The many faces of conflict – Towards an integrative framework for conflict regulation

• Applicant: Professor Dr. David Dignath
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology ; Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 454468927

Conflicts are ubiquitous in our everyday life. They arise when processing incongruent information and they signal the need to assess and intervene in the current course of action. Conflicts come in many different forms, for example, when deciding about whether to go to the gym or stay on the sofa (self-control/goal conflict), when being ambivalent about a person’s character (attitudinal conflict), or when getting ready to respond in a Stroop trial (response conflict). Often conflicts are challenging and need to be regulated. How the cognitive system exerts control over conflict is not only of theoretical interest, but also predictive for success and well-being in later life and failures of control cause enormous cost for individuals, companies and society. Accordingly, the study of conflict and conflict regulation has a long tradition in Psychology and major theories aimed to explain the role of conflict for regulation of behavior. While different subdiscinples within Psychology have pursued this goal independently from one another, only recently, more integrative approaches have become more and more popular. From a broader perspective these attempts highlight the potential of a theoretical synthesis. However, when taking a closer look, the cross references between theories and methodologies of different fields are often rather superficial and pragmatic in nature. Based on a conceptual analysis of the literature, we suggest that theoretical integration of conflict regulation faces two major challenges at this stage. On the one hand, the link between different levels of analysis are often not properly specified. This vertical challenge requires researchers to intertwine regulatory mechanisms at a more abstract and superordinate level with mechanisms at a more concrete and subordinate level. On the other hand, the link between control measured in lab-based conflict tasks and self-reports of real-life control situations is often very small. One aspect that has been proposed to account for these inconsistencies between lab-based research and self-reports is the point in time when conflict regulation is assessed. Accordingly, the horizontal challenge of integration underlines the need for accounts and measures to acknowledge the temporal perspective from goal setting to goal striving, implementation and evaluation. Against this background, we believe that a more careful analysis of concepts, measures and assumed processes is required. This is goal of the proposed research network which brings together a young group of excellent researchers from different subdisciplines. Together, we aim to critically discuss the commonalities and differences between dominant models of control in the respective fields, to identify key mechanisms and boundary conditions, to formulate a common framework on the regulation of conflict and to sketch a research agenda that will test its main assumptions.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks