The Importance Of Group Conflict

Group conflicts is a common feature associated with all kind of social organization. Intergroup conflicts occurs between different groups of people who are competing for dominance. Groups are more aggressive and competitive than individual persons. This conflict is evident with the delinquent adolescence boys in the detention camp who were members of different local gangs. Competition is the main source of these conflicts and to be specific is for valuable resources and respect in a community according to the relative deprivation theory. Group conflicts are very dangerous and statistically it is estimated that over 100 million people died of these conflicts between the years 1916-1964.
Intergroup conflicts are fueled by several concept such

Since the psychological and social lives of the members of the groups are involved in these conflicts, it is best to develop strategies that will involve the group and also the individual members (Oskamp 2000). Intergroup and personal approaches are the best strategies to overcome these biases. In personal approaches one aims at challenging the social cognitive factors which have made these adolescents to be negative perceivers. There is a direct approach and an indirect approach to the underlying issue. Direct approach is based on motivation in an attempt to reduce these conflicts. “Prejudice with compunction” is a notion coined by Monteith and uses the impact of self-directed guilt to reduce intergroup bias (Devine, 2000). This approach make use of the good intentions of individuals who are less prejudiced and a lot of effort, awareness and practice is required to make it work. Another way can be by helping individuals develop an “auto-motive” way of controlling their thoughts thus suppressing their biases. Another alternative method is by large scale retraining although the results of this intervention are not substantial for a permanent change (Dovidio, 2001). Making individuals accountable for their biases and emphasizing on broader and positive ideologies are other direct personal approaches that can help reduce

There are three main approaches in this strategy. The first approach is decategorization and it uses differentiation and categorization to abolish categorization. Bias is reduced by making interaction more out-group than in-group. Although, individual interaction yield much better results than a task focus, one cannot directly generalize individuals and group as the strategies involved in individual approaches will sever the group interaction. According to survey research, having out-group friends reduces bias and thus this supports this strategy. Another approach is recategorization which involves alteration of the existing categories (us and them) and replace them with new superordinate categories (us). Maintaining the salience of category distinctions is another approach and it is based on two main aspects which are: (a) maintaining the salience of group boundaries when in contact so as to encourage generalization across members of the target out-group; (b) mutual intergroup differentiation which will be as a result of difference in expertise and experience of the