A major roadblock in any negotiation can often be that each side believes their opponent鈥檚 position is unmovable, according to a group of researchers in Israel. Stand-offs, they say, can end if those involved think their counterparts can adopt a flexible mindset.
To put their theory to the test, they opted to ask Israelis and Palestinians.
of the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel and colleagues surveyed 500 Israeli Jews on , and on their attitudes towards the Palestinians. Volunteers who believed that groups could change tended to have more positive attitudes towards a negotiated peace process.
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To find out if they could change those attitudes, the team then ran three experiments on 76 Israel-born Jews, 59 Israeli Arabs and 53 Palestinians living in the occupied Palestinian territories. In each case, volunteers were randomly asked to read one of two articles, which portrayed groups of people as having either a fixed or a flexible nature. Jewish people were then asked about their attitudes towards Israeli Arabs and Palestinians and vice-versa, as well as how they felt about negotiating and compromising in a peace process.
Volunteers responded differently, depending on which article they had read: those who had read about flexible nature were more open to negotiations and compromises, when compared with those who had been given an article about inflexible human nature. The difference between the two groups was statistically significant.
According to Halperin, this suggests that 鈥渨hen you make people believe that groups have malleable characteristics, they change their attitudes towards the other group and are more willing to make specific compromises for peace鈥�.
So are the findings useful in real world scenarios? , who studies conflict psychology at the University of Edinburgh, UK, is not convinced. He says that while it is striking that people can be made to perceive other groups in a different way, Halperin鈥檚 methods would be hard to implement. The challenge in many conflicts is overcoming a small minority of committed, uncompromising extremists he says. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e the ones you ultimately have to defeat.鈥� Mind games may be of limited use there.
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