Conflicts can
involve different nations and religions, different races and classes. Some of
them seem intractable: the tensions and hatred seem depressingly permanent. But
there are a number of social psychologists who have been studying how prejudice
and distrust between groups can be overcome.
David Edmonds
has been exploring some of their ideas for BBC Radio 4's Analysis programme in November 2015.
Self-criticism
Eran Halperin
is associate professor at the School of Psychology at the Interdisciplinary
Centre, Herzliya, Israel, and has carried out many experimental studies to test
how people can be encouraged to think more favourably about the
"other" group, and be more willing to reach a deal.
In one
experiment a group of Israelis was given a fake newspaper article. It described
a Palestinian leader criticising his own society - corruption in Gaza and the
West Bank or shortcomings at schools. A group of Palestinians was likewise
exposed to Israelis being self-critical.
"One of
the major barriers to conflict resolution is that people just won't listen to
what the members of the other group are saying. We were looking for a way to
make them listen that is feasible and effective. We used
a real speech by Knesset member Ahmad Tibi, a Palestinian citizen of Israel,
who talked about the Holocaust as one of the major disasters in the history of
humankind, something that is incomparable to any other disaster of any other
society. After
Israelis were exposed to this speech, suddenly they were willing to be exposed
to things that he or other members of the Palestinian society were saying about
other issues. And if
Israelis hear a Palestinian leader - or just a Palestinian citizen - saying
something critical about the educational system, or corruption within the
Palestinian government, then suddenly they are much more open to hear what
Palestinians have to say about issues related to the conflict. We
found exactly the same results when Palestinians were exposed to Israelis
criticising their own group."
The effect
seems to be achieved by disrupting the idea of monolithic blocs, the idea that
the other group is overwhelmingly dominated by a single identity, a single
value system, a single political objective.
Fairness
In July this
year, Iran finally signed a deal with major powers around the world to freeze
its controversial nuclear programme in exchange for the lifting of international
sanctions. Sanctions had been in place for years, and were hitting the Iranian
economy. The puzzle, then, was why the deal had taken so long to reach.
Nick Wright
of the University of Birmingham has a background in neuroscience, which he now
applies to international conflict: "Why has
Iran been prepared to accept costs of some $100bn to pursue its nuclear
programme? If you
listen to what the Iranians actually say, it's that, as Foreign Minister Javad
Zarif put it at the end of 2013, imagine you're told you cannot do something
that everyone else can do. What would you do? Would you relent or would you
stand your ground?"
Here's a
thought experiment. Imagine that Fred had been given a £10 windfall and had
been told he must share it with you. You can choose to accept or reject Fred's
distribution. If you accept it, you get to keep what Fred offers you. But if
you reject it, you both get nothing. If Fred
offers you half the money, you'll almost certainly accept: £5 to you and £5 to
Fred. But what if Fred offers you only £1? After all, £1 is still better than
nothing.
"If you
only cared about what you were going to receive, obviously you should choose to
accept the nine-one split, because you're getting £1 rather than nothing. But
what most people do is they say, 'Oh, God, that's terribly unfair! You're
getting £9 and I'm only getting £1. That's very unfair and I'm going to reject
it. People
are prepared to forego money in the name of fairness."
And it turns
out that offers of less than 25% in this type of experiment are routinely
rejected. That's true whether you conduct the experiment in London or Lagos,
India or Indonesia.
Sacred values
Almost all of
us have so-called "sacred values". These aren't necessarily religious
values: they're values which are core to identity, the values which drive and
define us.
Anthropologist
Scott Atran has written extensively about terrorism, violence and religion. "Sacred
values differ from material values precisely because all the traditional
assumptions of rational actors, of utility, of trade-offs fly out the
window."
If you try to
bargain with sacred values it can prove disastrous: "Suppose I offered you money for your child. You might think I'm
crazy. If I insisted, you might get angry. It's
the same for people who offer to trade money for your being a traitor to your
country or your religion, or for the right of return or for whatever sacred
value you may hold. In
experiments, the more material incentives are offered, the greater the insult,
and the more violent people get in the defence of those values. I
briefed the United States Military Command for the Middle East, and people
would sort of understand what I was talking about, and believe that they
themselves have sacred values which they're defending. But the
difficulty is getting them to believe the others are also operating on the
basis of sacred values. People tend to conceive of their enemies as strict
consequentialists - simply out for the short-term gain of power - or that
they're crazy or nihilists. That is
a great mistake, because the force of intractable and enduring conflict comes
from a clash over sacred values more than it does over material
interests."When
things are sacred, if you try to trade them off, not only doesn't it work but
it backfires."
Contact
theory
In parts of
Northern Ireland, the two main communities, Protestant and Catholic, have
virtually no contact with each other. What contact they do have is often
hostile: for example, during the summer marching season. But whether the walls
are in West Belfast or the West Bank, lack of interaction can make one side
blind to the humanity of the other.
Prof Miles
Hewstone is the director of the Oxford Centre for the Study of Intergroup
Conflict, part of Oxford University, and is a leading proponent of contact
theory. "Contact
theory is the idea that you can reduce prejudice by members of different groups
by bringing them together under positive conditions."
Five years
ago two schools in Oldham, one of Britain's most racially segregated towns,
were merged to create Waterhead Academy. It was a good test: "They
took two pre-existing schools, Breeze Hill and Counthill, one of which was
almost entirely white British, the other was almost entirely Asian British, and
said, 'We'll take this pint of milk, we'll take this pint of Guinness and we'll
pour them into a new quart pot. What is
interesting is that the data are going the way we would have hoped - slowly but
gradually. There is an indication that the social networks of the Asian
students and the white British students are becoming more mixed. Within
just three months we've got more gender links and are beginning to break down
some of the racial isolation." Although the
effect is not dramatic, the school merger does seem to have improved relations.
Contact
theory, self-criticism, understanding sacred values and perceptions of
fairness: these are no panacea for settling conflict, but they do offer a
greater insight into what motivates enmity, and so how it might be diminished
and overcome.
They could be
psychologically useful levers in the pursuit of peace.
Such theories
advocate a different approach in the attempt to bring warring parties together.
But they raise the question: do we have the courage to embrace this
unconventional approach and the possibilities it presents?
