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Resolution Today
5/15: Mediation is hard work read 5/15: A leading civic advocate is lobbying for violence mediation to be formally incorporated into school curricula throughout Jamaica. read 5/05: Mediation services nonprofit celebrates 25th year read 5/02: Mediation over disabled man's tenancy dispute read 4/30: Diocese, parishioner ordered into mediation over priest's homily read 4/28: Mediation offers quicker, cheaper resolution read 4/27: Workshop will focus on mediation of disputes involving senior citizens read 4/26: Community mediator shows a strong resolve read 4/25: Crown Heights Jews and blacks talk, urging calm after attack read 4/25: Proactive program cuts court expenses with volunteer mediators read read all Keith Seat's Mediation News05/06/08
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The best argument is that which seems merely an explanation.
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The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reported a 9 percent increase in job bias charges last year, for a total of nearly 83,000 private sector filings in 2007. In addition to non-monetary relief, the EEOC recovered over $290 million for charging parties through administrative enforcement and mediation, compared with $55 million through EEOC litigation. Employers continue to enter into Universal Agreements to Mediate with the EEOC, with the total rising by 15 percent during 2007, to over 1,200. The EEOC’s National Mediation Program has a user satisfaction rate of 96 percent, meaning that nearly everyone using the program would do so again.
Federal Information & News Dispatch, Inc. (March 5, 2008) (Subscription Required)
Joshua Correll, a member of the University of Chicago Department of Psychology faculty, in conjunction with his work with the Stereotyping & Prejudice Research Laboratory, has created The Police Officer’s Dilemma, a video game that tests the effect of racial bias on decisions to shoot.
When you launch the game, you are presented with a series of images of young men against various backgrounds. Some of the men hold guns, while others hold innocent items like cellphones or soda cans. Half of the men are black and half are white. You must shoot all armed men but holster your gun at the sight of those who are unarmed. The game tests whether the target’s race influences the decision to shoot. The results are chilling:
Participants shoot an armed target more quickly and more often when that target is Black, rather than White. However, participants decide not to shoot an unarmed target more quickly and more often when the target is White, rather than Black. In essence, participants seem to process stereotype-consistent targets (armed Blacks and unarmed Whites) more easily than counterstereotypic targets (unarmed Blacks and armed Whites).
To play the game, you can test yourself with the beta version. You may be shocked by the results.
(Via On the Ground.)
When you mediate disputes in a major urban center like Los Angeles, you do a lot of cross-cultural negotiation as a matter of course. I've relied in the past upon the Kellogg School of Management's Leigh Thompson and am happy to report that one of her fellow professors, Jeanne Brett has devoted an entire book to the intricacies of negotiating across cultural lines.
Excerpt below from the Wall Street Journal's LiveMint article on Professor Brett's book The Negotiation Dance below. I link to Professor Brett's book Negotiating Globally because I haven't been able to find a link to the cited tome mentioned here.
For full article, click here. And there's an entire page of Kellogg Negotiation Books here!
In The Negotiation Dance: Time, Culture, and Behavioral Sequences in Negotiation, Kellogg School of Management professor Jeanne Brett (with Wendi Adair, assistant professor at the University of Waterloo) presents the intricate patterns of international negotiation, providing insights designed to encourage sure-footedness.
“Negotiating cross-culturally presents many challenges,” says Brett, the DeWitt W Buchanan Jr professor of dispute resolution, “but one of the most important is how people communicate information about their preferences and priorities”.
Brett notes that negotiators from low-context cultures—those that tend to take spoken words at face value, as in the US—typically gain information about the other’s preferences by asking and answering questions. In contrast, negotiators from high-context cultures—those in which people infer additional meaning that may be implied but not directly stated—frequently keep mental tallies of offers throughout the process. This type of behaviour is common in China, India and Japan, among other places.
