Conflicts over important moral differences can divide communities and trap people in destructive spirals of enmity that become intractable. But these conflicts can also be managed constructively. Two laboratory studies investigating the underlying social–psychological dynamics of more tractable versus intractable moral conflicts are presented, which tested a core proposition derived from a dynamical systems theory of intractable conflict. It portrays more intractable conflicts as those, which have lost the complexity inherent to more constructive social relations and have collapsed into overly simplified, closed patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting that resist change. Employing our Difficult Conversations Lab paradigm in which participants engage in genuine discussions over moral differences, we found that higher levels of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral complexity were associated with more tractable conversations. Whereas in a pilot study we examined conflicts that naturally became more/less intractable, in our main experiment, high versus low levels of cognitive complexity were induced.

中文翻译：

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变得复杂：复杂性对潜在棘手的道德冲突的对话的影响

重要的道德差异之间的冲突可能会使社区分裂，并使人们陷入破坏性的，难以解决的仇恨漩涡中。但是，也可以建设性地解决这些冲突。提出了两项​​实验室研究，研究了较难解决的道德冲突与难解决的道德冲突的潜在社会心理动态，这些实验检验了源自顽固性冲突的动力学系统理论的核心命题。它描绘了一些更加棘手的冲突，这些冲突已经失去了建设性社会关系固有的复杂性，并陷入了过于简单，封闭的思维，感觉和行动方式中，无法抵抗变革。利用我们的“困难对话实验室”范例，参与者可以就道德差异进行真正的讨论，我们发现，更高水平的认知，情绪和行为的复杂性与更易交谈的对话有关。鉴于在一项前瞻性研究中，我们研究了自然而然变得越来越棘手的冲突，但在我们的主要实验中，却导致了认知复杂性的高低。