EEOC Continues to Focus on Mediation of Discrimination Charges (4/07/08)
Keith Seat

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)

A video game tests racial bias - and the willingness to pull the trigger (4/07/08)
Diane J. Levin

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.)

Barack Obama’s Speech on Race (3/19/08)
Barack Obama
We find Barack Obama's speech on race to be a top flight example of the kind of mature consideration our most divisive issues deserve and need. We here present the text of Senator Barack Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia.

Cross-Cultural Negotiation Insights From The Kellogg School of Management (2/27/08)
Victoria Pynchon

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.

Brains Vary From Culture To Culture—A Lot! (2/19/08)
Stephanie West Allen

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:

Martin Luther King, Jr.: lessons in conflict resolution and negotiation (1/21/08)
Diane J. Levin

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?

Short Canadian film depicts aboriginal woman’s experience with mediation (1/21/08)
Diane J. Levin

“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.

Hopi Reservation Begins Mediation Program with Federal Support (1/09/08)
Keith Seat

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)

Obama: Reflections Of A Hard Core Negotiator (1/07/08)
Robert Benjamin
On Thursday evening, January 3rd, 2008, I watched Barack Obama appear to channel Dr. Martin Luther King and President John F. Kennedy as he gave his ‘audacity of hope’ speech to his supporters after winning the Iowa Caucus. Even someone as constitutionally pessimistic as I am was moved; I wanted to take a chance and believe in the future of this country---again.

Negotiation Tip: Race and Negotiation (11/13/07)
Joshua N. Weiss

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.

 
MP3 File

Los Angeles County Jails to Introduce Mediation (8/20/07)
Victoria Pynchon

(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. 

A Santa Clarita radio station has announced that Los Angeles County is introducing "disturbance mediation training services for jail inmates." 

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.

 

The Wisdom of Native Americans (7/27/07)
Joe Epstein
Native American wisdom focuses on healing wounds, and bringing peace through good feelings, not fear. While mediations are focused principally on legal issues, Native American wisdom teaches us to be mindful of a person's emotional damage as well. Mediators should not only emphasize a need for a legal resolution, but also strive to heal broken relationships, and rebuild personal self-esteem and confidence. Addressing these non-monetary dimensions directly is what makes mediation a unique opportunity for both financial resolution and closure. A mediator can assist in addressing non monetary dimensions by using Native American wisdom. This article will present twelve values inspired by Native American wisdom. Each value will be defined used traditional Native American quotes. We will then use actual stories and give examples and tips on how each value can effectively aid in a dispute resolution. The use of stories to explain basic concepts allows the reader to retreat from a linear thought pattern, thereby giving a context and life to ideas that may otherwise be glanced over and forgotten. We invite you to open your minds to a more balanced approach to mediation and a new understanding of how Native American wisdom can help facilitate the mediation process.

Race and Negotiation Part Deux (7/27/07)
Joshua N. Weiss
In this interview with Dr. Kathrine Cramer Walsh, Josh continues the quest to understand the issue of race and negotiation. Dr. Walsh offers some very useful tips for negotiating in this context.

 
MP3 File

Age Does Matter: Something To Think About (7/23/07)
Phyllis Pollack

      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.   

Questioning Integration (7/09/07)
Colin Rule

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.

Aotearoa New Zealand (7/09/07)
Geoff Sharp

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.

Negotiating Like a Woman - How Gender Impacts Communication between the Sexes (5/24/07)
Nina Meierding, Jan Frankel Schau
Anyone who has ever been married will admit that men and women argue differently. It should be no surprise to learn that women and men negotiate and communicate differently as well. After many years of practicing law and serving as mediators, the authors believe that there are certain ways than men communicate that are distinct from “a woman’s voice.” Mediators and representatives can utilize their knowledge of gender communication to foster better resolutions between parties.

Facing Prejudice In Mediation: What Should The Mediator Do? (4/23/07)
Josefina Rendon
My search for answers on best practices regarding the presence of prejudice in mediation led to a comparative overview of the conflict resolution literature. This article is the product of the information gathered from these sources as well as from conflict resolution practitioners. The answers vary considerably and even contradict each other: ignore or act assertively; balance the power or maximize; educate or use humor; stay on track with legal issues or be transformative, be a “guerrilla” mediator or a humanistic mediator; and so on.

And the Oscar for Best Movie Goes To--- Crash of Racial Stereotypes and Humanitarian Babel (4/08/07)
Elizabeth Moreno
Last year we saw Crash running away with the Oscar, and was acclaimed for not only the best movie of the year, but for its exposure of race relations, bias and stereotypes in American society. Again this year, Hollywood, has by accident, created incredible teaching tools that can be used to raise our unconscious biases and stereotypes which can lead us to recognize unique, individual features of others.

Considerations in Providing Mediation and Conflict Resolution Services to Spanish-speaking Latinos (2/05/07)
Sandy Bacharach
There are many questions, concepts, and “better practices” to consider and explore when providing mediation and conflict resolution services to Spanish-speaking Latinos. This paper explores some of the work I’ve done to ensure that Oregon’s largest nonprofit mediation center, Resolutions Northwest, is and continues to be accessible to Latino communities. Among the range of topics for consideration are: Mainstream Agency/Business Review, Mediation Outreach, Referral Processes, Language, and Multicultural Issues.

Mediators’ And Attorneys’ Perception Of Prejudice In Mediation: A Survey (8/20/06)
Josefina Rendon
Countless times as a mediator, I have had a sense that a party’s language, education, economic status or skin color was an unspoken factor both in the dispute itself and in the process of negotiations and arguments at hand. Recognizing that, not unlike beauty, discrimination and prejudice may be in the eyes of the beholder, I was curious to find out if others have had similar experiences and had reached similar conclusions. I conducted a survey of experienced mediators and advocates. It asked practitioners whether they had experienced discrimination in mediations.

Kiss, Bow or Shake Hands (7/17/06)
Edward P. Ahrens
The title of this little piece is not original. It is taken from the title of a book authored by Terri Morrison who offers a study of the differing cultures of sixty countries. "Kiss, bow or shake hands." Makes a difference whether you're in France, Japan or the good ole USA!

Mediation and Council, Kissing Cousins in Resolving Disputes (6/26/06)
Maurice Zilber & Barbara Zilber The article discusses the similarities between mediation and the council process, an ancient method for arriving at decisions, and suggests how the council process may be used in mediations as another tool in resolving disputes.

Lessons Learned of Mediation in Indian Country: Exploring and comparing transformative mediation process and theory and American Indian values and processes (6/26/06)
Kristine Paranica It is difficult to know where to start in this short discourse. However, the beginning for me, as a transformative mediator, is with the worldview. American Indian people hold a relational worldview. Their spirituality, in most forms, identifies a strong connection to other human beings, or at least to all tribal members or Indians, and the life force of the earth.

Corporations Will Carry The Bottom Line Torch And Ignite The Diversity Fire In The ADR Profession (6/12/06)
Elizabeth Moreno
As Diversity Chair of the ABA Dispute Resolution Section, we have the task of presenting the Diversity Forum at the Annual Conference. This year Corporations were particularly interested in addressing diversity in the ADR field. Unexpectedly, they announced at the Forum that their demands for diversity will extend to ADR providers that they utilize directly and indirectly.