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Overview

The next time you feel personally offended, it could be because something is threatening your identity. You might feel that as a proud liberal or nurturing parent, you’re being attacked. If so, recognizing that no one always does everything perfectly may help calm down the anger and offense that you feel.

At some point in our lives, we will have arguments with others. It might be a good friend, an acquaintance, a parent or perhaps even the love of your life. But if you find yourself arguing often about the same issues over and over again without any progress toward resolution, then it’s time to take action.

So how can we get past the insidious entrapments of interpersonal conflicts? Well, it turns out that our perceptions and identities have a key influence on our approach to conflict.

In this article, you will learn what makes up your identity. You’ll also learn how your identity can be a primary trigger of conflicts and how vertigo relates to arguments.

Big Idea #1: Arguments are more than just emotional or logical; they’re also about identity.

We’ve all had conflicts in the past. But to resolve them, we need to understand their complexity and dynamics. Traditionally, it’s believed that two main factors contribute to conflict: rationality and emotion. We generally begin an argument by appealing to our rational side because it makes sense for us to do so when dealing with money or time issues. Our personalities are influenced by economics; therefore, we try maximize gains while minimizing losses when dealing with these types of situations.

There are two factors that influence conflict. The first is rationality, which involves logical thinking and decision making. The second factor is emotion, or the irrationality of our thoughts and feelings. A third factor to consider when dealing with conflict is identity, which includes our sense of self-worth as well as how we see ourselves in relation to others.

Because of the importance of identity, we can see why tribes are such a powerful influence. A tribe is defined as a group united by similar ideas, values or religious beliefs. We can make this idea more concrete by looking at an experiment that was conducted to show the power of tribe identity in conflicts. The participants were divided into six groups and then asked questions on various themes for 50 minutes. They had to choose one out of six different tribes to represent themselves based on their responses during those 50 minutes. If they chose incorrectly, it would supposedly destroy Earth! Despite these high stakes, only a handful of times did people choose correctly out of 45 attempts across 5 continents!

Participants in the study became so attached to their new identities that they were willing to destroy the planet rather than change their identities. They formed strong bonds with others and didn’t want to lose them.

Big Idea #2: Identities are important to understanding conflict.

People have identities. These are the characteristics that make people who they are, which can be divided into five parts: beliefs, rituals, allegiances, values and emotionally meaningful experiences. Social groups also have identities.

Your identity does not need to be fixed, but it is still a part of who you are. You can change your values and beliefs, yet you will always remain yourself as an individual. Your relational identity is defined by how others perceive or describe you in relation to them.

In the last key point, we learned about the “tribe experiment” in which different groups had to work together to save the world. During their first round of negotiation, they worked as a team. However, tensions arose and cooperation decreased during subsequent rounds.