He Started It!

He Who Cast the First Stone Probably Didn’t

NY Times

I think all teachers and parents know about this little quirk of human behavior and psychology. An argument ensues in your classroom and if you take the time to try to mediate the conflict and figure out how to resolve it, you can easily get caught up in an endless regression into who did what first to whom that sometimes goes back several periods, days, even years as student A recounts how student B teased him in first grade.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately as the violence in Lebanon/Israel escalates, and even made a passing reference to it in conversation yesterday when asked about my feelings on the situation. Lo & behold the NY Times has an article citing research on the "he started it" phenomenon and applies it to - you guessed it, the conflict in the Middle East. The term "even-numberedness" refers to the idea that it's OK to strike back (physically or verbally) at someone who has harmed you.

That’s why participants in every one of the globe’s intractable conflicts — from Ireland to the Middle East — offer the even-numberedness of their punches as grounds for exculpation.

The problem with the principle of even-numberedness is that people count differently. Every action has a cause and a consequence: something that led to it and something that followed from it. But research shows that while people think of their own actions as the consequences of what came before, they think of other people’s actions as the causes of what came later.

It gets worse. Another feature of conflict is the magnitute of the response to a perceived "punch." Retribution in kind is generally perceived as "fair," but an excessive response to a perceived wrong ("an eye for an eye-lash" as the Times puts it) is generally not. So researchers set up an experiment to see well we can gauge the fairness of our own actions.

In a study conducted by Sukhwinder Shergill and colleagues at University College London, pairs of volunteers were hooked up to a mechanical device that allowed each of them to exert pressure on the other volunteer’s fingers.

The researcher began the game by exerting a fixed amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. The first volunteer was then asked to exert precisely the same amount of pressure on the second volunteer’s finger. The second volunteer was then asked to exert the same amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. And so on. The two volunteers took turns applying equal amounts of pressure to each other’s fingers while the researchers measured the actual amount of pressure they applied.

You can probably guess the results. The pressure escalated as each mis(under)estimated the force he/she was applying to the other. With each round of retribution the pressure increased even though each participant believed that he/she was giving back in kind.

I think this article might be a good point for discussion in my classes this year.