Personality and Conflict

The ideal conflict manager has the faith and vision of Joan of Arc, the integrity of Socrates, the persistence of Thomas Edison, the empathy of television’s Mr. Rogers, the practical creativity of Benjamin Franklin, the courage of any Victoria Cross or Medal of Honor recipient, say Tibor Rubin, and the analytical mind of Star Trek’s Mr.

Social psychologists give us a number of more scientifically derived propositions. One is that tolerance of ambiguity is important to understanding how people will react to conflict. Those who can tolerate ambiguity are more likely to see the world in shades of gray and be willing to listen to other sides in a dispute, and more willing to accept a problem-solving or negotiating stance. On the other hand, authoritarian personalities tend toward rapid and absolute solutions. Thus, for example, as the Vietnam War developed, we saw authoritarian conservatives demanding to “bomb them back into the stone age” in one infamous phrase while authoritarian liberals demanded that we “just declare victory and get out,” in an equally infamous phrase.

Adorno (1950) studied the relationship between personality and aggression rooted in prejudice defined as a judgment reached without regard for facts, usually based on oversimplified generalizations or stereotypes. It often is rooted in displacement, the process of transferring one’s anger or frustration to a scape-goat and it often is used to justify aggression, discrimination, or oppression. In an approach rooted in Freud and Marx, Adorno wrote that:

The authoritarian personality does not want to give orders; their personality type wants to take orders [later interpretation suggested that they also love to give orders particularly to people they regard as inferior].

Stanley Milgram (1963, 1983), inspired by the defense so many Nazis mounted during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials that they simply were obeying orders, designed research to determine the credibility of that defense. The experiment was disguised as a study of learning under negative reinforcement in the form of increasing electrical shocks. In fact, the “experimenter” was an actor selected for his professorial appearance and calm authority, reinforced by props such as glasses, clipboard, and white lab coat. Two people who had apparently responded to an advertisement were assigned apparently randomly to one of two roles. The apparent learner was in reality another actor who was then strapped into what looked like an electric chair. The real subject of the experiment was the “teacher,” who administered an ever-increasing shock every time the “learner” made a mistake. The shocks were not real. The “learner,” who had casually mentioned to the “experimenter” and the “teacher” at the beginning of the experiment that he had a heart condition, feigned mistakes and increasing pain and made increasingly desperate demands to stop the experiment. The experimenter ordered continuation of the experiment each time the “teacher” hesitated. Sixty-five percent of the “teachers” obeyed orders by the “experimenter” to continue punishing the “learner” despite his screams. In a 2011 repeat of the experiment for Discovery TV,¹ after forty years of people chanting “question authority,” an even higher 77% of the “teachers” continued as ordered. The experiment strongly suggests that normal men and women are willing to hurt one another if told to do so by someone in authority.

Haritos-Fatouros (1988), in a study of actual torturers who worked for the notorious government of the Greek colonels from 1967–1974, found that the “best” torturers were not sadists, but normal men or women desensitized by grueling and degrading training. For these once-normal people, torture was a method to achieve an end, usually information, so they were less likely to go over-board and kill anyone—at least not before they had given up the desired information.