Conflict Escalation

The concept that I could relate to most out of the group processes chapter in the book was the conflict spirals (Brett et al., 1998; Rubin et al., 1994). These spirals can be defined by frequent retaliation from parties when a disagreement is started. My conflict escalation story begins senior year of high school. It was very close to the end of senior year, my friends and I were very excited about prom and were trying to plan it all out. We would randomly call each other and talk things over. On the day of the conflict spiral my friend Elizabeth (yes, the same one from the last entry) and I were planning out prom. The conflict begun because half of us in the group had dates and the other half did not, we had previously said that we would all have dates for prom so that’s what really sparked the argument. My boyfriend is actually a year younger so I could have gotten away with not bringing him; however everything was already set for him to come. The conflict escalated because we started blaming each other for the inequality of our group and what apparently ‘ruined’ prom. The conversation went from “OMG prom is going to be so fun” to “Ugh! Prom is ruined” in a twenty minute phone conversation. Of course, once we hung up on each other Elizabeth called our other friends and told her what I supposedly said. I got a phone call from one of our other friends telling me to fix everything because Elizabeth was mad. This surprised me because to me it seemed much easier for them to either get a date for prom or to get over the fact that some of us had dates and some of them didn’t. Well, I was wrong, and getting our friends involved made the conflict escalate even more.

What also made the situation worse is that we also experienced group polarization between the ‘date’ and ‘no date’ groups. Group polarization is where the group’s initial opinion becomes exaggerated (Moscovici & Zavalloni, 1969). The “no date” group’s opinion became so exaggerated that it became “we don’t think that your boyfriend is good enough for you and y’all should break up!” after we had been dating for over a year and a half! They became quite demanding and biased towards everything that had happened since we started dating and blamed all our problems on him; when in reality it was everyone’s lack of communication that created the problem. I wish I could tell you a happy ending of how we ended up getting over the whole thing and how we had a great time at prom. However, we still don’t really talk very much, and that last month of senior year conflict ruined four years of awesome memories.



This is the 'date' group and we still had a GREAT time at prom!

References:

Brett, J.M., Shapiro, D.L., & Lytle, A.L. (1998). Breaking the bonds of reciprocity
in negotiations. Academy of Management Journal, 41, 410-424.

Moscovici, S. & Zanalloni, M. (1969). The group as a polarizer of attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 12, 125-135.

Rubin, J.Z., Pruitt, D.G., & Kim, S.H. (1994). Social conflict: Escalation, stalemate, and settlement. New York: McGraw-Hill.