“It’s important for negotiators from low-context cultures to learn to read information from the offer patterns of the other side, so as not to be at a disadvantage when a negotiator is reluctant to share information directly,” notes the professor, who has authored more than 50 articles and four books, including Negotiating Globally, which won the International Association for Conflict Management’s Outstanding Book Award in 2002.
The Negotiation Dance, published in Organization Science in 2005, presents a model that Brett teaches her students to facilitate tracking offers, infer preferences and priorities and record a visual picture of the progress of the negotiation.
Vickie Pynchon at her Settle It Now Blog is posting about the event she is attending: Mediators Beyond Borders Founding Congress. Yesterday in How to Make Your Opponent Do What You Want Him to Do: Part I she posted a list created by Ken Cloke of 12 Ways Systems Resist Change. In reading it, I was reminded of how much cultures vary. This list would apply in some cultures; in many other cultures it would be a mismatch.
Neurocience research is showing us that the brains of people in different cultures are not the same. Because brains differ from culture to culture, so will resistance to change. Also varying will be how conflict is viewed—and resolved. Here are just a couple of examples of the research on brains and culture.
Recently scientists in Singapore and Illinois compared how the brains of East Asians and of Westerners reacted to visual stimuli. They found that the older East Asian's brains responded differently from the brains of the older Westerners. In an article "Culture sculpts neural response to visual stimuli, new research indicates" principal investigator Dr. Denise Park is quoted as saying:
These are the first studies to show that culture is sculpting the brain.
In another study, researchers looked at how native English speakers and native Chinese speakers did arithmetic. From an Associated Press article about the research:
Simple arithmetic was easily done by both groups, but they used different parts of the brain . . . .
[Both brain/culture studies are linked to at the end of this post.]
Recognizing the advantages of different ways of seeing the world
For global understanding, one of the many exciting results of this kind of research is described later in the AP article:
Richard Nisbett, co-director of the Culture and Cognition Program at the University of Michigan, said “the work is important because it tells us something about the particular pathways in the brain that underlie some of the differences between Asians and Westerners in thought patterns.”
“Ultimately this kind of work will show us . . . how it may be possible to teach Westerners some of the advantages of Asian thought and Asians some of the advantages of Western thought,” said Nisbett . . . .
Nisbett last year reported on differences in the way Asians and North Americans view pictures. . . .
“They literally are seeing the world differently,” he said.
The new work extends his findings, Nisbett said, “in that it indicates that the reasoning differences that we find between Asians and Westerners are really quite deep."
From what we know about neuroplasticity, these findings are not surprising. Of course, people in different cultures see the world differently. Any other results would not be consistent with the brain being sculpted each day, each hour, each moment. Cultures sculpt differently and thus people raised in different cultures will have different ways of learning, thinking, deciding and decoding.
Another way of looking at cultural differences
Even before knowledge of brain differences among the cultures, people studying cross-cultural communication and interaction devised several ways of looking at how cultures differed. One of the most well-known is Geert Hofstede's value dimensions or cultural dimensions. People using Hofstede will look at cultures on these five dimensions:
Click to see other countries and a fuller description of the dimensions.
I compiled several other inventories or dimensions for an exercise I gave my my students in a class I was teaching on culture. Click to see it here (PDF). It is not exhaustive but shows still more ways cultures vary.
Although this chart needs to be redrawn by someone who knows how to design graphics, you can still see the content. There are 16 continua; each culture will lie somewhere on each of the 16. For example, one is called "Time." Where on the continuum between Past and Future orientation does a particular culture lie? Another is "One should place reliance on." Some cultures will fall more toward the Self; some cultures will fall more toward Others.
Back to brains again
Each place on the continua will represent brain differences. When involved in cross-cultural conflict or working with a culture not your own, remembering that the brains observing and acting are not doing so in the same way is a critical key, an essential guide. These brains may vary widely in how they see power, conflict, and conflict resolution, as well as in what they will choose for methods and parties of resolution.
Note: Stages of accepting cultural group differences
Note (added February 18, 2008, at 2:15 PM Mountain): from idealawg - What's universal about mediation? Confidentiality? Ownership of the dispute? Anything?
