MIT News- Conflict Resolution: The Power of Being Heard

Conflict resolution are methods, processes and ways to facilitate a peaceful ending to a social conflict or dispute. By participating in collective negotiation, group members attempt to resolve group conflicts. This is usually done by communicating information about their motives and disputes to the rest of the group. A wide range of methods and procedures for addressing conflict exist, including but not limited to, negotiation, mediation, diplomacy, and creative peacebuilding.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- To help promote peace in the Middle East, many organizations have established “peace camps” or similar conflict-resolution programs that bring Israelis and Palestinians together to foster greater understanding of the opposing group.

One common feature of such programs is the opportunity for members of each group to share stories about their lives with members of the other group. Now, a new study from MIT neuroscientists shows that the benefits from this exchange are much greater when members of the less empowered group share their stories with the traditionally dominant group than when the reverse occurs.

The finding, published online in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, supports the idea that for the disempowered group, the biggest barrier to reconciliation is the belief that their concerns are being ignored, says Rebecca Saxe, senior author of the study.

“If that sense of being neglected and disregarded and taken advantage of is the biggest obstacle to progress, from their perspective, then you can partly address that by providing an experience of being heard,” says Saxe, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences and associate member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT.

The researchers found the same phenomenon in a similar study of Mexican immigrants and white Arizonans, which is also described in the new paper.

Sharing perspectives

Many previous studies have documented the benefits of “perspective taking” — that is, making an effort to understand another person’s experiences and point of view. However, this is the first study to look at the other side of that exchange, which lead author Emile Bruneau dubbed “perspective giving” — the opportunity to share one’s own story with someone else.

Bruneau, an MIT postdoc who volunteered as a counselor at peace camps in Northern Ireland before earning his PhD, says interviews with camp participants suggested to him that the less empowered group would benefit more from perspective giving than perspective taking.

To test this hypothesis, Palestinians and Israelis, and Mexican immigrants and white Arizonans, were recruited for what they were told was a study of an online translation system. The Arizona study took place six months after the passage of a controversial anti-immigration bill, while the Middle East study was conducted six months after the 2009 Israeli military action in Gaza, when hope for a peace agreement was very low.

MIT News: How Conflict Influences Empathy.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- MIT postdoc Emile Bruneau has long been drawn to conflict — not as a participant, but an observer. In 1994, while doing volunteer work in South Africa, he witnessed firsthand the turmoil surrounding the fall of apartheid; during a 2001 trip to visit friends in Sri Lanka, he found himself in the midst of the violent conflict between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan military.

Those chance experiences got Bruneau, who taught high school science for several years, interested in the psychology of human conflict. While teaching, he also volunteered as counselor for a conflict-resolution camp in Ireland that brought Catholic and Protestant children together. At MIT, Bruneau is now working with associate professor of cognitive neuroscience Rebecca Saxe to figure out why empathy — the ability to feel compassion for another person’s suffering — often fails between members of opposing conflict groups.

“What are the psychological barriers that are put up between us in these contexts of intergroup conflict, and then, critically, what can we do to get past them?” Bruneau asks.

Bruneau and Saxe are also trying to locate patterns of brain activity that correlate with empathy, in hopes of eventually using such measures to determine how well people respond to reconciliation programs aimed at boosting empathy between groups in conflict.

“We’re interested in how people think about their enemies, and whether there are brain measures that are reliable readouts of that,” says Saxe, who is an associate member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. “This is a huge vision, of which we are at the very beginning.”