You Scare Me!

You scare me.

There, now that is out of the way.  

It is an honest thing to say and I wonder if I am alone in feeling this way, but I do not think so.

I have been thinking a lot about our social connectedness and how something like trust (some may even call it faith) plays into what connects us.  I find that I am constantly wrestling with what are frequently thought to be "big" philosophical questions...

Is there Truth?
On what could/should we base our ethics?
Do we have a responsibility for anything or anyone outside of our self?

Importantly, who gets to determine the answers to such questions?  If we believe that it is up to us to decide for ourselves the answers to such questions, why even ask them aloud?  If we believe that it is the job of our wisest minds to determine such answers, again, why ask?

It seems to me that one can find a justification for answering such questions in every corner that we seek to find answers.  What I mean is that we find whatever it is we are looking for.

The Platonic tradition in philosophy holds that there is Truth that exists in a form that stands outside of our human constructs.  As humans, we are flawed, but the Truth exists to be found if we just seek it and try to remove the layers that obscure it from our conditioned responses.  The same holds for the form of a horse.  The horses we experience are representations of the perfect form "Horse" upon which all subsets are based.  The horses we see are imperfect representations of the perfect "Horseness" that precedes all horse existence.  And so it goes all the way up and down the line from the simplest to the most complex "things".

We do not know much about human thought prior to the Greek philosophical tradition, which accounts for the reason why we still cling so tightly to many of it's core ideas.  Since then, debates have raged and mind wars have been waged to try to parse out whether or not such an idea as "Forms" and other invisible "first causes" exist.  It's the old 'a priori' (before) versus 'a posteriori' (after) debate.


In more recent times, a more constructivist view has gained favor in much of the debate about where it is that ideas such as Truth emerge.  Sociological schools of thought put forth the idea that we largely construct our "reality" by means of language and culture (to name just two areas explored).  Evidence supports such theories, yet there is also an undeniable reality to being human that seems to stand apart from all these theory-laden constructs.  We all seem to know what it is to be happy, sad, angry, disgusted, and yes....scared.


Nobody needs to provide a biological, psychological, or social theory for us to understand fear.  We know it all too well.  The scientific methodologies may help us uncover mechanisms behind such emotions, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient in their explanatory power.


Of the five primal emotions mentioned above I have noticed something that I find interesting.  I can be happy without anyone else having to be involved in that emotion.  I may find happiness laying alone on a blanket staring into the starry sky on a cool, clear night.  Would such an experience be enhanced by sharing it with another?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  What matters is that it can be experienced alone and not lose it's inherent value to me.  


I think this is also true of sadness, disgust, and anger.  What about fear?  If I were truly alone in the world, could I know fear?  I think yes (as in fearing death), but I also think that there is a particularly social aspect that drives our fears.


So much of what we are and what we do is driven by a fear of social isolation or being ostracized by our peers.  In American Indian society, and indeed in most Indigenous societies, the greatest punishment a person could get was to be banished from their group...a fate worse than death (even though the likelihood of death was far greater from having to go it alone).  The very foundation of these societies is based on connectedness with others and the larger environment.


How do we come to a state of mind in which we begin to believe that we can trust no others and that it is up to us alone as individuals to either succeed or fail?  How is it in a sea of humanity, which in less than 40 years will likely find it's numbers well over 9 billion, that we can be so utterly alone?


I was thinking about evolution the other day.  We tend to group things because it makes it easier for our brains to work.  We lump people, animals, architectural styles, kinds of music, etc. into nicely organized categories in the name of simplicity.  But we have to ask the question, are any two things identical?  Is it not possible that each and every entity that exists in this universe is a unique species that is suited and adapted to the particular environment that it finds itself in at that moment in time?  


Perhaps this uniqueness, this difference is the source of our fear.  Perhaps somewhere buried deep within our psyche we know that there is not one other person in the whole of the universe that sees it the way we do.  In the end, we are utterly alone.  Yet we strive to find that connection with the other.  We seek it like the Grail.  It always stands just out of reach, yet close enough to keep us on the eternal quest.  


Perhaps the final frontier, the Truth, is not out there somewhere, but in you, and that scares me.

 

Personality Factors in Conflict Resolution

Article Summary

Park & Antonioni's (2007) article "Personality, reciprocity, and strength of conflict resolution strategy" investigated how an individual's conflict resolution behavior was affected by an assessment of their personality by way of the Big 5 personality assessment and situational factors.  The article builds on the generally accepted notion that how a person behaves is a function of both their personality and their environment, so to understand how a person will interact in a conflict, both these factors need to be understood.  For the purposes of this class blog, I am exploring the personality dimensions and how they may be related to conflict management strategies.