Note (added February 18, 2008, 8:14 PM Mountain): Today more attention in the blogosphere to Geert Hofstede by Ed Batista at Executive Coaching & Change Management in his very comprehensive post Geert Hofstede on the Dimensions of Cultural Difference. Recommended reading on cultural differences. I post one day and he posts the next about Hofstede—nice synchronicity or even a minor Hofstede buzz?
First study mentioned above: "Age and culture modulate object processing and object–scene binding in the ventral visual area" (PDF)
Second study: "Arithmetic processing in the brain shaped by cultures" (PDF)
Image credit: neji129 at photobucket
One of the best blogs on cognition, behavior, and the mind sciences is The Situationist, which examines the implications of social psychology for law, policymaking, and legal theory. In honor of Martin Luther King Day, which is celebrated in the U.S. today, The Situationist has republished a post from 2007, “Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Situationism“.
Pointing to excerpts from the text of King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail“, this post makes the case that “Martin Luther King, Jr. was, among other things, a situationist“:
To be sure, King is most revered in some circles for quotations that are easily construed as dispositionist, such as: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Taken alone, as it often is, that sentence seems to set a low bar. Indeed, some Americans contend that we’ve arrived at that promised land; after all, most of us (mostly incorrectly) imagine ourselves to be judging people based solely on their dispositions, choices, personalities, or, in short, their characters.
Putting King’s quotation in context, however, it becomes clear that his was largely a situationist message. He was encouraging us all to recognize the subtle and not-so-subtle situational forces that caused inequalities and to question (what John Jost calls) system-justifying ideologies that helped maintain those inequalities.
In reading King’s movingly written “Letter”, and The Situationist post, I would say that not only was King a situationist but a skilled master of negotiation and conflict resolution. Consider what King says about community and the mutual responsibility that flows from it:
Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.
Or this about negotiation and the need to confront issues and talk them through:
You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.
The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.
Read King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail“. What messages does it hold for you, as a mediator, as a negotiator, as a resolver of disputes, or simply as a human being?
“An Aboriginal Woman’s Experience with Mediation” is a six-minute-long film that allows a woman to describe what mediation meant for her and the changes in her life it helped her produce:
…When you go to appear in front of a judge with a lawyer, your lawyer does all the talking and you don’t get to be heard. Whereas with mediation you have a voice and there’s options…and things get worked out on both sides…
Despite its length, this little film speaks volumes, serving as an eloquent reminder to lawyers and judges of mediation’s power to give a voice to those whom the legal system all too often silences.
“An Aboriginal Woman’s Experience with Mediation” was produced by the Vancouver Coastal Region, Ministry of Children and Family Development, for the Mediation Cafe, a mediation forum held in April 2006 in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Thanks to the Peacemakers Trust for the link, which reports on news and events on dispute resolution.
A mediation group funded by a three-year $300,000 federal grant has been formed on a Hopi Reservation, with the goal of being a role model for other Native American reservations. The concept was developed by the late chief justice of the Hopi Appellate Court. A group of nine has received training in mediation tailored to fit Hopi needs and traditions.
The Independent (January 3, 2008)
In this podcast Josh talks about the difficult problem of Race and Negotiation with his colleague Stuart Rankin. Among the things they discuss is understanding race in the context of ones larger identity and how that manifests itself in a negotiation process.
(left: a mother and child reunion outside the L.A. County Jail)
The last time you heard news from the Los Angeles County Jail, it had to do with Paris Hilton's claustrophobia. Today, we bring you less sizzling but perhaps more important news from our local jail cells.
The training, "aimed at reducing racial and gang-related violence" will be provided by the Amer-I-Can Foundation.
According to its website, Amer-I-Can Foundation facilitators "initiated a truce between rival gangs in Watts, California in 1992, the year of the "Rodney King" riots.
The Foundation provides resources to continue this movement to bring about peace and social change.
