CONCLUSION

The framework developed here (Figure 19.1) is founded in the role that inter­ests play in negotiation and social conflict and how what people say or demand is often an expression of those underlying interests.

A man liked motoring, his wife walking; he anticipated what her response might be to a suggestion that they motor on Sunday afternoon by tiring her out playing tennis in the morning.... You integrate the different interests without making all the moves... like a game of chess.... A good chess player sees the possibil­ities without playing them out. (Follett, 1940, p. 43)

Is managing interests in such a strategic manner cooperative or con- tentious?⁵ Of course, if the husband’s wife discovered that his interest in play­ing tennis was to get her to go for a drive, that he had an ulterior motive, the game might change; but then again, to her, a game of tennis followed by an afternoon of motoring might be just fine. And there’s the rub,⁶ the creative, silver lining to the dark contentious cloud: the result may be an asymmetric outcome—but this may be just fine with the party who accepts it. Indeed, some laboratory work suggests that strategic misrepresentation does not necessarily interfere with the development of integrative agreements (O’Con­nor and Carnevale, 1997).7

Deutsch (this volume) details the values and norms that underlie construc­tive conflict resolution and includes reciprocity, human equality, shared community, fallibility, and nonviolence.

Notes

1. See http://al-islam.org/kaaba14/1.htm; see also Rubin's (1981) introductory chapter that describes interesting mediations of disputes in the Bible.

2. As an aside, see Carnevale and De Dreu (2006) for a sense of the wealth of perspectives on methods across many disciplines for addressing these and related questions.

3. Kahneman and Tversky (1995) indicate that a cognitive orientation to one's own economic interest, often defined as economic rationality, can inhibit an integrative resolution of conflict, whereas an orientation that also takes in the interests of others may reach agreements that are individually and collectively more desirable than the cognitive orientation of individual economic rationality. As they put it: “It would be inappropriate to conclude, however, that departures from rationality always inhibit the resolution of conflict. There are many situations in which less- than-rational agents may reach agreement while perfectly rational agents do not. The prisoner's dilemma is a classic example in which rationality may not be con­ducive for achieving the most desirable social solution” (pp. 45-56).

4. Presented here with a tribute to Joe McGrath (see McGrath, 1984).

5. Consider creativity in the pursuit of death and war, which was revealed in comments by Muhammad Dahlan, a leader of the Palestinians in Gaza, while lamenting the assassination of a leader of the Black September terrorist group: “When we lost Abu Iyad, we lost the creativity and ability to shape opinion” (Samuels, 2005).

6. Shakespeare, Hamlet:

... To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub: For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,...

7. Where, for example, would the outcome in Follett's motoring example go in the Agreement Circumplex? Do we need a Disagreement Circumplex for asymmetric agreements or for agreements where one party pulled the wool over the eyes of the other? A large issue is how the parties come to know or be aware that they have found a creative, integrative agreement. It may ultimately be a matter of appropriate measurement that takes into consideration objective and subjective factors that are immediate as well as long term.