Week 6 Lecture 1 – Managing Differences Part I 5/4/11- The Mystery of Conflict in Coupleso Consider what everyone wants from their intimate relationships. Nobody WANTS arguments, name-calling, hurtful behavioro Consider what everyone knows about how we should treat our intimate partners.o So how is it that we get into our worst, meanest, loudest, most hostile fights with people we love the most?o Example Study that made this point in an elegant way: They got unhappy married couples – married couples who say they are unhappy, and brought them to the lab They shuffled the partners, they partnered them up with strangers Question of the study: Is bad communication, the inability to get along with someone in an interaction, is that a quality of the person?- If it is then if I am having trouble with my spouse – fighting, name calling – then I should have that trouble with everyone else that I talk to- BUT, that’s not what the researchers found- People were able to talk to strangers perfectly, politely, appropriate, and effective- Gave them a task and they were able to compromise, see each others pov, resolve task they had been given- BUT match those same people with their actual spouses and those negative patterns arise again- The History of Studying Couple Conflictso The idea that the issue is about the individual¸about who YOU are began to crumble in the 60’s and 70’s when divorce rates started to skyrocket When rates grew it became harder to think that it’s just this group of people having the problems Everyone was having the problems, so stigma was goneo When divorce rates climbed in the 1960s, couples therapy became more acceptable. And as a result more couples therapistso The big 'complaint? Conflict. “We can’t communicate, when we try to communicate we fight.” The approach of SLT really came out of these therapists They said that we need to offer these clients something useful They said that we need to study/understand conflict better The assumption being that that’s why they are not getting along It’s not they are bad people – there are too many of them – the problem is that they don’t know how to communicate effectivelyo Social learning theorists assumed that mismanaged conflict was a primary cause of relationship distress. Clinicians as a driving force.o They studied conflict and developed treatments based on this assumption.- What IS Conflict?o “Conflict arises when one person pursues his or her goals and in doing so interferes with the other person’s goals. … Responses to this interference can vary in many ways.” Kurt Lewis 1890-1947 (founding father of social psychology) He distinguishes between two things, only one of which is conflict Conflict is the interference, that state of you getting in the way of my goal, that is conflict THEN after we have a state of conflict we have some behaviors, responses to these behaviors The definition says:- Conflict doesn’t have to be a bad thing- We can response well/poorly to conflict The other profound implication is:- If he defines conflict as when one person interferes with the goals of another person, then the more interdependent two people are the more inevitable it is that conflict will arise- The more interdependent two people are the more your behaviors affect me and the more my behaviors effect you- So if you have lots of effects on me there are more ways for you to either facilitate my goals or interfere with my goals- Conflict is inevitable!o So: In every intimate relationship, some conflict is inevitable.- Since it’s inevitable it’s not about reducing conflict it’s about responding to conflict What matters is how we respond to conflict situations.- In a healthy, effective way Social learning theory focuses on this question.- Not reducing conflict- But handling/addressing conflict, in ways that maintain closeness and doesn’t interfere with closeness- What are the different ways that people manage the existential love/terror of knowing that they actually do have separateness from the person they loveo There is research that addresses this question- The Research Agendao The cross-sectional question: What exactly is it that unhappy couples are doing wrong? What is it that’s making them unhappy? What do people do that seems to be associated with happiness? This is where the research started, can we simply document behaviorally what distinguishes between people who feel close in conflict and people who feel distant and unhappy in conflict Then we’ll move on the longitudinal questiono The longitudinal question: What behaviors predict the future outcome of the relationship? Not what behaviors are associated with good/bad relationship but what behaviors CAUSE good/bad relationship- Methods: How to study conflict?o Self-reports proved inadequate quickly. especially the kind of mundane frequent behaviors that conflict involves o Learning to observe couples was key.o The typical observational conflict paradigm: Locate happy and unhappy couples- First research happened in research rooms- Bring them in and sit them in chairs facing each other- Researchers says thanks for coming in, we are interested in how you interact with each other, we’d like to talk about an area of disagreement in the relationship, not something that upsets you but something that matters to you, so that talking about it might be beneficial to you Ask each spouse to identify a topic- For a while they were asking the male partner to come up with a topic and the female to come up with a topic but that approach isn’t used anymore because:- The wife’s topic was invariably something that she was really irritated by in the marriage- The husband’s topic was frequently ALSO something that she was frequently irritated by, that HE KNEW she was irritated by and that’s why she picked it- There weren’t great differences between their topics Record their discussion for a few minutes- After topic selection they are left in the room to talk and that interaction is then recorded- Some labs hide the cameras, but we rapidly learned that couples are not that self-conscious - Doesn’t matter if they see cameras or not really- In K’s lab faces are both visible on one screen (2 cameras, one over each shoulder) Compare observations of happy and unhappy couples- The first studies done at this time invited two kinds