Resolving Conflict: Who Deserves The Cookies?

Dr. Dachner Keltner is a psychology professor at the University of California who studies how "humans negotiate moral concerns." One of the experiments he conducted has implications for conflict resolution. 

Here's the situation:

Imagine you have been arbitrarily designated as the leader of a team of three people who have been asked to develop ideas about how to curb drinking on college campuses.

Or, if you prefer, imagine you've been arbitrarily designated the leader of a team with two other business colleagues who are crafting an employee handbook.

Or suppose that you've been arbitrarily designated the leader of a team consisting of you and two other parents who are drafting a proposal to deal with bullying at your children's school.

Make up a team of your choosing if you don't like any of these situations. Whatever you choose, imagine you have become the leader purely by chance.

Now imagine that after exactly 30 minutes of being together, someone enters the room with a plate of four of your favorite cookies, fresh out of the oven.

You and the other two team members immediately reach for a cookie. They taste as delicious as they smell.

But who gets that fourth cookie still sitting on the plate? The solution is obviously to divide the cookie into three, equal pieces, right? 

Except when this experiment was carried out by Professor Keltner, that's not what happened. The experiment was conducted repeatedly with the same result: The leader of the team took the fourth cookie for himself/herself and ate it with relish, clearly enjoying this second cookie in full view of his/her cookieless teammates.

I first heard of this experiment in a talk given by Michael Lewis, author of "Moneyball," "The Blind Side," and "The Big Short," among other books. He was speaking to the 2012 graduating class of his alma mater, Princeton University.

On one level, this experiment merely confirms the old adage that "power corrupts." But Lewis used the results of the experiment for a slightly different purpose and one that has implications for conflict resolution.

Lewis cautioned the graduates to remember that it is easy when one gets to a leadership position or to a position of authority to imagine one automatically deserves an extra "cookie." And that one, by dint of that position, no matter how lucky one may have been to arrive there, needn't find it necessary to share one's "cookies."

But we don't have to be in a leadership position to face this dilemma. By definition, our point of view is the only one we've got. It's easy from our vantage point to believe it's the only one there is and, therefore, deserving of extra "cookies."

As Dr. Keltner notes on his website, "opposing partisans tend to assume that they alone see the issues objectively and in principled fashion."

At the very least, if we're interested in living and working cooperatively, we should consider the implications of the choices we make about how to divide the cookies.

You can watch Lewis's 13-minute talk at: