Word differences in news media of lower and higher peace countries revealed by natural language processing and machine learning.

Language is both a cause and a consequence of the social processes that lead to conflict or peace. "Hate speech" can mobilize violence and destruction. What are the characteristics of "peace speech" that reflect and support the social processes that maintain peace? This study used existing peace indices, machine learning, and on-line, news media sources to identify the words most associated with lower-peace versus higher-peace countries. As each peace index measures different social properties, they can have different values for the same country. There is however greater consensus with these indices for the countries that are at the extremes of lower-peace and higher-peace. Therefore, a data driven approach was used to find the words most important in distinguishing lower-peace and higher-peace countries. Rather than assuming a theoretical framework that predicts which words are more likely in lower-peace and higher-peace countries, and then searching for those words in news media, in this study, natural language processing and machine learning were used to identify the words that most accurately classified a country as lower-peace or higher-peace. Once the machine learning model was trained on the word frequencies from the extreme lower-peace and higher-peace countries, that model was also used to compute a quantitative peace index for these and other intermediate-peace countries. The model successfully yielded a quantitative peace index for intermediate-peace countries that was in between that of the lower-peace and higher-peace, even though they were not in the training set. This study demonstrates how natural language processing and machine learning can help to generate new quantitative measures of social systems, which in this study, were linguistic differences resulting in a quantitative index of peace for countries at different levels of peacefulness.

How to live in peace? Mapping the science of sustaining peace: A progress report.

Despite good faith attempts by countless citizens, civil society, governments, and the international community, living in a sustainably peaceful community continues to be an elusive dream in much of our world. Among the challenges to sustaining peace is the fact that few scholars have studied enduringly peaceful societies, or have examined only narrow aspects of them, leaving our understanding of the necessary conditions, processes and policies fragmented, and deficient. This article provides a work-in-progress overview of a multidisciplinary, multimethod initiative, which aims to provide a holistic, evidence-based understanding of how peace can be sustained in societies. The Sustaining Peace Project, launched in 2014, uses complexity science as an integrative platform for synthesizing knowledge across disciplines, sectors and communities. This article introduces the multiple components of the project and shares preliminary findings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Morton Deutsch (1920-2017).

Presents an obituary for Morton Deutsch, who died March 13, 2017, at 97 years old. Deutsch believed in the power of ideas to rectify serious social problems, and in the role of science to refine our understanding of those ideas. Ranked among the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century, he was a distinguished theorist and pioneer in the study of cooperation, conflict resolution and social justice, as well as a remarkably warm, wise and respectful mentor. Deutsch held numerous leadership positions, including faculty positions at Teachers College, Columbia University and New York University and various presidencies, and accumulated dozens of awards, including eight lifetime achievement awards and the creation of four awards in his name. He also trained as a psychoanalyst and had a private practice for many years. In 1986, he founded the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at Columbia, where he continued to work and welcome students well into his 90s. (PsycINFO Database Record

Moving on or digging deeper: Regulatory mode and interpersonal conflict resolution.

Conflict resolution, in its most basic sense, requires movement and change between opposing motivational states. Although scholars and practitioners have long acknowledged this point, research has yet to investigate whether individual differences in the motivation for movement from state-to-state influence conflict resolution processes. Regulatory Mode Theory (RMT) describes this fundamental motivation as locomotion. RMT simultaneously describes an orthogonal motivational emphasis on assessment, a tendency for critical evaluation and comparison. We argue that this tendency, in the absence of a stronger motivation for locomotion, can obstruct peoples' propensity to reconcile. Five studies, using diverse measures and methods, found that the predominance of an individual's locomotion over assessment facilitates interpersonal conflict resolution. The first two studies present participants with hypothetical conflict scenarios to examine how chronic (Study 1) and experimentally induced (Study 2) individual differences in locomotion predominance influence the motivation to reconcile. The next two studies investigate this relation by way of participants' own conflict experiences, both through essay recall of previous conflict events (Study 3) and verbal narratives of ongoing conflict issues (Study 4). We then explore this association in the context of real-world conflict discussions between roommates (Study 5). Lastly, we examine results across these studies meta-analytically (Study 6). Overall, locomotion and assessment can inform lay theories of individual variation in the motivation to "move on" or "dig deeper" in conflict situations. We conclude by emphasizing the importance of using RMT to go beyond instrumental approaches to conflict resolution to understand fundamental individual motivations underlying its occurrence. (PsycINFO Database Record

Behavioral and emotional dynamics of two people struggling to reach consensus about a topic on which they disagree.

We studied the behavioral and emotional dynamics displayed by two people trying to resolve a conflict. 59 groups of two people were asked to talk for 20 minutes to try to reach a consensus about a topic on which they disagreed. The topics were abortion, affirmative action, death penalty, and euthanasia. Behavior data were determined from audio recordings where each second of the conversation was assessed as proself, neutral, or prosocial. We determined the probability density function of the durations of time spent in each behavioral state. These durations were well fit by a stretched exponential distribution, [Formula: see text] with an exponent, [Formula: see text], of approximately 0.3. This indicates that the switching between behavioral states is not a random Markov process, but one where the probability to switch behavioral states decreases with the time already spent in that behavioral state. The degree of this "memory" was stronger in those groups who did not reach a consensus and where the conflict grew more destructive than in those that did. Emotion data were measured by having each person listen to the audio recording and moving a computer mouse to recall their negative or positive emotional valence at each moment in the conversation. We used the Hurst rescaled range analysis and power spectrum to determine the correlations in the fluctuations of the emotional valence. The emotional valence was well described by a random walk whose increments were uncorrelated. Thus, the behavior data demonstrated a "memory" of the duration already spent in a behavioral state while the emotion data fluctuated as a random walk whose steps did not have a "memory" of previous steps. This work demonstrates that statistical analysis, more commonly used to analyze physical phenomena, can also shed interesting light on the dynamics of processes in social psychology and conflict management.

Rethinking intractable conflict: the perspective of dynamical systems.

Intractable conflicts are demoralizing. Beyond destabilizing the families, communities, or international regions in which they occur, they tend to perpetuate the very conditions of misery and hate that contributed to them in the first place. Although the common factors and processes associated with intractable conflicts have been identified through research, they represent an embarrassment of riches for theory construction. Thus, the current task in this area is integrating these diverse factors into an account that provides a coherent perspective yet allows for prediction and a basis for conflict resolution in specific conflict settings. We suggest that the perspective of dynamical systems provides such an account. This article outlines the key concepts and hypotheses associated with this approach. It is organized around a set of basic questions concerning intractable conflict for which the dynamical perspective offers fresh insight and testable propositions. The questions and answers are intended to provide readers with basic concepts and principles of complexity and dynamical systems that are useful for rethinking the nature of intractable conflict and the means by which such conflict can be transformed.