Mechanisms
for Managing
Conflict: Maintaining the Integrity of Social Relationships
An
inevitable problem faced by any
social
animal is conflict, because of competition for resources, or because
conflicting goals and priorities threaten to undermine
gregariousness. There is evidence that social animals, and
particularly primates, manage conflict
in many ways: for example, they may avoid conflict by adhering to
conventions like dominance or ownership (which Hans Kummer and I
studied in macaques), or they may resolve conflicts that have escalated
by reconciling afterward.
My
empirical research on conflict
resolution stressed experimental approaches, in which the social
interactions
between particular individuals were manipulated. By
preventing two animals from encountering one another after a fight, I
was able to demonstrate how post-conflict friendly reunions work to
restore characteristic levels of
tolerance in particular pairs of monkeys. Before this experiment,
it
was only a presumption that these reunions functioned to reconcile
former
opponents, and this was but one of several possible interpretations of
observational studies. By varying the circumstances in which
animals interacted
with each other, Sylvie Thurnheer and I were also able to show that
reconciliations were more likely between individuals whose
relationships with each other
were more valuable. Using dyads as their own controls, we found
that
the monkeys were much more likely to reconcile after fights when they
needed
one another to gain access to a favorite food, relative to what they
had
done when this food could be accessed independently. This
experiment
also provided evidence consistent with the idea that monkeys can
somehow
evaluate the status of their social relationships, and adjust their
behavior
accordingly, although the exact mechanisms (whether cognitive or
emotional) were not identified.
While
I am not presently conducting
experiments like those just described, I maintain a strong interest in
conflict management. I have deliberately used the term
management to broaden the
behavioral phenomena under consideration from the relatively narrow
topic
of post-conflict reconciliation, which long occupied most attention
among
primatologists. Collaboration with Melanie Killen
(University of
Maryland),
a developmental psychologist, and resulting exposure to the literature
on
social skills and social and moral knowledge in young human children,
has
stimulated theoretical work, especially the development of a context,
both
behavioral and evolutionary, in which to consider the particular forms
of
conflict resolution in the primate order. A 2002 paper with
fellow
ethologists Filippo Aureli and Carel van Schaik expanded our
consideration of conflict management to other
social
animals, so that a comparative perspective, which informs any
evolutionary
argument, becomes more broad-based taxonomically. In a way, this paper
could be read as a challenge to other researchers to look for conflict
management strategies.