The Confusing Nature of Conflict
Conflict is often complex and confusing. Conflict involves (1) multiple and often vague goals that (2) change during the conflict, (3) are structurally incoherent, and (4) occur without warning (Sillars & Weisberg, 1987).
In brief, features of conflict resist the thoughtful use of conflict strategies and tactics. Sillars and Weisberg revealed how the emergence of conflict works against developing an effective set of conflict skills that help people manage conflict. Sillars and colleagues have also shown (e.g., Sillars, Roberts, Leonard, & Dun, 2000) that parties to conflict are cognitively challenged and make inaccurate interpretations of what happened in a recent conflict. For example, both parties interpret their partners’ intentions and behaviors with only weak connections to what the partners actually did. To obtain a helpful and robust set of strategies, scholars need to account for conflict confusion and complexity.Examining concrete ways that people manage conflict lends insight into communication tactics and can suggest alternative forms and functions of communication tactics (Putnam, 2006). Confusion about conflict can be better understood by looking at segments of interaction. Such segments are more informative than hypothetical scenarios, recollections of previous conflicts, and interviews because actual interaction shows how conflict strategies and their specific tactics begin, progress, and end. And actual interaction shows how general patterns of behavior emerge (Bakeman & Gottman, 1997, p. 150).
Research shows that dissatisfied couples tend to communicate with more negative messages than do their satisfied counterparts. Negative messages also tend to be reciprocated between partners, making them even more frequent. This might sound obvious to some, so we need to look at specific instances of negative message reciprocation. Ting-Toomey (1983) found, for example, that dissatisfied partners exchange an average of ten attack—defend sequences. Chapter 2 discusses specifics of conflict strategies and tactics to elaborate this discussion for our readers.
At this point, we introduce our model of strategic conflict.