What’s in a Wookiee? Inside Our Conflict Styles
From here to Corusanct, every sentient being has a default method of dealing with conflict. Some of us instinctively jump into any fray, and some of us instinctively run from it. There’s even more to it than that. If a bounty hunter gets in our face or throws down a puck with our picture, there are some of us who will instinctively reach out to them to discuss working together for mutual gain. Is there more to engaging in conflict situations, and in conflict-rife negotiations, than our go-to defaults?
Noam Ebner’s chapter in Star Wars and Conflict Resolution I: There Are Alternatives to Fighting, titled “Is It Your Destiny? Conflict Modes and Strategic Choice”, explores these conflict modes or styles that we all develop early on in life. Ebner explains how to identify the conflict style of Star Wars characters, as well as your own style and those of the people you encounter in your day-to-day life.
Ebner focuses on free will and the power of choice: we each have default programing, but much like C-3PO ultimately impersonating a deity or reading Sith inscriptions, we can bypass our compressors, and act in ways we choose too even when these are wildly different than our defaults. After all, Chewie could pull everyone’s arms out of their sockets, and probably had an instinct to do so fairly often… and yet, he hardly ever did so.
In a sense, the issue of freedom to choose is at the heart of Star Wars. Think about it: everybody keeps telling Anakin, Luke, and Rey that their future is predetermined, that they have no choice, that it is your destiny… and they each spend a trilogy bucking those dictations and making their own choices.
On the level of conflict behavior, our personality is imprinted with forces causing us to gravitate toward a similar behavior in each conflict in our lives. Some of us naturally compete, others avoid, some accommodate their counterpart, others cooperate, and some default to compromise.
This default has imprinted powerfully as it has helped us in our early life experiences. And still, it is not helpful in all of our life experiences. Instead, we would do better to identify our default style, work with it when it is likely to serve us well, and replace it intentionally and strategically with another approach in situations where it will disadvantage us.
Consider Luke: he wasn’t born wearing a black outfit; he donned it intentionally ahead of particular interactions in which he felt it would be helpful. Or, consider Anakin, the most fiercely competetive personality in the saga, who knew how to shift gears and become collaborative when it served his purposes.
The chapter explains how to learn this sort of strategic thinking and action from Luke, Anakin, and other characters, while pointing out the shortcomings of always enacting your default style.
Like the Sarlaac discovered, this works for a while, and then it’s the pits.