Conflict Competence

If you have ever been disappointed in, embarassed by, or amazed at how out of character you behaved in a conflict, take heart. Humans generally are hard-wired for sub-optimal conflict incompetence. By understanding this, you can become conflict competent.

 Our brains and bodies instinctively view conflict as a threat, like invading armies at the borders and germs on our hands are threats. Under threat, we revert to the most fundamental of drives – to survive. Our bodies get us physically ready by optimizing what we need to protect the vital functions of strength, speed, and agility. Our minds get us mentally ready by focusing narrowly on the crisis and rejecting extra information. However, this sacrifices higher level brain functions that are less vital to the immediate success of survival, such as memory, sense of time, and cognition.

How we adapted to the threats of conflict began millennia ago. Adaptation is an evolutionary strategy for continuing to thrive on a fitness landscape. Those who do not adapt can perish. We adapted to shut down anything that diverts blood, oxygen, hormones, chemicals, and energy from their essential functions of saving us. And it is all done automatically by the amygdala, the original limbic brain that operates basic feelings. The adaptation to extreme emotions and data overloads is to shut down feelings such as empathy and collaboration.

The design worked incredibly well during the time period in which it was bred into our species, say, about the late Pliocene period, when the humanoid population was walking – more or less upright - around the Afar Depression of present Ethiopia. The design was not given a test run in crowded urban communities, which is either perverse entertainment at human expense, or insufficient prescient to anticipate globalization.

The Australopithecus afarensis, nicknamed Lucy, who may or may not be our indirect ancestor, had very different threats to deal with than we do now. When a predator was bearing down on Lucy, if she lacked these automatic responses to threat, and was contentedly enjoying the day, was slow to run, was easily distracted, or did not fight, she would not have survived to contribute to the gene pool. When a saber–toothed tiger was charging was no time to be thinking what to have for dinner or she would be dinner. We inherited the genes of the fleet-footed, the narrowly focused, and the fierce. Feeling compassion for their adversary rarely led to good outcomes for Lucy or her related tribes.

It is a side effect of human biology that clear strategic thinking, when most needed, can be an early casualty of conflict. We still have, despite our sophistication, the same limbic responses to basic threats to hunger, thirst, procreation, and comfort that kept Lucy and her kin alive into their old age. Although feeling threatened or attacked affects our  higher brain functions, we make decisions in conflicts without questioning whether our operating systems have full capacity. We narrowly focus on threats we fear, when conflict competence would entail thinking clearly about strategies for making the most of conflict-laden problems. 

From Neanderthal to now, we read into threatening situations what we need to see in order to explain our emotions. If we feel fear, we will perceive a threat in the other person’s behaviour to explain the source of our emotion. We attribute to others what helps us make sense of our feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations. That person’s words and actions become the way that we seek to understand our emotions. The cycle made sense in Lucy’s time.  Now, we do a cycle of attributions, assumptions, and belief systems. By the time we think of alternatives to the conflict, often a conflict cascade has already escalated. Has a limbic response that was originally a fail-safe mechanism, become a design flaw? Not really. Threats still exist and the immediate automatic response to danger still keeps us safe. However, not all conflicts need to be reacted to as threats. Sometimes, becoming instinctively defensive and aggressive can be counter-productive. Then, it can require different conflict analyses and resolution strategies to work with the decisions that want to flow from natural limbic thought processes. The irony of teaching conflict competence is that if higher brain functions were not affected in conflict situations, people likely would not need assistance with their conflict-laden problems.  To be successful in imparting conflict competence would work me out of a job. I am okay with that.