This paper examines the framework presented by Robert M. Krauss and Ezequiel Morsella in their discussion of communication and conflict resolution. The paper explores how encoding and decoding, the intentionalist paradigm, perspective-taking, and the dialogic paradigm complicate the widely held assumption that communication automatically resolves conflict. Drawing on historical examples including Cold War diplomacy, the Vietnam peace negotiations, and the death of journalist Daniel Pearl, the paper argues that effective conflict resolution requires active listening, filtering out noise, and approaching negotiation as collaborative rather than adversarial. The paper concludes with practical suggestions derived from Krauss and Morsella's principles for becoming more effective communicators.
The paper demonstrates sustained textual engagement with a single source: it paraphrases, quotes, and applies Krauss and Morsella's framework across multiple real-world scenarios rather than relying on surface-level summary. This technique — using a theoretical lens to illuminate external examples — shows the reader how academic frameworks gain explanatory power when tested against historical and contemporary events.
The paper opens by introducing Krauss and Morsella's central argument and its challenge to Western assumptions about communication. It then moves through the encoding/decoding model, the intentionalist paradigm illustrated by the Daniel Pearl case, and the concept of noise in negotiation illustrated by the Vietnam talks. The final sections shift from analysis to prescription, drawing on Krauss and Morsella's principles to recommend active listening and collaborative framing as practical tools for conflict resolution.
The discussion on communication and conflict by Robert M. Krauss and Ezequiel Morsella (2000) is as thought-provoking as it is interesting. It is not just another discussion on communicating our way through conflict, because that approach to resolving conflict has been ingrained in those of us living in Western civilization. Rather, Krauss and Morsella point out that conflict resolution through communication — negotiation — requires more than the parties simply coming together and agreeing upon a solution. Indeed, as Krauss and Morsella succinctly demonstrate, the parties coming together might never adequately address the problems that begin as tensions and then escalate to the level of conflict. However, when the conflict becomes greater than the goals of a society or even of a relationship, communication is a logical avenue of resolution. That does not guarantee that conflict will yield a solution, because, as Krauss and Morsella also point out, communication as a means of conflict resolution requires more than just talking about the problems.
The parties that come together for conflict resolution through communication must be open-minded. They must be willing to listen as well as talk. They must be willing to consider the other side's perspective, and to put that perspective into a framework that brings to light what they, as the opposing party, can contribute to resolving the problems that exist between them. This, of course, is the ideal — and what Krauss and Morsella describe as the expectation when people come together to communicate about problems and how to resolve them. It demonstrates the point that Krauss and Morsella want to make when they emphasize that we, as a civilized society, have broadened the meaning of communication and placed such importance on it that we are often left confused when attempts to resolve conflict through communication fail to bring about resolution.
Krauss and Morsella treat this subject as far more complex than simply looking at two parties coming together to talk through their problems and expecting that, because they do, resolution will follow. The authors cite the experiences of political leaders during the Cold War to demonstrate the many factors beyond a mere willingness to meet that impact communication. Coding and decoding is really the first problem that must be overcome when attempting conflict resolution. It is the reality check for people who view communication as straightforward information transfer — ideas passing from one person to another — which, as such, should make the process relatively smooth.
Words have meanings, the authors note, much like "dot-dot" represents the letter H in Morse code and carries no other meaning. We can see coding and decoding in the animal world as well. Krauss and Morsella point out the sounds made by monkeys that alert one another to a sky predator or a ground predator. One sound represents only the sky predator, the other only the ground predator. The sounds, like the dot-dot, stand for nothing except those specific threats. It is, however, far more complicated when we look at communication in the complex exchanges between humans, because our words can carry meanings beyond what they plainly state, depending on our motivation and intent.
When Krauss and Morsella discuss communication in terms of coding and decoding, they introduce a new dimension to our pre-conditioned concepts about communication being the all-encompassing way to resolve conflict. This is the way we are conditioned to think. We not only believe that communication can resolve conflict — we believe it will. When coding and decoding are taken into account, we must begin to think of communication as a means by which conflict might be resolved, rather than as the guaranteed way to resolve it.
