Welcome to lesson twelve, module three. This will be a very
short lecture, but a very important one nonetheless. In this lecture we are
going to be discussing conflict and cooperation. You should read your
text carefully here. Many of these ideas are important not only for your own
experience, they take place on a worldwide scale, especially when we
have global conflict.
Let’s move to slide two and begin. A social dilemma. A social dilemma
puts the common good against the individual good. You do what’s best for
yourself or what’s best for the community or the group. One game is
commonly used when studying social dilemmas is a prisoner’s dilemma. Were
you
might use the tit for a tat strategy; I scratch your back, you scratch
mine for a strategy. However we also have other types of dilemmas. For
example public goods dilemma. This is you can contribute to a pool, a
public pool, and how much you contribute is considered a dilemma. What
you don’t contribute, you get to keep for yourself. This is distinct
from a commons dilemma whereas if you overuse a product, it will
soon be gone, so do you only take what is rightly yours or do you overuse
the product and not care about the common good. Again, all of these pit
the common good versus the individual good. Your book gives some
excellent examples of these.
Let’s move on to slide three. What happens when there is conflict
between happy dilemmas, you have people trying to cooperate or groups
trying to cooperate. How do you deal with threats? The trucking study in
the text is one example. It's often referred to as the Acme Trucking
Game and often is on the subject GRE for those of you attending grad
school. The trucking study demonstrates what happens when people have
differential control. So who’s allowed to block a one way street. That allows one
truck to go from it’s current location to the destination. They’ve done
studies where they tried to open up communication channels to allow
people to discuss and hope that there would be a resolution to the
conflict. However, communication is not the key here. Especially for
the bilateral threat and no-threat conditions. However communication
must be used to establish trust and it’s trust that is key. You can talk
all you want, but if you don’t back it up with action, no one is going
to trust that and the conflict will continue to escalate.
Let’s move on to the final slide of this very short lecture, slide four.
What are some integrative solutions? One is that each party makes a
trade-off or compromises on the points they care least about. This is
common, so at one point you decide perhaps in a conflict with a
roommate, that you were definitely going to be the one that buys the
dishwashing soap, that they will be buying the laundry detergent. You
don’t really care much about this and there’s something larger at stake,
for example, the willingness or unwillingness you may have to have a
party in your apartment, then you may give up on this one small
trade-off. The other thing that is important is to know what you care
about and what you don’t. Each of you are picking your battles. You
don’t want to hold out for something that isn’t very important if
ultimately it’s going to lead to continued conflict. Also the more each
person cares about winning, the less likely that you’ll ever confront
any sort of solution. Caring about winning is not likely to lead
anywhere. Often the best negotiation strategy is defined in integrative
solutions. That is, not that each person gets exactly what they want but
each person gets some of what they want and also not that one person
gets what they want this time and next time the other person will get
what they want. That strategy often also falls apart over the long term.
This concludes lesson twelve, module three. Thank you.
