Procedural
Approaches
to Conflict Resolution
Designing
Analytical Support for
Interactive Group Decision Making
Motivation
of the Research Project
Decision making is recognized today as one
of the most important key qualifications and a necessary complement
to basically every specialized education. Lack of competence in
decision making can lead to premature decisions, delayed decisions,
wrong decisions, or no decisions at all. Cases of decision insufficiency
can be found at all levels of society. Policy making is often
inhibited by its own historically developed institutional decision
procedures. Incompetence in decision making frequently leads to
business failures or prevents new enterprises from emerging. Misguided
or missing decisions result in uncoordinated and inefficient organizational
performance, which often becomes even worse under a new organizational
structure.
In a highly specialized, interactive society, many decisions are
made by groups (e.g., spouses, families, teams, executive boards,
political parties, governments, etc.). Decision making is then
further complicated by the clash of individual objectives, differing
assessments of alternatives, or conflicting attitudes towards
risk. With diverging interests the group decision must be negotiated.
Negotiation is a form of human interaction, where two or more
individuals have the opportunity to collaborate for mutual benefit.
The positive aspect of negotiation is that individuals can enjoy
benefits that are not feasible for each of them alone. The negative
aspect, however, comes right beside, because any joint gain must
be distributed among the parties involved. Hence, negotiation
is always related to distribution - either of benefits or of costs.
This distributive dimension is present in every bargaining situation,
and it implies that parties must deal with conflict in one way
or another.
Negotiation over conflicting interests and demands involves two
separate, but interacting, dimensions: one dimension is given
by the problem, which includes the content and the structure of
the negotiation. The other dimension comes with the players and
determines how the game is approached. The structure
is what remains when the players of the game are exchanged. The
behavior of the players and their method of interaction
within the structure detemines the outcome.
In order to provide an analytical
framework for designing group decision-making processes, one must
focus on the game (the problem), while at the same time acknowledging
that it is being played by real players (the negotiators), who
must make decisions. The primary aim of group decision making
should not be the elimination of conflicts via a harmonization
of individuals' views, but rather the management of conflicts
that arise from parties' given preferences. Parties' interests
are to be taken as they come - the resulting conflict (i.e. the
structure) can then be viewed unemotionally as a natural consequence.
This (negotiation) analytic perspective of conflict resolution
enables parties to accept diverging interests and thus
to respect differing views. Group decision making is
not regarded as a game with winners and losers, but rather as
an interactive problem-solving process. What is required then
is a procedural approach to conflict resolution, where the objective
is to theoretically develop practicable methods for problem-solving
in groups.
Structure
of the Research Project
The
objective of the ZiF research group 2001/02 is the theoretical
development and experimental assessment of practicable and perhaps
institutionalizable procedures for group decision support and
conflict resolution. The research group will simultaneously focus
on three main issues.
- A
theoretical foundation for procedural design:
The formal theoretical approach will be directed towards the
development of procedures for interactive decision making
and joint problem solving in groups. The conceived theoretical
foundation is intended to combine normative models of game
theory, descriptive analyses of cognitive and social psychology,
and formal concepts of argumentation theory.
- The
implementation of procedural support:
The focus of the second main research issue is the practicability
of the theoretical approach for real-life conflict situations.
Supported by experimental research in the laboratory and motivated
by the actual practice of dispute resolution outside, the
aim is to transform the theoretical foundation to a workable
basis.
- The development of analytical process support:
Research activities concerning this third issue will concentrate
on the development and deployment of new computational and
visual aids to enhance the practicability of procedural support.
Of particular interest are group decision support systems
and virtual platforms for group interaction in a decentralized
decision environment.
A
characteristic feature of the ZiF research group is the interdisciplinary
approach to all three issues. The most distinguishing aspect,
however, is the combination of these three research fields within
a single project. The project thus emphasizes the practical relevance
of formal theoretical research in the social sciences.