Psy 400 - Conflict and Resolution and Peacemaking

Conflict and Resolution and Peacemaking

Jennifer Cleveland

PSY/400

December 15, 2014

David Brueshoff

Conflict and Resolution and Peacemaking

A conflict by definition is a perceived incompatibility of actions or goals. Peace is defined by low levels of aggression and hostility in a mutually beneficial relationship (Myers, 2010). There can be many reasons that conflict is created. This reason can range from social dilemmas, competition, perceived injustice and many others. The same can be said for peacemaking. There are many ways to help solve these problems. Conflict resolution has many ways to solve problems and they called the four C’s. These are contact, communication, cooperation, and conciliation (Myers, 2010). These four aspects of conflict resolution can be applied to children as well as adults.

Peacemaking Among Preschool Children

This article is written on how preschool children resolve conflicts and remain friends (Verbeek, de Waal, 2001). There are many factors that influence this such as the context in the conflict happened, and what relationship they had prior to the conflict. Children see conflict and peacemaking different than adults. Children prefer to see behaviors that will initiate and continue relationships instead of the adult version of helping and sharing. Children in preschool are a right age group to study peacemaking. Preschool is where most children start making friends whose relationships are different than that with their siblings and family (Verbeek, de Waal, 2001). They found that friendships before the problem lead to better outcomes than non-friends. Five trained observers watched the free play of these children during the fall and then again during the spring. They observed to identify social relationships, post-conflict, and social activity,

Conflict Resolution

Many of the conflicts between these children are social dilemmas. There conflicts can be fundamental attribution error where both children attempt to explain their behavior in a positive way while explaining the other child’s behavior in a negative ways (Myers, 2010). These social conflicts can be resolved by keeping these groups of children small, so the children feel like they are part of a group. Another way to solve social dilemmas is through communication. In a preschool setting, this means face to face conflict resolution to reach a solution to the problem. Preschool teachers could also change the payoff given to reward cooperation by giving extra recess for positive behaviors. They could remove recess to punish negative behaviors (Myers, 2010). The same could be said for appeals to altruistic norms. If they make recess a reward given when the entire group behaviors is positive, this will create feelings of responsibility for the feelings of the other children in the group. Competition can also cause conflicts with preschool age children. In this group, it could be competition for who is first in line, who gets to help the teacher, or who gets other limited resources (Myers, 2010).