Settle It Now will be following this story to see what beneficial results mediation has in our overcrowded county jail system.
Often, during the process of resolving a dispute, the parties (if not also the mediator) fail to take into account the age of the parties. In an article entitled: “It seems all those birthdays may be making you happy” by Judy Foreman in the Health Section of the Los Angeles Times, July 16, 2007, the author notes that “many people do indeed mellow with age.” (Id.)
The article focuses on a study conducted in Australia which was published last summer. The researchers found that the
“amygdala – a deep brain center for processing raw feelings especially fear – becomes less reactive to fearful stimuli between the middle and older years while a higher brain center, the medial prefrontal cortex, which governs planning and judgment, gets more active during that same period.” (Id.)
Consequently, older people “are less bothered by things.” This age group focuses more on positive emotions than negative ones. They focus more on quality of life, attaining a “better sense of comfort with oneself and the world.” (Id.)
In short, older persons “focus on what’s really important. . . while discarding things that are less personally meaningful.” (Id.)
Relating this to resolving a dispute, an older party may well be more “mellow” about it: the “principles” involved may not be as important because of other life issues. The older party may tend to be more forgiving, more sanguine and more willing to reach a compromise, secure in the knowledge that “this, too, shall pass.” Focusing on the quality of life rather than the minutiae of life, the older party may be more willing to put the dispute behind her and move on to the “more important” issues in life.
Contrast this attitude with a young person who seemingly “has everything to look forward to, and everything to gain or lose.” (Id.) The young person still has much to fear; the older person does not for she has already succeeded in many ways. This clash of attitudes, on the surface, may appear to lead to an unresolvable dispute or impasse. But, chances are, this “clash” will be resolved, precisely because the older party has, indeed, mellowed, finding the whole dispute to be unimportant. That is, as a result of the positive emotions of the older person, the matter will get settled.
So. . . consider the age of the parties involved in your next dispute. It plays a very important, if, indeed, unconscious role in how they approach the dispute and their willingness and amenability to compromise.
. . . Just something to think about.
David Brooks in the 6/6 New York Times: "Nothing is sadder than the waning dream of integration. This dream has illuminated American life for the past several decades — the belief that the world is getting smaller and that different peoples are coming together over time.
Over the course of the 20th century, the civil rights movement promised to heal the nation’s oldest wound. Racism and discrimination would diminish. Blacks and whites could live together, go to school together and gradually integrate their lives...
All these promises hung in the air, but then crumbled, even in the past few weeks.
The progress in civil rights has not produced racial integration. Amid all the hubbub about last week’s Supreme Court decision, we were reminded that five decades after Brown, blacks and whites do not live side by side, even when they share the same income levels. They do not go to the same schools. And when they do go to the same schools, they do not lead shared lives. As several people noted last week, many educators are giving up on the dream of integration so they can focus on quality.
The movement of peoples, meanwhile, provokes as much rage as assimilation. The immigration reform bill was defeated last week by Americans who feel their country is being torn apart by outsiders who don’t play by its rules, and by a ruling class blind to the threat...
Expecting integration, Americans find themselves confronting polarization and fragmentation. Amid all the problems that have made Americans sour and pessimistic, this is the deepest.
...it could be the dream of integration itself is the problem. It could be that it was like the dream of early communism — a nice dream, but not fit for the way people really are.
For hundreds of thousands of years our ancestors lived in small bands. Surviving meant being able to distinguish between us — the people who will protect you — and them — the people who will kill you. Even today, people have a powerful drive to distinguish between us and them.
As dozens of social-science experiments have made clear, if you separate people into different groups — no matter how arbitrary the basis of the distinction — they will quickly begin discriminating against others they deem unlike themselves. People say they want to live in diverse integrated communities, but what they really want to do is live in homogenous ones, filled with people like themselves.
If that’s the case, maybe integration is not in the cards. Maybe the world will be as it’s always been, a collection of insular compartments whose fractious tendencies are only kept in check by constant maintenance...
