How unspoken expectations influence conflict behavior

To what extent do you play up to other people’s expectations of you during conflict? In workplace conflict, if they believe you’re aggressive, do you act more aggressively? In a relationship conflict, if they expect you to be a conflict coward, do you behave more timidly?

A classic psychology experiment suggests you do.

University of Minnesota researchers had a hunch that people sense how others view them and start exhibiting the expected behaviors, They set up this experiment, described in PsyBlog’s How Other People’s Unspoken Expectations Control Us:

To test this in the context of interpersonal attraction they had male students hold conversations with female students they’d just met through microphones and headsets. One of the quickest ways that people who’ve just met stereotype each other is by appearance. People automatically assume others who are more attractive are also more sociable, humorous, intelligent and so on.

So to manipulate this, just before the conversation, along with biographical information about the person they were going to meet, the men were given a photograph. Half were shown a photograph of a woman who had been rated for attractiveness as an 8 out of 10 and half were given a photo of a woman rated as a 2 out of 10.

Then the men talked to the women but without seeing them so they didn’t know they weren’t actually talking to the woman in the picture. Half expected to be talking to the attractive woman, half to the unattractive woman. The question is, would the women pick up on this fact and unconsciously fit into the stereotype they had been randomly assigned. By doing it this way the experimenters could rule out the influence of individual personalities and focus on the effect of expectations.

When independent observers listened to the tapes of the conversation they found that when women were talking to men who thought they were very attractive, the women exhibited more of the behaviours stereotypically associated with attractive people: they talked more animatedly and seemed to be enjoying the chat more. What was happening was that the women conformed to the stereotype the men projected on them.

My experiences as a mediator and conflict coach mesh with the researchers’ experiences. People often act differently from one conflict situation to another, perhaps in part because their conflict partners have different expectations from one another. Clients tell me they sometimes find it a challenge to act in the way they want with certain people they sense have harsh, rigid judgments about them.

And while the full picture behind these challenges is more complex than the study addressed, it still offers some insight into the nuances of human behavior and the influences we have that exist below our awareness. Instead of shrugging shoulders and throwing all hope of conflict behavior change to the wind, consider this:

• This research suggests we have some influence over someone else’s behavior. Not in a “let me tell you how you should be acting” way, but through the way we think and anticipate their behavior. Anyone who’s worked with me will find this idea familiar — no skill teaching in the world will work with conflict if we don’t also learn useful frames of mind to adopt alongside the skills. What could happen if you allowed yourself the courage to expect better behavior from someone you’re inclined to condemn?
• This research also reminds us of the importance of addressing our own and others’ reflexive loops, a pattern of subconsciously selecting data that supports our beliefs about someone and excluding data that doesn’t. This is exactly the work my husband and I are doing in our Year 20 Reboot.

Conflict Zen by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at ConflictZen.com.