The authors state that a person's personality will have an affect on the choice of conflict strategy they are likely to use (Park & Antonioni, 2007).  The Big 5 personality assessment uses five measures to evaluate an individual's personality.   

1.  Agreeableness measures whether a person demonstrates warm, generous, trusting, and cooperative behaviors.  Persons characterized as agreeable have a strong motivation to maintain positive relationships with others.

2.  Extraversion measures an individual's sociability, assertiveness, and positive emotionality.  Persons characterized as highly extraverted are said to be highly motivated by rewards of various kinds, including winning in competitive situations.

3.  Neuroticism measures anxiety, emotional instability, easy embarrassment, and depression.  Persons characterized by neuroticism show a heightened sensitivity to punishment cues and negative events.

4.  Conscientiousness measures industriousness, discipline, and responsibility.  Persons characterized as demonstrating conscientiousness as a trait are strongly motivated by achievement and a high integrity. 

5.  Openness (to experience) measures associations with being imaginative, adventurous, original, and thoughtful.  In addition, the need for variety and novelty is seen in this type.  Persons measuring high in openness appear to be able to access and process more thoughts, feelings, and impulses and are motivated to seek out new and varied experiences.

Integration

Conflict resolution strategies can be understood as occurring within two overarching dimensions.  The first being a person's concern for meeting their own interests and the second being a concern for meeting the interests of the other party in the conflict.  Within these two primary distinctions, subsets have been defined in order to better understand specific conflict resolution styles.  Park & Antonioni (2007) chose to explore the four best researched strategies and connect these styles with the traits associated with the Big 5 personality assessment.

1.  Competing/Dominating strategy is exemplified by an individual's attempt to satisfy their own concerns at the expense of the other.  Persons testing high in extraversion are more likely to use a competing style, which is a reflection of their desire to attain rewards.  Neuroticism is also associated with a competing style due to a tendency for neurotic personalities to react negatively (often by "attacking" the other party) to interpersonal conflicts.  Finally, persons rating as highly conscientious may also incorporate a competing style due to their motivation to achieve.

2.  Accommodating strategy is characterized by a person's lack of satisfying their own concerns in order to satisfy those of the other party.  Persons testing high in agreeableness would tend to conform to the demands of others in conflict situations.  In addition, persons high in openness to experience would tend to be more receptive to the perspective of other parties in a conflict and, therefore, more accommodating.

3.  Collaborating strategy is characterized by an effort to resolve a conflict in a win-win manner.  Persons who rate higher on agreeableness, because of having an active concern for the welfare of others, would tend to use a more collaborative approach to conflict.  Extraverts have a strong tendency toward sociability, which requires some amount of an ability to collaborate.  In addition, extraverts are show little apprehension toward direct communication techniques, which should result in an increased willingness to share information.  This willingness to share information should increase the likelihood of developing win-win situations.  Because of the tendency of a person testing high in conscientiousness to value high integrity, a collaborating style may allow for both parties to satisfy their own concerns without coming at the expense of the other.  Finally, those who are more open to experience should better be able to see and overcome inherent biases that could undermine conflict resolution strategies and also see novel opportunities for collaborative possibilities that others may miss.

4.  Avoiding strategy is allows events to take their own course and often results in lose-lose outcomes in conflicts.  Persons rating high in agreeableness are likely to avoid conflicts due to their high concern for the welfare of others.  Because of the emotional stability often required to effectively interact in conflict situations, those persons testing high in neuroticism are more likely to avoid these interactions completely.

Note:  I have, for the purposes of brevity (which I may have failed at anyway!), chose to only explore the "positively" associated aspects of these personality and conflict style interactions.  Obviously, there would be negative associations, as well.  For instance, it would be easy to see how agreeableness would be negatively associated (correlated) with a competing conflict style.

Application

The application of assessing personality variables in conflict resolution strategies could play an important role in helping parties understand the style of negotiation that will likely play out during an attempt at negotiating a satisfactory settlement between two parties.  Park & Antonioni (2007) have taken a step in this effort by exploring the relationships between the Big 5 personality assessment and four styles of conflict interaction.  While situational factors and reciprocal norms will clearly affect how such interactions play out in the real world, the effort to understand what personality factors drive how a person is likely to approach a conflict should be an area of productive research.

