Hope and Hopelessness in Intractable Conflicts
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Have you ever been involved in a conflict you just couldn’t imagine being resolved? In other words, a conflict that was so entrenched, you felt hopeless?
Researchers studying the role of emotions in the context of intractable (lengthy, all-encompassing, and possibly violent) conflicts have begun to look at the emotion of hope to understand what effect it can have on conciliatory attitudes. Hope is considered an important emotion in conflict resolution because it involves thinking about different ways of doing things and motivates people to support peace. In addition, the absence of hope in prolonged conflicts can create a self-fulfilling prophecy that creates an atmosphere where, indeed, nothing ever changes.
To shed light on these issues, researchers have recently looked at the role that implicit theories play in the context of extremely difficult conflicts. Implicit theories are often unconscious beliefs that people hold about the changeable nature of people and conditions (incremental beliefs), or their fixed and unchangeable nature (entity belief). They hypothesized that for people to believe that it is possible for a specific conflict to be resolved, they must first believe that violent, prolonged conflicts can change in general.
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