Nonverbal communication and culture. Identity, stereotypes and prejudices, страница 44

The parties involved must practice self-restraint. It's okay to get angry, but it's important to move past the anger – to refrain from acting out feelings.

Maintain Contact. This does not mean that the parties have to stay in the conflict situation. Sometimes we need to walk away for a while. However, the parties should not cut off the relationship. They should attempt dialogue rather than isolate themselves from each other or engage in fighting. Dialogue differs from normal conversation. As conflict specialists Joyce Hocker and William Wilmot (1998: 226) point out,

In dialogue, both people speak and listen to help each other clarify what is being said. . .. [Quality dialogue is slow, careful, full of feeling, respectful, and attentive. . . . This movement towards an apparently opposing viewpoint must be learned; few develop this approach to others without a deep sense of the importance of each human being, and a belief in collaboratively searching for new solutions that honor each person.

Dialogue offers an important opportunity for coming to a richer understanding of your own intercultural conflicts and experiences.

Recognize the Existence of Different Styles.  Conflict is often exacerbated because of the unwillingness of partners to recognize style differences. Barbara L. Speicher (1994) analyzes a conflict that occurred between two student leaders: the committee chair, Peter, an African American male; and Kathy, a European American female, who was president of the organization. The two had a history of interpersonal antagonism. They disagreed on how the meeting should be run and specifically on how data should be collected in a particular project they were working on. They interviewed the meeting participants afterwards and learned that most thought the conflict was related mainly to the interpersonal history of the two and somewhat to the issue at hand, but not to either race or gender.

Speicher (1994: 204) then describes how her analysis of videotapes of the conflict showed that both Kathy and Peter adhered to cultural norms for communication between Blacks and Whites in the United States:

Peter was assertive, took the floor when he had an important point to make and became loud and emphatic as the conflict accelerated. . . . The Eurocentric discomfort with and disapproval of his adamancy [stubbornness, inflexibility] led to either silence (avoidance) or attempts to calm him down and diminish rather than resolve the conflict.

Speicher goes on to say that part of the problem was due to the differences in perceptions of rationalism, "the sacred cow of Western thought," and emotionalism. In Western thought, these two perceptions often are seen as mutually exclusive. But this is not so in Afrocentric thinking. For Peter, he was being rational, giving solid evidence for each of his claims, and he was also emotional.

For his Eurocentric colleagues, high affect seemed to communicate that he was taking something personally, that vehemence precluded rationality or resolution. Speicher suggests that perhaps we need to rethink the way we define conflict competence. From an Afrocentric point of view, one can be emotional and rational and still be deemed competent.

Speicher also points out the danger of attributing individual behavior to group differences: "While such work can help us understand one another, it can also encourage viewing an interlocutor as a representative of a group (stereotyping) rather than as an individual" (p. 206). However, she goes on to say that in this particular case

failure to recognize cultural differences led to a negative evaluation of an individual. The problems that emerged in this exchange were attributed almost exclusively to Peter's behavior. The evaluation was compounded by the certainty on the part of the European Americans, as expressed in the interviews, that their interpretation was the correct one, a notion reinforced by the Eurocentric literature on conflict.