When people disagree on a topic,
there are several ways they might deal with that disagreement. They might avoid it altogether, either by
pushing off a discussion or just agreeing with the other person in order to end
the conversation. On the other hand,
people can also be active in resolving disagreements.
In that case, people have the
choice between being competitive or cooperative. Competitive resolution means that people are
trying to convince the other person to change their belief. Cooperative resolution means that people are
seeking some kind of middle ground.
There are many factors that can
lead people to take a cooperative or a competitive stance when trying to deal
with a disagreement. For example, the
personality characteristic of openness reflects how willing people are to
consider new ideas. People high in
openness are more likely to be cooperative than those low in openness. The characteristic of agreeableness reflects
how much people want to get along with others.
Agreeable people are also more likely to seek a compromise than
disagreeable people.
An interesting paper by Kimberly
Rios, Kenneth DeMarree, and Johnathan Statzer in the July 2014 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin examined the way
people’s certainty about their beliefs affects their tendency to be cooperative
or competitive.
People’s certainty about their
beliefs can be broken down into two components:
clarity and correctness. Clarity
refers to whether people are sure about what they believe. Each of us has some beliefs that we hold
deeply and other issues on which we are not that clear about exactly what we
believe. Correctness focuses on whether
we think our belief is “correct” in some broader cultural or moral
context.
The authors suggest that the more
strongly people believe their attitude is correct, the more competitive they
will be in discussions. In contrast, the
authors did not assume that clarity would be strongly related to competitiveness.
In one study, participants read
about a proposed tax on junk foods that would be used to defray expenses for
medical care for people who eat unhealthy foods. Participants read about the issue, and then
used a scale to rate both how clear they were about their own attitude as well
as whether they believed that their attitude was the ‘right’ one to have.
After that, participants were led
to believe that they would be engaging in a discussion with another person who
had the opposing view. They were given
the opportunity to select messages that would be sent to the other person
before the discussion. Some of these
sentences suggested competition (“I plan on winning this debate.”). Some suggested cooperation (“I hope that you
will also want to find some common ground on this issue.”). Still others reflected a desire to learn
about the conversation partner’s beliefs (“I’m curious to learn about your
position in this debate.”)
In this study, the more strongly
that people believed that their attitude was correct, the more likely they were
to select competitive sentences to introduce themselves to their partner. Being clear about the attitude did not have a
strong influence on people’s sentence selections.
Other studies in this paper
manipulated correctness and clarity experimentally. To manipulate correctness, people were shown
a story suggesting that most other people agree with their attitude (leading to
high correctness) or that most other people disagree (leading to low correctness). To increase clarity, people were given
opportunities to repeat their belief, which makes it easier for people to state
what they believe.
In these studies, manipulations of
correctness made people more likely to adopt a competitive stance in
discussions. Manipulations of clarity
did not have a strong influence on the way people approached discussions.
Putting this together, then, being
certain of your attitude can affect whether you try to convince other people
that you are right. In particular, the
more strongly you believe that your attitude is the right attitude to have, the
more that you will focus on convincing others.
That also means that if you find
yourself in conflict with others on a regular basis, you might want to see
whether you generally assume that your attitudes are the correct ones. If so, you might consider taking other
people’s perspectives in order to see whether there is validity to opposing
points of view. That may reduce your
tendency to treat discussions as invitations for coercion.
