How Does Culture Influence Conflict Resolution?

Abstract

Psychologists have taken several approaches to modeling how culture influences the ways individuals negotiate interpersonal conflict. Most common has been the approach of searching for cultural traits-general, stable value-orientations that pre - dict a variety of culturally typical conflict resolution behaviors. Increasingly re- searchers have adopted a constructivist approach of locating the nexus of cultural influence in the knowledge structures that guide negotiators’ judgments and deci- sions. In this paper, we advocate extending the constructivist approach by incorpo- rating principles from social cognition research on knowledge activation. We develop dynamic constructivist hypotheses about how the influence of culture on negotiation is moderated by the stimulus or task that the conflict presents, the social context in which the negotiator is embedded, and the negotiator/perceiver’s epistemic state