Surveying Attractor Landscapes for Conflict: Investigating the Relationship between Conflict, Culture and Complexity

Abstract:     
This survey study will examine how cultural group differences in degrees of structural, social, and psychological complexity affect procedural knowledge (cultural scripts) regarding conflict with members of ingroups and outgroups. In other words, we are interested in identifying differences in cultural conditions which foster a press for coherence and collapse of complexity in situations of conflict, and result in simple, automatic rules for conflicts with insiders, and in evaluatively different sets of simple rules for conflicts with outsiders. This set of more coherent versus more complex orientations and rules for conflict constitute differences in what we term attractor landscapes for conflict. This project, funded as a Multiple University Research Initiative (MURI) through the US Army Research Institute (ARI), aims to develop basic theory to better understand constructive negotiation and collaboration processes in Middle Eastern cultures.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 6

working papers series