This isn’t the integrated world many of us hoped for. But maybe it’s the only one available."
Why is it that David Brooks drives me to madness so? I think it's his thoughtfulness, his intelligence, and his willingness to wade into waters outside the usual talking points and cliched rhetorical tennis matches. I ignore the Malkins and Coulters and Hannitys and all the other shouters on the right because, honestly, it's more effective arguing with a mailbox. But when Brooks writes something like this it sets my teeth on edge. It reveals the inner thinkins of the intellectuals on the right, and that is far more frightening than a month of O'Reilly bullying.
Again, the spiritual crisis that has infected the architects of the current American malaise has not affected many of us in the political left. It is no surprise that Iraq ended here. It is no surprise that a "good vs. evil" orientation has deepened the division and anger in the world, as opposed to healing it. It is a naive perspective to think that the one "true" vision of reality (democracy, Christianity, conservatism, whatever) can "win" over the other side, ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity. Brooks acknowledges this when he says "In a sick society, people are bound by one totalistic identity." But that is exactly the vision articulated by many of the people holding the reins of power these days. We on the left saw all this extending off into the mists even before Bush's first day in office -- maybe not with perfect clarity, but clear enough to know this was absolutely the wrong direction.
So for Brooks to use his own depression to deep six the dream of integration is particularly disturbing. I put this into the box of "tenets of American society that conservatives are giving up hope in because their massive social experiment was a failure" -- Brooks has had a few of these before.
King's vision was for an America where people are judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. No one can question the progress we have made toward that dream in the last forty years. One of the leading candidates for the Presidency is African American. Our last two Secretaries of State were African Americans. I work in Silicon Valley (where they say the only color that matters is green) in one of the most diverse communities I have ever been a part of -- and this is after a life spent in diverse communities. I'm going to lunch with my extended team today and I think caucasians will make up less than 15% of the group.
Some people are threatened by all this. This is the minority of people who riled up in opposition to the Immigration bill Brooks cites as further evidence of the death of integration. But if you look at the younger generation in this country (as the Brooks' own paper reported recently ) they don't share the same hatreds as their parents and grandparents. 100 years ago it was the Jews and the Irish who were discriminated against. All the same racist tropes were trotted out then that are trotted out now against Mexican immigrants. America has embraced this diversity throughout its history, and it's made us stronger. There is no American race, and that is one of the great things about America.
There will always be racism, sure. People are hard wired to notice the differences between people, in particular those that are most visible, like color and ethnicity. There is always a natural affinity to hang with those like you, because then you don't have to worry about the baggage of race. But the angels in our nature enable us to overcome those baser tendencies in human nature, and to see people for what they are: the content of their character. And in my view, the fundamental truth that surpasses the weaknesses of the flesh is that all people are basically good, and that every society has its share of bad apples, regardless of race or culture.
So Mr. Brooks, please... do not compare integration with Communism, a discredited political ideology and right wing buzzword. You do yourself a disservice to let your "sour and pessimistic" mood undermine your faith in the tenets of America that have always made us strong. This kind of rationale is used by those less thoughtful than you to justify racism, classism, and isolationism -- ideas I know you reject. Do not give up on the idea of integration -- your forefathers didn't, and that's one of the reasons why you (as a Jewish American) hold such an august position as a columnist in the most influential newspaper in our country.
I love this country. Some days it takes my breath away.
Like yesterday.
I was asked to help out a group of Maori in trouble.
They wanted to korero (speak) together and had invited me to their hui (gathering) to help.
I was manuhiri (a visitor) and when I arrived at the hui I was met by the tangata whenua (home people) and the kaumatua (elders of the tribe) and we proceeded to hongi (sharing of breath and pressing of noses)
We started with a mihi or whaikorero (welcome) followed by a karakia (prayer).
Then they turned it over to the skinny pakeha boy (not).
And guess what - our stuff works with their stuff.
