CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

14. ON THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN 417
ing subtly racist attitudes (e.g., “Blacks are pushing too hard, too fast, and
into places where they are not wanted”; McConahay, 1986, pp. 92–93) and
discriminating against Blacks (e.g., Brief, Buttram, Elliot, Reizenstein, &
McCline, 1995). Considering their lack of insight into their own attitudes
and motives, it is not difficult to imagine a modern racist expressing a
racially insensitive remark without realizing the potential harm created.
Such remarks could signal the existence of conflict in the minds of minority
group members, despite the majority group member’s ignorance of any
conflict. Considering the possibility that minorities are more likely to perceive
diversity-driven conflict, at least under some conditions, Olekalns,
Putnam, Weingart, and Metcalf’s (this volume) discussion of online conflict
led us to wonder whether diversity-driven conflict might be derailed
by computer-mediated communication and whether this might be a potential
benefit of an often problematic medium of communication. That is, the
presence of diversity may be less detectable online (e.g., due to androgynous
names and communication styles). Assuming that the detection of
diversity is a necessary precursor to perceiving diversity-driven conflict,
ignorance of the existence of diversity could render such conflict unlikely.
Beyond the simple question of which party is more likely to first detect a
conflict, we also wondered how the nature of the conflict might be affected
depending on which party first becomes aware of the conflict and on the
lag between when the first and second party both recognize the conflict.
For instance, a woman joins an all male work group. A male member sees
her as competition for a desired promotion, and he sees her sex as providing
her with an unfair advantage. Weeks after joining the group, the
woman realizes that the male in question has been subtly behaving as an
adversary. Would the nature of such a conflict be different if the female
first perceived the male as a threat or if both parties very quickly realized
they were potential adversaries?
We also are led to wonder whether DeDreu and Gelfand’s (this volume)
definition of conflict adequately captured the full potential character of
diversity-driven conflicts. Social dominance theory (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999),
for instance, tells us that most types of group conflict and oppression (e.g.,
racism, sexism, and nationalism) can be regarded as different forms of the
same basic human predisposition to form group-based social hierarchies,
where valued, finite resources (e.g., money, employment, education, and
healthcare) are disproportionately held by the upper echelons of the hierarchy
which dominate groups at the lower levels. It is not difficult to imagine
that those benefiting from such arrangements come up with rationalizations
to justify the inequity (and, thus, do not perceive a conflict), while those not
benefiting see such arrangements for what they are—resource conflicts (e.g.,
DeDreu & Gelfand, this volume). What is perhaps less intuitive (although
it is empirically supported), is the idea put forth within social dominance
theory (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999), as well as system justification theory (Jost,
Banaji, & Nosek, 2004), that subordinate groups (e.g., Blacks and women)
suppressed by dominant ones sometimes participate in and contribute to