Krauss and Morsella write: "The view of communication implicit in the encoder-decoder position is that meanings of messages are fully specified by their elements — that meaning is encoded, and that decoding the message is equivalent to specifying its meaning. However, it is easy to demonstrate that this is often not the case . . . In human communication the same message can be understood to mean different things in different circumstances, and that this fact necessitates a distinction between a message's literal and its intended meaning (p. 147)."
This is what Krauss and Morsella call the intentionalist paradigm (p. 147). While the authors anchor this concept in the Cold War, it is equally applicable to more recent events. Consider the case of the war in Afghanistan following September 11, 2001. It was widely reported that Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl made contacts in Pakistan who agreed to arrange a meeting between Pearl and representatives of Al Qaeda. The meeting was intended, from Pearl's perspective, to be informative: he wanted to report on the other side of the story and gain some insight into what motivated the attacks against the United States. Pearl met with his contacts — and was not seen or heard from again until Al Qaeda released a videotape of him being murdered by terrorists.
The violence Pearl suffered assaulted our senses because, first, Pearl was a journalist — the ultimate communicator. He had approached the story from a thoroughly Western perspective: the First Amendment and freedom of the press. Implicit in the American understanding of the First Amendment is that journalists have the right to pursue a story and publish it, thereby enlightening the public on views which, however controversial, serve to advance public understanding.
Unfortunately, Pearl appears to have failed to see the full picture as his contacts perceived it. He most likely approached the meeting from the perspective-taking paradigm — the assumption that ". . . individuals perceive the world from differing vantage points, and that, because the experiences of each individual depend to some degree on his or her vantage point, messages must be formulated with this perspective in mind (p. 150)."
Al Qaeda operates under no First Amendment ideology, and freedom of speech directly contradicts the fundamental ideology that the terrorists espouse. The conflict went far beyond any language barrier that Pearl was no doubt prepared to manage. When Al Qaeda agreed to meet with Pearl, he must have assumed that a meeting implied a two-way exchange — even a transfer of ideas from one party to the other. This would be a typical journalistic, even Western, assumption when any group or person agrees to meet with a reporter. It could not have occurred to Pearl that agreeing to a meeting did not mean he would be released afterward, or that his murder would be videotaped and broadcast to the world as a communication of Al Qaeda's position — an unequivocal statement that they are inflexible in their ideology and will kill anyone who holds different religious beliefs or interprets the tenets of Islam differently from them.
The world was shocked by what happened to Pearl. It has long been ingrained into our thinking that conflict is resolved by and through communication. As Krauss and Morsella point out, we would be taken aback if the U.N. Secretary-General encouraged nations to do anything other than come together and talk through their problems. As the tragic death of Daniel Pearl shows, and as Krauss and Morsella make clear, people who come together to communicate do not necessarily share a common mind or a mutual goal of resolution. This absence of willingness to communicate toward a resolution is foreign to the Western mindset. We cannot, however, force our ideas — even our information — onto others who do not want them, simply because we are in the same room with them.
It would be difficult to imagine that Daniel Pearl did not attempt to persuade the men who took his life by arguing why they should spare him. He must have assured them that he could convey their words and, through his reporting, communicate their ideas and position to the rest of the world. Apparently, the violence of September 11, 2001 — and the killing of Pearl and others — is precisely the statement the terrorists wished to make. It is their response to those who would not agree with their religious ideology.
Finally, Krauss and Morsella leave us with the tools to begin working toward becoming better communicators. The process is not difficult, and it can begin immediately. To become an active listener and a cooperative collaborator, we need only start: listen to the person speaking until they have finished what they are saying. Wait until the speaker reaches the end of their thought. Take five seconds to consider what has been said, and then respond, keeping the response within the parameters of what was spoken. What can we expect? We can expect a conversation — a communication — to occur that resolves the problem of word meanings, because those meanings are being worked out by keeping responses within the back-and-forth flow of the conversation. That conversation will most likely, according to Krauss and Morsella, expand and grow, becoming easier and more natural over time.
While communication may not solve all problems — as there will always be individuals and groups who, even when engaged in two-way dialogue, do not have resolution as their goal — the role of communication as a problem-solving tool will only grow in importance as our world community expands. If we practice it with Krauss and Morsella's four paradigms and their principles for improving communicative skill in mind, the problems we face will become fewer and more precisely focused as we approach them together, as collaborators.
Deutsch, M., & Coleman, P. (2000). The Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice. Jossey-Bass Publishers.
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