Communication Failures

3. Factors That Make Conflict Intractable

One of the most common conflict "overlay" factors are communication failures. Such failures are ubiquitous in conflict. They come from unintentional misunderstandings, intentional deception, different worldviews, different sources of information, lack of communication channels, and many other causes.

Unintentional Misunderstandings:

These can happen when one person understands a message to mean something different from what the sender intended to say.  If the communication is verbal, the tone of voice can influence interpretation, making someone think someone else is angry, for example, when they actually are not. Nonverbal cues are also important.  Is the speaker's posture open and friendly, or closed, cold, or aggressively hostile? These too communicate something, but it might not be what the speaker intended to communicate. 

The written word is even more prone to error.  Few people write clearly and well, and if one is writing on social media, the writing is short, and often intentionally inflammatory, in order to get attention. People often, however, do not know how much pain their inflammatory quip might be causing.

"Cognitive biases" also cause misunderstandings.  These are tricks that our brains play on us, without our awareness at all.  For example, one very common cognitive bias is what is called "confirmation bias."  We hear things and if they confirm what we already know, we assume they are "right." If they conflict with what we already know, we assume they are "wrong," and hence we ignore them, or we twist the meaning in our minds so that it does seem to confirm what we already believed after all. Cognitive dissonance is a related problem.  People don't like holding two dissonant ideas in their heads.  So if they "know" that someone is nasty or untrustworthy, and then that person does something nice, that causes what is called "cognitive dissonance." Sometimes this is a good way to mend relationships.  But other times, people just assume that person is trying to pull a trick on them.  They resolve the dissonance by deciding they weren't really being nice, after all.

Intentional Disinformation:

Another communication problem (also a fact-finding problem) is when people or organizations intentionally spread false information, or fail to spread accurate information.  Propaganda is getting to be a huge problem today, particularly on social media, where it is being driven by bots that can spread millions false posts instantaneously, even making them look like they are coming from someone you know and trust.  A linked problem is censorship, when social media platforms, publishers, and/or government agencies prevent the dissemination of factual information because it spreads stories that contradict the prevailing narrative, so quash it as "disinformation," when it really is not.

Different Worldviews:

One of the things that becomes evident when one travels to other countries, or sometimes even different regions or communities within one country, is that the language may be different and behavior expectations maybe different. Things that are seen to be polite by one group of people is seen as rude or hostile to another group of people. Ideas that are thought to be "obvious" to someone is not the least "obvious" to another. This can lead to all sorts of misunderstandings and unintended affronts, that, if not clarified, can turn into deep hostility, polarization, escalation, and growing conflict.

Different Sources of Information:

Different sources of information can lead to different worldviews. When we were young, there were only three TV channels: ABC, CBS, and NBC. Everyone got their news from one of those sources, and for a long time, Walter Cronkite, the evening news anchor on CBS was considered to be "the most trusted man in America." This all changed, of course, with cable news, first, and now social media, both of which "narrowcast" (as opposed to "broadcast") to increasingly narrower audiences.  The "news" that listeners of NPR, and readers of the New York Times and the Washington Post get is vastly different from the news that watchers or readers of Fox News or Breitbart get. And these very disparate sources of information lead to gaping differences of worldviews, which lead to almost a complete lack of understanding about "the other." 

No Information/Communication:

A third communication problem in conflict is no communication at all. As people, organizations, or even countries get increasingly hostile to each other, they tend to cut off most or all communication.  That lets rumors run unstopped, and leads to all sorts of malicious and fearful assumptions about the other that are usually not true.  But they drive the polarization and escalation spirals, and make what might have been a relatively simple dispute into a very difficult conflict. 

The Cost of Communication Failures:

The result of such communication failures is the straining and even complete rupture of relationships between people and groups, the breakdown of the ties that hold us together as a family, community, organization, or society. Communication failures almost always worsen conflict, and make them much more difficult to resolve. That is the essence of our concept of an "overlay" problem.

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