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Mistaking love for hate drives intractable conflict

Roots of war While love for our own kind might drive us to fight with others, thinking our enemy is driven by hate can hinder conflict resolution, say researchers.

This bias in "motive attribution" can make us pessimistic about negotiation and compromise, and ultimately lead to intractable conflicts, they say.

"Hatred is an intractable emotion," says social psychologist Dr Jeremy Ginges, of the University of Melbourne.

"It's not like anger. If I'm angry at you I'm angry at something that you've done. If I hate you, I hate you as a person. There's something that's unchangeable about that."

Many conflicts, such as that between the Israelis and Palestinians, are so long-standing that they appear to be intractable.

Despite possible solutions being obvious to outsiders, the parties in the conflict seem to have problems negotiating and voting for compromise, says Ginges.

In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he and colleagues report on a series of studies that found possible clues as to why this is the case.

After interviewing 995 Israelis and 1266 Palestinians, the researchers found each side was biased in how they explained their own, versus the other side's, motives for aggression.

"When we asked Israelis why they supported bombing attacks against Gaza they tended to attribute their support to their love and affiliation for Israel, more than hatred for Palestinians," says Ginges.

"When we asked Palestinians why they supported rocket attacks against Israel they also referred more to love and affiliation for Palestine than hatred for Israel."

"But when we asked each side to explain the motives of the other they got it all wrong."

Each side thought the other side was attacking them out of hate, says Ginges.

The researchers say they have found evidence of a previously unidentified fundamental bias in "motive attribution".

Ginges says the effects were consistent and large, and held regardless of gender, political affiliation and age.

Pessimism

In another study involving Israelis, the researchers found that the bias was linked to pessimism about conflict resolution, says Ginges.

It meant people were more likely to believe the other side could not, and would not, change, and they were less likely to believe that negotiation could result in a win-win outcome, he says.

The researchers also found the same bias operating among American Democrats and Republicans. But they found the bias reduced when members of each party were offered financial incentives for accuracy in assigning motives to the other side.

This also led to a reduction in pessimism about conflict resolution, says Ginges.

"Perhaps ... the money created an incentive to think more rationally."

"It's interesting and we need a lot of future research to work out why, and whether what worked in the American context would also work in other contexts like sectarian disputes in Lebanon or Sri Lanka."

Ginges says the motive attribution bias probably arises from perception.

"If you're the victim of violence in an intergroup conflict, your attention is on the aggression," he says. "You don't see the love that's driving the other group, you only see the outcome."