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with time that question has been fairly well settled. The notion that a conflict can be thought of as a problem, and approached by thinking “What is the best way for us to solve it?” has been borne out by many other studies and has been turned into a number of programs of practical training. In 1986 Deutsch founded the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at Teachers College, and this institute, the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, the Conflict Resolution Consortium at the University of Colorado, and other similar centers have had considerable success in teaching constructive methods of settling disputes to negotiators for management and labor, divorce and corporate lawyers, government officials and legislators, teachers and students, tenants and landlords, family members, and others in conflict situations. If unresolved conflict is all too rife in our world, it’s because all too few embattled individuals and peoples know about—or care about—peaceful resolutions of their disputes.

Research on the topic continues. Heidi Burgess, co-director with Guy Burgess of the Colorado Consortium, says that currently the areas of special interest are “the way people frame conflicts” and how this affects “the way the conflict process is conducted and/or resolved” (thus carrying on Deutsch’s original work), and, branching out to other aspects of the field, “the impact of humiliation, anger, fear, and other strong emotions on conflicts and their resolution, the social-psychological effects of trauma, and approaches to trauma healing.”53

Attribution

In the 1970s, cognitive dissonance was displaced as the leading topic of social psychology by a new subject, attribution. The term refers to the process by which we make inferences about the causes of events in our lives and the behavior of others.

Our attributions, whether correct or incorrect, are more responsible than objective reality for how we think, what we feel, and how we behave. Studies have shown, for example, that we commonly attribute greater warmth, sexiness, and other desirable traits to good-looking people than to homely people, and behave toward them accordingly. Again, those who ascribe women’s lower employment status and pay scales to their fear of success and lack of assertiveness treat them differently from those who believe the causes are male prejudice, male dominance in the workplace, and traditional attitudes about woman’s proper role. All these are examples of what social psychologists call the “fundamental attribution error”—namely, “the strong tendency to interpret other people’s behavior as due to internal (dispositional) causes rather than external (situational) ones.”54

The phenomenon of attribution is captured in an old joke. Two men, one a Protestant and the other a Catholic, see a priest entering a brothel. The Protestant smiles sourly at the evidence of the hypocrisy of Catholics, the Catholic smiles proudly at the evidence that a priest will go anywhere, even into a brothel, to save the soul of a dying Catholic.

For those who prefer a more serious example, attribution is illustrated by an early experiment conducted by two former students of Lewin’s, John Thibaut and Henry Riecken. They assigned naïve volunteers, one at a time, to work on a laboratory project, in the course of which each realized that he needed the help of two other people present, one a graduate student, the other a freshman. (Both were accomplices of the researchers.) Each volunteer sought their help and eventually got it. When the volunteers were later asked why they thought the others had helped them, most said the graduate student had helped because he wanted to, the freshman because he felt obliged to. These attributions were based not on anything they had experienced but on the volunteers’ preconceptions about social status and power.55

Much other research has examined an extremely serious form of attribution error—the reasons given by people as to why other people tolerated or committed acts of hatred against groups and even accepted genocide