People as Objective Witnesses
Both parties to conflict believe that they fairly well understand the cause of the conflict and who was responsible for it, but both parties likely have very different understandings of what occurred.
In some instances, the two versions of what happened are so different that the two people appear to be in two different places, talking about two different sets of issues. Indeed, people sometimes begin a new conflict about what happened during a former conflict; they become convinced the other person is being stubborn, or worse yet, lying about the event. It is probable that each person is telling the truth—the truth as they see it.In addition, conflict behaviors become meshed and mixed largely without the knowledge of both people using them. For example, consider how people disagree about who “started” the conflict, or who said what in response to the other. Who initiated a conflict is known as a punctuation problem (Watzlawick, Beavan, & Jackson, 1967). People hold a very loose grasp on who initiated and changed the progression of a conflict interaction, so they each “punctuate” the conflict differently—most likely in a way that is self-serving and creates its own problem (“You started this by saying you wanted to leave later than planned.” “No, you started this by saying I am always late.”). The certainty of who started the conflict or who said what when becomes rather comical when one person claims, “If I only had a video camera, you would see that I am right.”
As we noted in Chapter 2, people are very selective and biased when it comes to processing information. People cannot provide an accurate account of what happens in conflict episodes. As mentioned earlier, people can sense about 7 million bytes of information each second but can only attend to 1—40 bytes of information per second (Berscheid & Regan, 2005). People must select the bytes they attend to.
Dear reader, for a minute listen to the background noises you have been ignoring and then return to selecting the information you selected before. In recollections of brief conflict interactions, people can recall approximately one third of message sequences an hour following their interactions and only 2% a month later (Sillars, Weisberg, Burggraf, & Zietlow, 1990). And when people view their conflicts on videotape immediately after they occur, their recollections and interpretations of messages that occurred overlap with the other person’s recollections and interpretations by a mere 3% at most (Sillars, Roberts, Leonard, & Dun, 2000). Instead, people’s recollections and inferences about conflicts are driven by their own experiences of the event, largely separated from the goals, interpretations, and behaviors of their conversational partner (Sillars et al., 2000).To complicate matters, people tend to underestimate the impact of their own behavior on their own assessments of the conflict episode and its outcomes (Canary, Pfleiger, & Cupach, 2008). One reason for underestimating their own behavior is that people cannot perceive their conflict behaviors but they do experience conflict just the same (Storms, 1973). In a word, people’s field of vision is external to them but their field of experience is internal to them. This external perception/internal experience difference can affect one’s confidence in managing conflict as well as one’s bias in his or her view of what messages occurred. For example, you cannot really see yourself talk—perhaps you notice your hand movement and glasses frames (if you wear them). Nor can you hear yourself accurately (to hear yourself more accurately, cup your hands behind your ears and talk). So you cannot see the wince on your face, notice how your eyes widen, nor hear the pauses in your responses. Yet other people can see and hear you, because their field of perception is largely focused on you, and that information builds their own field of experience. In brief, people’s perceptions and experiences reflect two different phenomena.
How can two people who participate in the same conflict have two opposing versions of the event—and both be telling the truth? Their perceptions are their reality, even though little agreement exists between the two perceptions (Sypher & Sypher, 1984). Differences in perception lead to faulty communication and misunderstanding, thereby setting up opportunities for escalation of a current conflict or for further conflict (Kowalski, Walker, Wilkinson, Queen, & Sharpe, 2003). However, research shows that mutual understanding is not important to relational quality—perceived agreement on the conflict issue appears most important (Buggraf & Sillars, 1985). Examining the perception process and attribution theory can help explain how interpretation of conflict directly affects conflict message behavior choices.