Conflict and Communication

Donohue, W. A. (1991). Communication, marital dispute, and divorce mediation. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 29-36

Donohue has published a report on communication and how it creates conflicts between individuals. Despite the importance of communication in social conflicts, early researchers often cast it as a backdrop or a taken-for-granted activity. In particular, initial studies that include communication in the Prisoner's Dilemma games often treated it simplistically, as “let the players talk or don't let them talk” or as tacit cues that conveyed preferences through moves and countermoves. Amid this widespread growth, communication scholars are often silent or presumptive about the relationship between communication and conflict. Scholars typically define conflict in a consensual way and then treat the elements of this definition as assumed within their research designs. Thus, characteristics and dimensions are often presumed within the operational nature and measurement instruments of conflict (Weider-Hatfield, 1993). For many scholars, communication is the manifest stage of conflict; that is, it surfaces as social interaction or as strategies and tactics. As such, communication seems bound by a set of presumed relationships between communication and conflict.

Prisoner's Dillema

In the research addressing the prisoner's dilemma game, the effectiveness and accountableness of the method allowing for the emergence of cooperation is generally discussed. The most well-known solutions for this question are memory based iteration, the tag used to distinguish between defector and cooperator, the spatial structure of the game and the either direct or indirect reciprocity.

We have also challenged to approach the topic from a different point of view namely that temperate acquisitiveness in decision making could be possible to achieve cooperation. It was already shown in our previous research that the exclusion of the best decision had a remarkable effect on the emergence of an almost cooperative state. In this paper, we advance the decision of our former research to become more explainable by introducing the second-best decision. If that decision is adopted, players also reach an extremely high level cooperative state in the prisoner's dilemma game and also in that of extended strategy expression. The cooperation of this extended game is facilitated only if the product of two parameters is under the criticality.

Donohue W. A. Analyzing negotiation tactics: Development of a negotiation interact system Human Communication Research vol. 7 (1981a) pp. 273-287

The research discusses the development of negotiation interaction of human communication. The residue of game theory surfaced in social exchange models of conflict and negotiation. Similar to game theory, social exchange emulated an economic approach in which disputants held rational motives to maximize their own self-interests. Unlike game theory, however, disputants maximized profits based on rewards minus costs that were derived from social resources. For communication scholars, social resources were symbolic (e.g., affection, status, control) and any given exchange had multiple resources involved. Social exchange, then, entailed an interaction process or a series of sequential behaviors in which disputants provided each other with resources through their interactions. Drawing from the philosophy of pragmatism, the researcher proposed a transactional model that favored a developmental ...