Deutsch - Cooperation and Conflict.pdf - Socjologia - Piffony

COOPERATION AND CONFLICT: A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE HISTORY OF

THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY

OF CONFLICT RESOLUTION *

Morton Deutsch

Teachers College, Columbia University

Introduction

Conflict is an inevitable and pervasive aspect of organizational life. It occurs within and

between individuals, within and between teams and groups, within and between different levels

of an organizations, within and between organizations. Conflict has been given a bad name by

its association with psychopathology, disruption, violence, civil disorder, and war. These are

some of the harmful potentials of conflict when it takes a destructive course. When it takes a

constructive course, conflict is potentially of considerable personal and social value. It prevents

stagnation, it stimulates interest and curiosity, it is the medium through which problems can be

aired and creative solutions developed, it is the motor of personal and social change.

It is sometime assumed that conflicts within teams in organizations should be suppressed,

that conflict impairs cooperation and productivity among the members of a team. This may be

true when conflict takes a destructive course as in a bitter quarrel. However, it is apt to

strengthen the relations among team members and to enhance productivity when it takes the

form of a lively controversy.

In this chapter, I present an overview of the major research questions addressed in the

literature related to conflict resolution, as well as a historical perspective to see what progress

has been made in this area. My premise is that anyone interested in understanding teamwork and

cooperative working should be familiar with the field of conflict resolution. As I stated above,

conflict is inevitable in teamwork; how the conflict is managed can lead either to the

enhancement or disruption of cooperation and team productivity.

Some definitions

* To appear in M.A. West, D.J. Tjosvold, & K.G. Smith (Eds). International handbook of Organizational

Teamwork and Cooperative Working . Wiley & Sons.

Throughout my many years of empirical and theoretical work in the field of conflict studies,

I have thought of conflict in the context of competition and cooperation. I have viewed these

latter as idealized psychological processes which are rarely found in their "pure" form in nature,

but, instead, are found more typically mixed together. I have also thought that most forms of

conflict could be viewed as mixtures of competitive and cooperative processes and, further, that

the course of a conflict and its consequences would be heavily dependent upon the nature of the

cooperative-competitive mix. These views of conflict lead me to emphasize the link between

the social psychological studies of cooperation and competition and the studies of conflict in my

assessment of this latter area.

I have defined conflict in the following way (Deutsch,1973 p.10): "A conflict occurs

whenever incompatible activities occur…An action that is incompatible with another action

prevents, obstructs, interferes, injures, or in some way makes the latter less likely or less

effective". Conflicts may arise between two or more parties from their opposing interests, goals,

values, beliefs, preferences, or their misunderstandings about any of the forgoing. These are

potential sources of conflict which may give rise to actions by the parties which are incompatible

with one another; if they do not give rise to incompatible actions, a conflict does not exist: it is

only potential.

The terms competition and conflict are often used synonymously or interchangeably. This

reflects a basic confusion. Although competition produces conflict, not all instances of conflict

reflect competition. Competition implies an opposition in the goals of the interdependent parties

such that the probability of goal attainment for one decreases as the probability for the other

increases. In conflict that is derived from competition, the incompatible action reflects

incompatible goals. However, conflict may occur even when there is no perceived or actual

incompatibility of goals. Thus if two team members of a sales group are in conflict about the

best way to increase sales or if a husband and wife are in conflict about how to treat their son's

mosquito bites, it is not necessarily because they have mutually exclusive goals; here, their goals

may be concordant. My distinction between conflict and competition is not made merely to split

hairs. It is important and basic to a theme that underlies much of my work. Namely, conflict can

occur in a cooperative or a competitive context, and the processes of conflict resolution that are

likely to be displayed will be strongly influenced by the context within which the conflict occurs.

At the beginning...

The writings of three intellectual giants - Darwin, Marx, and Freud - dominated the

intellectual atmosphere during social psychology's infancy. Each of these major theorists

significantly influenced the writings of the early social psychologists on conflict as well as in

many other areas. All three theorists appeared - on a superficial reading - to emphasize the

competitive, destructive aspects of conflict. Darwin stressed "the competitive struggle for

existence" and "the survival of the fittest." He wrote (quoted in Hyman, 1966, p. 29): ". . . all

nature is at war, one organism with another, or with external nature. Seeing the contented face

of nature, this may at first be well doubted; but reflection will inevitably prove it is too true."

Marx emphasized "class struggle," and as the struggle proceeds, "the whole society breaks up

more and more into two great hostile camps, two great, directly antagonistic classes: bourgeoisie

and proletariat." He ends The Communist Manifesto with a ringing call to class struggle: "The

proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of

all countries, unite." Freud's view of psychosexual development was largely that of constant

struggle between the biologically rooted infantile id and the socially determined, internalized

parental surrogate, the superego. As Schachtel (1959, p. 10) has noted:

The concepts and language used by Freud to describe the great metamorphosis

from life in the womb to life in the world abound with images of war, coercion,

reluctant compromise, unwelcome necessity, imposed sacrifices, uneasy truce

under pressure, enforced detours and roundabout ways to return to the original

peaceful state of absence of consciousness and stimulation...

