Hello Maria and Reginald,

Maria is right when she sais the psychological conflict is embedded into the environment / social structures. But psychological conflict is more pointed to internal states of one person/individual that happen in order to resolve a conflict, while social conflict points to the interactions which take place. Different explanations from different perspectives.

So at least 'psychological conflict' is something that takes place - in my opinion - anyway. So I am not that sure if a differenation between psychological and social conflict is a proper discrimination for actions/reactions. It seems to be either different fields of research.

I will give you an examples:

Let's say we have a group of cute meerkats. The meerkats society is hierachicaly. Some conflicts are decided by a leader. For example who is allowed to sexual intercourse and who not. Here we have a social and a psychological conflict for each member of the family. Each individual may have their own needs and they have to decide if to follow those needs or give up self determination. If they follow individual needs this may lead to exclusion from the group. I guess those conflicts are more tending to a psychological conflict however the outcome is social. And then again we have conflicts which are more social but nevertheless do show a psychological conflict. For example if the family is hunting. Here we have more teamplay because it would be too expensive to only rely to a leader. However each individual by itself must make decissions.

As a rule of thumb I would say those concepts occur in humans too.

1 hypothesis: The more the environment is perceived as secure and one can take the expenses and the group undergoes self determination the more an individual will follow their own needs.

Likewise: The less the environment is perceived as secure and one can't take the expenses the more an individual will give up self determination and follow the groups needs.

2 hypothesis: The more the needs of the group fit the needs of the individual and the calculated outcome the more teamplay.

El conflicto psicológico es social, ambos se implican mutuamente, creo que allí está la dificultad.

Dear Maria,

Is the following Google translation a good translation of your comment?

"The psychological conflict is social, both refer to each other, I think there is the difficulty."

Hello Maria and Reginald,

Maria is right when she sais the psychological conflict is embedded into the environment / social structures. But psychological conflict is more pointed to internal states of one person/individual that happen in order to resolve a conflict, while social conflict points to the interactions which take place. Different explanations from different perspectives.

So at least 'psychological conflict' is something that takes place - in my opinion - anyway. So I am not that sure if a differenation between psychological and social conflict is a proper discrimination for actions/reactions. It seems to be either different fields of research.

I will give you an examples:

Let's say we have a group of cute meerkats. The meerkats society is hierachicaly. Some conflicts are decided by a leader. For example who is allowed to sexual intercourse and who not. Here we have a social and a psychological conflict for each member of the family. Each individual may have their own needs and they have to decide if to follow those needs or give up self determination. If they follow individual needs this may lead to exclusion from the group. I guess those conflicts are more tending to a psychological conflict however the outcome is social. And then again we have conflicts which are more social but nevertheless do show a psychological conflict. For example if the family is hunting. Here we have more teamplay because it would be too expensive to only rely to a leader. However each individual by itself must make decissions.

As a rule of thumb I would say those concepts occur in humans too.

1 hypothesis: The more the environment is perceived as secure and one can take the expenses and the group undergoes self determination the more an individual will follow their own needs.

Likewise: The less the environment is perceived as secure and one can't take the expenses the more an individual will give up self determination and follow the groups needs.

2 hypothesis: The more the needs of the group fit the needs of the individual and the calculated outcome the more teamplay.

Dear Carmen,

Your comment is very helpful. It is also thought provoking.

Carmen has very well describet both types of conflict and her answer makes perfect sense from the perspective of current knowledge.

I am certainly with the opinion that social conflict is more tractable for the reasons that Carmen stated.

As Carmen pointed out the two are intertwined. Every social conflict has psychological conflicts embeded. So Part of the answer is whether the 'team' is coherent in the beliefs that pertain to the conflict in hand. If they are coherent, then the conflict is probably easier sorted in a social context. If they are disparate in viewpoints, then the conflict is VERY difficult to solve because their individual psychological conflicts hhave to be dealt with first.

Hello

In my opinion although psychological conflict is easier to resolve but it has more consequences. Unresolved psychological conflicts are more perdurable, thus it depend on the issue, sometime it is easier and better to resolve psychological conflict

In my opinion,

Psychological conflicts are more difficult to resolve, as as it embedded in the internal structure of a human while the social conflict is comparatively easy to resolve.

because there are several other actors that will leads a person towards resolution of social conflict

Reginald, I doubt that it is possible to measure the ease or difficulty of resolving a conflict in equal terms across the different types of conflict. What measure(s) of ease or difficulty do you have in mind? Time to resolve, subjectively perceived effort or (dis)comfort, objective effort invested... it seems that the options are almost endless.

And, regarding social conflict, things become even more complicated when there is more than one group involved - just think about protracted intergroup conflicts such as Northern Ireland or the Israeli-Palestinian one.

Hello Gerd,

there are some new studies in the field of symbolic interactionism which could be modified or at least reinterpreted with elder conflict theories and newer cognitive studies. I wouldn't give up that fast. Especially interactionism has some great papers when it comes to diversity filled up with a bunch of examples where one can already find this discrimination between individual opinion and represented action. Anyway they suggest further research. Some of Baumeister's research could be reinvented too when being modified. And one huge topic: Hyperindividualism... which is anyway right now more a ghost than a serious topic. I really would like to see a lot more papers based on this topic as - as far as we do believe the philosophers fraction - this develops into a huge social problem with regard to society and internet. And the internet is per se a social room where conflicts do have different dynamics.

I agree that the options are endless. But that's also a great advantage.