Culture and Conflict

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Culture and conflict are clearly linked.

Culture and conflict are clearly linked. If we consider how important culture is to our identities and how pervasive conflict is in our lives, we can begin to understand how culture influences and guides our conflict experiences. Differences in cultural values, beliefs, and attitudes can lead to conflict directly, and they can also affect how individuals perceive conflict, what their goals are for conflict, and how conflict is handled. Let’s examine two of the innumerable cultural influences on conflict: individualist versus collectivist cultures and sex and gender.

Individualist Versus Collectivist Cultures. Research in the area of race, ethnicity, and conflict often examines differences between individualist, low-context cultures and collectivist, high-context cultures. As you learned in chapter 3, individualist cultures emphasize personal needs, rights, and identity over those of the collective or group, whereas collectivist cultures emphasize group identity and needs. In addition, you’ll recall that people rely more on social norms and nonverbal communication than on what is actually said in high-context cultures. In low-context cultures, people are expected to say what they mean.

According to Ting-Toomey and her colleagues (2000), European Americans are individualist and low context, while Latinos and Asians are collectivist and high context. Thus, European Americans tend to view conflict as a necessary way to work out problems and feel that specific conflict issues should be worked out separately from relational issues. For Latinos and Asians, on the other hand, conflict is perceived as having a negative effect on relational harmony, and conflict issues cannot be divorced from relationships. Because conflict is viewed as damaging to relationships, Asians tend to avoid conflict and often use less direct communication than their more individualist American counterparts (Merkin, 2009).

When it comes to power in relationships, individualist, low-context cultures rely on and compete for tangible power resources. For example, people with power can reward and punish others; power is often asserted through threats and direct requests. In collectivist, high-context cultures, however, power is about gains or losses in reputation and is displayed subtly through indirect requests. Communication during conflict in individualist, low-context cultures is expected to be clear and direct, whereas in collectivist, high-context cultures, people are supposed to pick up on subtle cues and vague verbal messages. So whereas a Canadian parent might assert, “I’m angry with you because you used my car without asking,” a Vietnamese parent may stare at his son or daughter, wait for an acknowledgment of wrongdoing, and then ask, “Why did you take the car without asking?” Understanding these very influential differences between cultures can help us understand how confusion, frustration, and miscommunication can happen when communicating across cultures.

Sex and Gender. In the 2010 film The Kids Are All Right, mothers Jules and Nic are worried about their teenaged son, Laser, who appears withdrawn. They ask him, over and over, if there’s anything he wants to talk about. They complain that his friend Clay is a bad influence. They ask him why he sought out his biological father without telling them. But Laser simply does not want to talk. While such nagging female / noncommunicative male stereotypes are standard in fiction and film, there is some evidence to suggest that, in fact, women are more inclined to voice criticisms and complaints, and men tend to avoid engaging in such discussions.

Researcher John Gottman (1994) has studied marital conflict and the differences in conflict behaviors between men and women. He believes that four destructive behaviors are predictors of relationship dissolution: criticism and complaints, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Criticism is attacking your partner’s character, especially when the criticism is weaved into the complaint; contempt is attacking your partner’s sense of self-worth; defensiveness is making yourself the victim; stonewalling is refusing to engage in conflict and withdrawing from the interaction. Gottman (1994) found that women tend to criticize more than men and that men tend to stonewall more than women. Recent research also suggests that sex and gender influence satisfaction level with regard to certain conflict management strategies. Afifi, McManus, Steuber, and Coho (2009) found that when women perceived that their dating partner was engaging in conflict avoidance, their satisfaction level decreased, but avoidance did not cause the same dissatisfaction in men.

The outcome of such behavioral patterns does not mean inevitable doom for relationships. According to Gottman’s Web site, gottman.com, one way of improving conflict is to focus on the bright side of the relationship and give five positive statements for every negative one. In other words, Veronica may well have reason to be upset that Brent continually stonewalls her when she attempts to bring up the topic of marriage. But while she seeks productive ways to address this area of conflict, she might do well to remember the reasons she’s interested in marrying him in the first place. Similarly, Brent might try to focus on Veronica’s traits that bring joy to his life—her sense of humor, her ambition, and her adventurous nature—rather than constantly viewing her attempts to discuss “settling down” as a nagging criticism.

When we think of these aspects of conflict and culture, it is important to remember that assuming cultures are at one extreme or the other is dangerous because it can lead people to believe that differences in culture mean irreconcilable differences in conflict. It may be difficult to understand others’ cultural values, and we may feel compelled to persuade others to see things the way we do, but competent communication in conflict means understanding and respecting differences while working to “expand the pie” for both parties. Even in the most uncomfortable and frustrating conflict situations, we can learn a great deal about others and ourselves through culture.