or individualistic efforts (ES = 0.90). For example, controversy tends to be more effective than modeling and nonsocial presentation of information in influencing nonconserving children to gain the insights critical for conservation. In classrooms where students are free to dissent and are also expected to listen to different perspectives, students tend to think more critically about civic issues and be more tolerant of conflicting views. Thus, cognitive reasoning across domains of inquiry is improved when controversy is used.

  Perspective Taking.

  Understanding and considering all perspectives is important if difficult issues are to be discussed, the decision is to represent the best reasoned judgment of all participants, and all participants are to help implement the decision. Constructive controversy tends to promote more accurate and complete understanding of opposing perspectives than do concurrence seeking (ES = 0.91), debate (ES = 0.22), and individualistic efforts (ES = 0.86). Engaging in controversy tends to result in greater understanding of another person’s cognitive perspective than does the absence of controversy, and individuals engaged in a controversy tend to be better able subsequently to predict what line of reasoning their opponent would use in solving a future problem than do individuals who interacted without any controversy. The increased understanding of opposing perspectives tends to result from engaging in controversy (as opposed to engaging in concurrence-seeking discussions or individualistic efforts) regardless of whether one is a high-, medium-, or low-achieving student.