Preemptive strikes are actions to eliminate or reduce the potential threat by a costly act, resulting in harm to others. While managing interpersonal conflicts, individuals prefer preemptive strikes to reduce or eliminate what they may perceive as a threat. Yet, it may cost individuals to initiate a preemptive strike and may find themselves in a substantially worse situation after launching a preemptive strike. It is unfortunate that such pricey and destructive preemptive strikes are prevalent in daily interpersonal interactions. The goals of this research were to explore the effects of perceived implicit beliefs on interpersonal preemptive strikes in interpersonal conflict situations using two experiments and to examine the mediation role of hope.
In both experiments, a one-way between-subjects design was used, with the independent variable in Experiment 1 being the implicit belief that threatening conflict is changing/unchanging and the independent variable in Experiment 2 being the implicit belief that the world is changing or unchanging. The dependent variable in both experiments was preemptive strikes, which was measured by the proportion of people who pressed the red button. The mediating variable in both experiments was the hope of subjects in each experimental condition. In Experiment 1, subjects were asked to manipulate their perceptions of implicit beliefs about threatening conflict by reading an article presented in a news form highlighting that "threatening conflict is changing" or "threatening conflict is unchanged". Some studies, however, have suggested that those who did not directly refer to conflict situations, but merely believed that the world is a dynamic and constantly changing place, were more likely to experience hope in the conflicts. Consequently, they were more inclined to make amends with their conflict opponents. Therefore, in Experiment 2, we manipulated implicit beliefs about a changing and unchanging world successfully by building a more neutral intervention.
The findings of Experiment 1 indicated that in interpersonal conflict situations, people with the implicit belief that threatening conflict is constant more often preferred preemptive strikes than people with the implicit belief that threatening conflict is variable. Moreover, individuals with "threatening conflict is changing" implicit beliefs had significantly higher hope than those with "threatening conflict is constant" implicit beliefs. Hope fully mediated the causal relationship between the perception of threatening conflict implicit beliefs and preemptive strikes.
The results of Experiment 2 revealed that in situations of interpersonal conflict, people with unchanging world implicit beliefs were more probably to initiate a preemptive strike than people with changing world implicit beliefs. In addition, individuals who hold implicit beliefs about a changing world have significantly more hope relative to individuals who hold implicit beliefs about an unchanging world. Hope fully mediated the causal relationship between implicit beliefs about a changing world and preemptive strikes.
The results of these two experiments suggest that when people hold implicit beliefs about change, they experience higher levels of hope, which in turn reduces the likelihood of individuals initiating preemptive strikes. This study has illustrated one such mechanism for promoting peace: by indirectly inducing people to believe that conflict or the world is changing, increasing hope people would experience successfully reduced the tendency of individuals to initiate preemptive strikes in interpersonal conflicts. This study helps people to find solutions to the problem of defensive aggression, and thus to facilitate conflict resolution.
Key words
preemptive strikes /
implicit belief /
hope /
interpersonal conflict
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