Thus, the intellectual atmosphere prevalent during the period when social psychology began

to emerge contributed to viewing conflict from the perspective of "competitive struggle." Social

conditions too - the intense competition among businesses and among nations, the devastation of

World War I, the economic depression of the 1920s and 1930s, the rise of Nazism and other

totalitarian systems - reinforced this perspective.

The vulgarization of Darwin's ideas in the form of "social Darwinism" provided an

intellectual rationale for racism, sexism, class superiority, and war. Such ideas as “survival of

the fittest,” “hereditary determinism,” and "stages of evolution" were eagerly mis applied to the

relations between different human social groups - classes and nations as well as social races to

rationalize imperialist policies. The influence of evolutionary thinking was so strong that, as a

critic suggested, it gave rise to a new imperialist beatitude: "Blessed are the strong, for they

shall prey upon the weak" (Banton, 1967, p. 48). The rich and powerful were biologically

superior; they had achieved their positions as a result of natural selection. It would be against

nature to interfere with the inequality and suffering of the poor and weak.

Social Darwinism and the mode of explaining behavior in terms of innate, evolutionary

derived instincts were in retreat by the mid-1920s. The prestige of the empirical methods in the

physical sciences, the point of view of social determinism advanced by Karl Marx and various

sociological theorists, and the findings of cultural anthropologists all contributed to their

decline. 1 Since the decline of the instinctual mode of explaining such conflict phenomena as

war, intergroup hostility, and human exploitation, two others have been dominant: the

"psychological" and the "socio-political-economic." The "psychological" mode attempts to

explain such phenomena in terms of "what goes on in the minds of men" (Klineberg, 1964) or

"tensions that cause war" (Cantril, 1950); in other words, in terms of the perceptions, beliefs,

values, ideology, motivations, and other psychological states and characteristics that individual

men and women have acquired as a result of their experiences and as these characteristics are

activated by the particular situation and role in which people are located. The "socio-political-

economic" mode, in contrast, seeks an explanation in terms of such social, economic, and

political factors as levels of armaments, objective conflicts in economic and political interests,

and the like. Although these modes of explanation are not mutually exclusive, there is a

tendency for partisans of the psychological mode to consider that the causal arrow points from

psychological conditions to socio-political-economic conditions and for partisans of the latter to

believe the reverse is true. In any case, much of the social psychological writing in the 1930s,

1940s, and early 1950s on the topics of war, intergroup conflict, and industrial strife was largely

nonempirical, and in one vein or the other. The psychologically trained social psychologist

tended to favor the psychological mode; the Marxist-oriented or sociologically trained social

psychologist more often favored the other mode.

The decline of social Darwinism and the instinctivist doctrines was hastened by the

development and employment of empirical methods in social psychology. This early empirical

orientation to social psychology focused on the socialization of the individual; this focus was, in

part, a reaction to the instinctivist doctrine. It led to a great variety of studies, including a

number investigating cooperation and competition. These latter studies are, in my view, the

precursors to the empirical, social psychological study of conflict.

1 This is a decline, not a disappearance. The explanation of social phenomena in terms of innate factors

justifies the status quo by arguing for its immutability; such justification will always be sought by those

who fear change.

Early studies of cooperation and competition

Two outstanding summaries of the then-existing research on cooperation and competition

were published in 1937. One was in the volume of Murphy, Murphy, and Newcomb,

Experimental Social Psychology; the other was in the monograph “Competition and

Cooperation,” by May and Doob. It is not my intention here to repeat these summaries but

rather to give you my sense of the state of the research and theorizing on cooperation-

competition in the 1920s and 1930s.

My impression is that practically none of the earlier research on cooperation and competition

would be acceptable in current social psychological journals because of methodological flaws in

the studies. Almost all of them suffer from serious deficiencies in their research designs. In

addition, there is little conceptual clarity about some of the basic concepts - "competition,"

"cooperation," "self-orientation," - that are used in the studies. As a result, the operational

definitions used to create the differing experimental conditions have no consistency from one

study to another or even within a given study.

Further, the early studies of cooperation and competition suffered from a narrowness of

scope. They focused almost exclusively on the effects of "competition" versus "cooperation" on

individual task output. There was no investigation of social interaction, communication

processes, problem-solving methods, interpersonal attitudes, attitudes toward self, attitudes

toward work, attitudes toward the group, or the like in these early investigations of cooperation-

competition. The focus was narrowly limited to work output. The simplistic assumption was

made that output would be an uncomplicated function of the degree of motivation induced by

competition as compared with cooperation. The purposes of most of these early investigations

appeared to be to support or reject a thesis inherent in the American ideology; namely, that

competition fosters greater motivation to be productive than other forms of social organization.

Field theory, conflict, and cooperation-competition

During the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, quite independently of the work being conducted in the

United States on cooperation-competition, Kurt Lewin and his students were theorizing and

conducting research which profoundly affected later work in many areas of social psychology.

Lewin's field theory - with its dynamic concepts of tension systems, "driving" and "restraining"

forces, "own" and "induced" forces, valences, level of aspiration, power fields, interdependence,

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