Psychological Complexity

3. Factors That Make Conflict Intractable

This introductory article was written by ChatGPT at the direction of Heidi Burgess, who reviewed, edited, and approved the final content.
For more information

Conflicts are difficult to understand because people are difficult to understand. Human beings do not simply calculate their interests and then act rationally to pursue them. They are influenced by fear, anger, hope, loyalty, identity, pride, shame, trauma, moral conviction, habit, and the desire to belong. They also operate with limited attention, imperfect memory, and incomplete information. This means that understanding why people act as they do in conflict requires attention not only to their stated positions, but also to the psychological processes that shape how they perceive threats, interpret evidence, and decide whom to trust.

One part of psychological complexity involves the brain and nervous system. People under threat often react quickly and emotionally before they have time to reflect carefully. This can be useful in emergencies, but it can also lead to overreaction, stereotyping, and escalation.

Another part of psychological complexity are cognitive biases, which are systematic patterns of error in how people process information. A review in Frontiers in Psychology describes cognitive biases as unconscious and systematic errors in thinking that affect how people interpret information and make decisions. Humans have hundreds of such biases. To get a sense of just how many we have, and what some of them are, look at the Cognitive Bias Codex. In conflict settings, confirmation bias, attribution error, loss aversion, and motivated reasoning, especially, can all lead people to notice evidence that supports their side and dismiss evidence that challenges it.

Psychological complexity also appears in small-group behavior. People often make decisions in families, teams, organizations, political parties, congregations, activist groups, and government agencies. These groups can provide support, courage, knowledge, and discipline. But they can also create pressure to conform. Britannica's discussion of groupthink explains how members of cohesive groups may accept a perceived consensus, even when they privately doubt that the consensus is correct. In polarized conflicts, group loyalty can make it very difficult for people to question their own side, acknowledge mistakes, or explore compromise.

Constructive conflict work, therefore, has to take psychological complexity seriously. Facts and arguments matter, but they are not enough. People also need emotional safety, respect, time to reflect, opportunities to save face, and processes that reduce fear and defensiveness. They need help distinguishing real threats from imagined ones, and principled disagreement from personal attack. Psychological complexity does not mean that people are irrational or impossible to reach. But it does mean that conflict resolution efforts must be designed for real human beings, not for perfectly calm, rational, and fully-informed decision makers who don't exist.

—————————

This page was created by ChatGPT in response to this prompt. It was then reviewed, edited, supplemented and approved by Heidi Burgess. More information about how and why we are using AI in this way, and about the growing number of ways in which Beyond Intractability is using ChatGPT, Claude and other AI systems to generate content and build out the BI system, is available on our BI/AI Overview Page.