Causes of social conflict
In any interaction between two people, two groups or two countries, their needs and goals may conflict. Many social problems arise because people (or groups) seek to satisfy their own selfish interests to the detriment of the interests of the whole society. Two laboratory games — «The Prisoner’s Dilemma» and «The Tragedy of Communal Pastures» — reflect the essence of the contradictions between the well-being of the individual and the well-being of society. In real life, you can avoid such traps. To do this, it is necessary to develop rules governing selfish behavior, create small groups in which people feel responsible for each other, provide for the possibility of communication, because it helps to reduce the level of mutual distrust, use material incentives for cooperation and appeal to people’s altruistic feelings.
However, when competing for limited resources, human relationships are often drowned in a sea of prejudice and hostility. Such competition, in which the victory of one means the defeat of the other, quickly turns strangers into enemies, giving rise to unrestrained militancy.
Conflicts also arise when people feel they are being treated unfairly. According to the theory of balance, «fairness» for people is the distribution of rewards in proportion to contributions. Most often, people do not agree with the assessment of their own contribution, and therefore with the fact that rewards are distributed fairly.
Often conflicts contain only a small rational grain of goals that are really incompatible with each other, surrounded by a thick layer of distorted perception by the conflicting parties of each other’s motives and goals. Often conflicting parties mirror each other. If both sides believe that «we want peace, but they dream of war,» each of them can treat the other in such a way that in the end they provoke it into a demonstration of hostility and receive confirmation of their expectations. International conflicts are often fueled by the illusion that a “malicious leader is a good people.”
Ways to resolve social conflicts
The attention of social psychologists is focused on four strategies for helping enemies become friends. They are easy to remember as four «K»:
- Contact,
- Cooperation,
- Communication and
- Consilience (pacification).