Conflict Management

Conflict management is the topic of much of my academic work, and my consultancy.

Community = conflict.

Conflict is generally managed in pursuit of win/lose, win/win, or partial win/partial loss solutions. Each has distinct psychological and behavioral implications. Incivility, a hot topic in research on social media, often reflects this win/lose mentality.

Of course, the perceived nature of this conflict, fact-based or feeling-based, matters.

Importantly, individual experiences of conflict can, via exemplification processes, generalize to perceptions of social groups. In turn, people may tune, socially, to these groups, or act to contrast themselves to these groups.

While work demostrating this is still under review, these concepts contribute to my in development model of social depolarization, online.