Knowing something about how a person sees the world offers an opportunity to approach a conflict negotiation in a more sensitive and productive manner.  Knowledge of such factors could lead to avoiding unnecessary confrontations that may inhibit otherwise fruitful dialog.  On the other hand, caution needs to be taken when applying a label to another person.  While personality factors may capture certain overall traits and characteristics of an individual, human beings are highly complex and dynamic entities.  Any attempt to narrowly define a human being by a simple and reductionistic methodology threatens to undermine a nuanced and humanistic understanding of personhood and its inherent potentials.  We may be driven and informed by a relatively consistent set of traits that have evolved over a lifetime, but we are also incredibly adaptive and capable of transformations that elude easy categorizations and descriptions.  Personality assessments can, therefore, be both positive and negative in their potential use in conflict resolution.  Perhaps their best function exists in how they help us to understand ourselves...

"What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself." 

-Abraham Maslow

References

Park, H., Antonioni, D.  (2007).  Personality, reciprocity, and strength  of conflict resolution strategy.  Journal  of Research in Personality, 41, 110-125.

Tibet: Conflict Since 1959

"If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading." -Lao Tzu

The history of Tibet, a remote region in the southwest of China, is in many ways similar to most of the stories in history, at least when viewed from the perspective of colonization.  Tibet has remained largely isolated from the world for almost all of modern time.  Tibet is the highest region on earth, and is often referred to as the "roof of the world".  It is reported that humans have inhabited the region for over 20,000 years despite its inhospitable climate and elevation.  The people of Tibet have historically existed largely off of subsistence farming and agriculture, although that is changing rapidly today.  Tibet is the homeland of His Holiness The 14th Dalai Lama, a prominent figure in world peace activism and religious tolerance.  Most of us are familiar with his face...

The Dalai Lama is the spiritual and political leader of Tibet.  Before 1959, he lived in Lhasa in the Potala Palace overlooking the city.  In 1959, the Chinese army invaded Tibet and the Dalai Lama was forced to flee over the Himalayas to India where he currently lives in exile in the city of Dharmasala.  Since that time, Tibet and China have been in a struggle to determine who has the right to control the affairs in Tibet.  In is in this struggle for control that the conflict exists.

The long history of whether or not Tibet is a part of China is too long and complex to explore in this post, so I am choosing to write about what has been happening very recently in this conflict.  In 2008, as the Olympic Games were nearing in Beijing, peaceful protests began to erupt in Tibet over Chinese control in the region.  Protesters saw an opportunity to make their cause better known on the world's stage and they took it.    The Chinese government was embarrassed by widespread unrest in the Tibetan region just before the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008 and has been cracking down on any form of protest or civil unrest ever since.  The Chinese government says that only 19 people were killed during the 2008 civil unrest, but the Tibetan Government-in-Exile, which operates out of Dharmasala, India claims that Chinese troops killed more than 200, injured hundreds more, and have jailed many others for participating in the peaceful demonstrations.  In recent times, we have seen the Chinese government react strongly to any mention of the "Jasmine Revolutions" occurring in Northern Africa and the Middle East by arresting anyone known for voicing opposition to Chinese policies and giving stern warnings to those who have not been arrested.  Just this week, the Dalai Lama announced that he will be stepping down from his political role as a Tibetan leader so that he can allow the democratic process in Tibet develop new leadership.  

The policy of the Chinese government toward Tibet has been one of a competing style of conflict.  It is clearly a case of China believing that a hard bargaining approach, backed by clear military superiority is their best approach.  China blamed the Dalai Lama for the protests that began in 2008 and called him “a wolf in monk’s robes”.  The Dalai Lama, in his normal magnanimous style, invited the Chinese to send an investigation team to his home to look through all of his personal documents and speeches to determine if he had any role in the instigation of the protests.  China has not taken him up on his offer.  We can see here that the style of the Dalai Lama is a collaborating method.  He has constantly called for efforts to work together to solve the conflict, in spite of the constant demonization of him by the Chinese government and its cronies.  Even his recent step down from a political role has been met with scorn by the Chinese government.  An official said that his stepping down is a "trick to deceive the international community."

The conflict between Tibet and China is a clear example of a dominant culture  marshaling all of its forces to overrun another. Tibet has vast unexplored areas of wilderness that may contain resources that China needs to maintain its incredible growth.  It is not lost on me the many similarities between what has been happening in Tibet and what happened here in the United States when we overran and took everything from the American Indian tribes who had lived on these lands for tens of thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans.  When everything is viewed as a commodity, the march of progress does not slow down to consider the people being trampled and left in its wake.  We are witness, once again, to such a process in Tibet.    

