Binary thinking is a stonewall when it comes to conflict resolution; below are some aspects to ponder when considering solutions:

CONFLICT
    •    there’s binary thinking = wrong vs. right – looking for who is right means both parties are working at cross-purposes (A is
working for ‘A is right’, B is working for ‘B is right’) In an ideal agreement, both parties agree, in order to get your way, the other party
has to agree to it – which means that suddenly the focus is on WHAT BOTH SIDES WANT.
    •    OR ALTERNATIVELY: ‘’what are our shared values’  & why do we see this differently?’ (collaborative thinking) – questions vs. accusations.

TRUST
‘ trust: a confident relationship with the unknown.’ – Rachel Botsman

More and more we need to use conscious energy to constantly question whether to trust people/places/things (this also applies to conflict and debate) and THIS IS EXHAUSTING. We end up with binary thinking (yes or no) as a way of evaluating based on limited facts to make decision making faster.

evolution of trust: local -> institutional ->  (future) distributed
•    local: pre-industrial, where we trusted the people around us, mom’n’pop shops, direct communities
•    institutional: businesses replaced individuals
•    institutional trust was NOT DESIGNED for the digital age. It doesn’t scale properly online/There are too many loopholes for direct accountability.
•    moving towards distributed  (ideally warranted) trust (trust in the age of the internet)
•    no longer top-down
•    using social profiles and reviews help people make the choice which strangers to trust
•    those same reviews make us accountable to online services in new ways (hotel vs. airBnB)
•    ie. block chain structures – removes the need for an intermediary/institution to facilitate an exchange

The Internet/technology gives anyone with access to it the knowledge/resources to do almost anything, which brings up a new concern:
•    either we trust everyone and give everyone ‘god-like’powers (Chat GPT tells us how to pass the bar exam, build bombs, make (fake) news)
•    we trust no-one, leading us to a dystopia of surveillance and monitors (ie. China)
•    we move into an era of ‘warranted trust’ (warranted meaning justified or well-grounded and rational) (definition from Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/trust/)

EMPATHY
•    cognitive empathy imagining ourselves in another person’s situation/ taking their perspective
•    affective empathy (empathic concern) – actually experiencing the emotions of others and wanting to alleviate their suffering (can result
in compassion fatigue – aka. nurses)
•    narrative empathy  (helps develop cognitive and affective empathy): the sharing of feeling and perspective-taking induced by reading, viewing, hearing or imagining narratives of another’s situation and condition. Films/books/art are where you come to care about something in a safe space. You can empathize without having to take part personally. (With loss, sadness, danger, adventure, etc.)

INFORMATION

how we get it
•    social media results in selective curation of all the information we are receiving. (we are NOT ALL GETTING THE SAME INFO, so how can we make reliable choices together?)
•    the loudest detractors get the most attention
•    algorithms prefer conflict (does not show us where we agree)
•    statistical tools / algorithms find and output averages (erase variations and differences and moderative in-betweens)

what it looks like
•    knowledge bubbles and echo chambers – shouldn’t we question this indication from those around us that we seem to live in a world / around people where everything we think is right (and everything ‘others’ think is not?)
•    fact checking in this day and age is no longer valid as a value – because with chatGPT we can have it write a paper with a whole bunch of true facts FOR EITHER SIDE, creating a convincing argument which amounts to fake news.

how we understand it
•    perspective is everything – what if, before every conflict, both sides had to write down what the other person said from memory, and notes had to be compared. How much misunderstandings might we avoid at this stage before the debate even begins?
•    how information will change in the age of AI: train ie. midjourney based on the content IT generates itself (aka ‘average/averaged-out’ information, the quality diminishes exponentially.

fear of moderate beliefs
•    “By being ‘inbetweeners,’ independents are viewed as unfavorably as the other party by both sides, and left out.
•    The authors speculate that this phenomenon could cause those in the middle to drift towards the extremes in hopes of avoiding the ills of being in the middle. Over time, this could lead to a highly polarized society, as nobody is left in the middle at all.
•    In the paper, mathematician Vicky Chuqiao Yang,* sociologist Tamara van der Does,* and cognitive scientist Henrik Olsson*
•    https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/666012

specifically for W.E.I.R.D* oes
•    The higher the education the easier you we to manipulate – we are more confident, less likely to notice what we are doing.
•    We self-justify, post-rationalise, and are better at creative rationale for why what they are doing is okay.

BLACK or WHITE? CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING.

•    Author Jamie Wheal in his book Recapturing the Rapture: God, Sex and Death in a World that has Lost its Mind  suggests replacing the certainty of morals (in conflicts) with the situational relevance of ethics, that is:  it’s no longer the act that is right or wrong but it’s the relationship to the act that determines its value – it’s only wrong to eat people if you are not a cannibal.

* White, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic