My good friend, Jonathan Corey, encouraged me to re-start this blog, so I'm starting off by posting an Op-Ed piece he had published in the Newport Daily News in Early September, 2010.

Please send letters and comments.

- Universal

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Published in Newport Daily News Editorial Page September, 2010

The study of the Psychology of Peace and Conflict can provide a useful vocabulary to help us better understand how individuals and leaders think about conflict and reconciliation as well as provide insight into why some individuals and groups respond to conflict differently than others.

One key term for understanding how individuals respond in conflict and reconciliation situations is “bias” which is displaying attitudes for or against something. Group bias is a particularly important type, because it combines strong individual self-identification with a group with strong negative beliefs about out-group members. For example, an individual might identify himself or herself as a vegetarian and also hold negative views toward meat-eaters. Another person may think that Fords are the only kind of car worth driving and that anyone who drives a Chevy must be deluded. Simple experiments in a classroom can show that even a temporary and mundane group identification, such as thinking that one belongs to a group who over-estimates dots on a screen as opposed to a group who under-estimates the number of dots, will lead to negative attributions from one group toward the other.

Research has also shown that bias makes it easier for groups to support violence toward one another. By contrast, other research has shown that creating conditions in which opposing groups work together toward a common goal can reduce the sense of group bias and negative attribution, and so can reduce the likelihood of violence between the groups.

Type of personality may also impact how individuals respond to events. A personality type called “Powerlessness” can be identified by a brief questionnaire and those who are strong in this personality type tend to think that they cannot affect social and governmental problems. Interestingly, this personality type then frequently tends to become involved in activism of various kinds such as involvement in protests.

Another personality type, called “Right-wing authoritarianism” (RWA), was first outlined in 1950 by Theodor Adorno and later by Robert Altemeyer. This personality type can be identified using a questionnaire with items like: “Obedience and respect for authority are the most important values children should learn.” Respondents rate their agreement or disagreement on a numeric scale. The key characteristics of RWA are submission to authority, conventional thinking, and support for authoritarian aggression. The RWA scale has been tested many times and has been found to be very reliable. It is interesting to note that investigators have not been able to find a "Left-wing Authoritarianism" personality type.

High RWA individuals seem to submit to authority figures that may be identified as another personality type known as “Social Dominance Orientation” (SDO). Individuals with this personality type, also identified by a simple questionnaire, feel that they should lead others and that their particular group should dominate others.

Altemeyer once ran a “quasi” experiment in which he had students take part in an international relations simulation game conducted over three evenings at a college campus. He first had many students take the RWA and SDO surveys and then purposefully selected mostly low RWA students to play one night, then some high RWA students played also another night and then some high SDO students were also included the third night. He found that the mostly low RWA group made modest progress toward reducing conflict and improving living conditions globally. The game with the high RWA students resulted in higher levels of international conflict. The night with the high SDO students would have resulted in global nuclear war if the game had not run out of time.

This is far from an exhaustive review of relevant terms, and there is much more research available on these and related topics than can be discussed here. How citizens and leaders think and act about justice, peace and conflict should be influenced in part by knowledge of psychological concepts including group bias and personality types as part of understanding how we tend to think and act on the individual and group levels. From this we can also better understand our responses to events on the national or international levels.

Decisions about who leads us, and about the policies leaders devise and execute, should be informed by research about study of the Psychology of Peace and Conflict. This knowledge about our own thinking will make a difference over time in our national responses to conflict so that we may again have some hope for a future that includes periods of real peace with prosperity, periods that have become increasing rare for the United States in the past century, even until today.

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