 

Recognizing our Shadow: A method for Conflict Management.

"Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people." -Carl Jung

For me, one of the most influential and important psychologists in history was Carl Gustav Jung.  Jung was the reason I decided to major in psychology, so his work has been a tremendous influence on my way of thinking about the human psyche.  As time has elapsed, I have come to embrace many other ways of thinking about psychology (Adlerian, Existential, and Humanistic approaches to name a few), but Jung continues to be a major influence on me and a source of scholarship that I will likely continue to explore for the rest of my life.

One of Jung's key contributions was his exploration of the archetypal shadow.  Jung described the shadow as a part of our unconscious mind that contains repressed weaknesses, instincts, and personal shortcomings.  This is a very, very basic definition that helps to frame this discussion for our purposes, but rest assured that the concept of the shadow, as explored by Jung, is tremendously complex and in-depth, which means my efforts to frame it here will be somewhat incomplete and will in no way do Jung's work justice.  

Jung explored this area of the human psyche because he believed that we were not going to be able to be "whole" persons until we recognized this aspect of ourselves.  We have a tendency to place "evil" and traits that we find undesirable on to other people and reject that these may be in us, as well.  The social psychologists Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo conducted research that went a long way in illustrating the lengths ordinary people will go to by either accepting external authority for their actions, or the effects that "roles" play in how we interact with others.  These social psychologists emphasized the external factors that influence our behavior.

Jung was interested in the internal factors (like personality) that can play a role in how we interact with others in the world.  For Jung, it was our own (unconscious) repression of the aspects of ourselves that left us vulnerable to projecting evil onto other people.  Jung wrote in the Introduction to Erich Neumann's book, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, "No-one stands beyond good and evil, otherwise he would be out of this world.  Life is a continual balancing of opposites, like every other energic process.  The abolition of opposites would be equivalent to death.  Nietzsche escaped the collision of opposites by going into the madhouse.  The yogi attains the state of nirvana (freedom from opposites) in the rigid lotus position of non-conscious, non-acting samadhi.  But the ordinary man stands between the opposites and knows that he can never abolish them.  There is no good without evil, and no evil without good" (pg. 16).  For anyone unfamiliar with the term, samadhi is a state in meditation said to be of one consciousness, or beyond any pair of opposites, such as good and evil.  No duality, just oneness with the universe.  The point Jung is driving at here is the importance of our ability to recognize that just as good exists inside us, so does evil, and until we can accept this fact, we are going to continue to try to place that evil exclusively in the outside world, leaving us vulnerable to our own projections and self-delusions.

What does this have to do with our studies in conflict resolution?  When attempting to move from a stage of differentiation to an integration stage, it would be helpful to realize that many of the aspects that we do not like about those who stand on the other side of an issue from us are aspects that we are likely to have within ourselves.  We tend to project the worst onto someone who stands in conflict with something that we want.  We demonize and dehumanize them because it makes us feel as if our position is stronger, more ethical, or justified.  But we would be well served to recognize how we may find ourselves standing in the position of another when trying to reconcile differences.  While a recognition about real differences is a key step in the integration process, we must be careful to separate differences of substance from differences in perception, which may or may not be real.  If there is anything that we learned from the works of people like Milgram and Zimbardo, it is that we may easily find ourselves standing in a place in which we could never have imagined possible.  We are only a few social variables away from being fascist aggressors who are willing to torture someone who stands opposed to what we believe is right.

What do you see?  Angels or Demons? 
Or...Angels and Demons?

Round One...

Hi.  I am Jon.  I am in my final semester at Kent State University majoring in Psychology.  I am planning on applying to the University of Akron to enter in a Master's program in Community Counseling.  Later, I want to pursue a PhD, but I am undecided if it will be in Psychology or something in Philosophy.  I am very interested in Mythology and am an active forum participant and Community Council Member on the Joseph Campbell website (jcf.org) under the pseudonym jonsjourney.  My first official publication appeared on the Joseph Campbell website here:  The First Psychologist?

I am taking the course in Conflict Management for several reasons.  First, it will be very much applicable in my future work as a counselor.  I am also interested in the group and individual dynamics of conflict; particularly political and religious group conflict.  Finally, I have taken several courses with Dr. Betz over the years and have come to very much respect his perspective and guidance.  My first class upon returning to Kent after a 20 year hiatus was with him in his Child Psychology class and now, in my final semester, I have the opportunity to take one more class with him before I leave the campus that I have come to love so much.