Workshop on Intergroup Conflict and Its Resolution by Gilad Hirschberger

This four-hour workshop will present the T-politography project – a data-based decision-making tool for intergroup conflict resolution.  First, we will briefly go over the main elements of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. We will then focus specifically on social psychological models of intergroup conflict resolution and their shortcomings. Then, I will present a new conceptualization of intergroup conflict – aggregate control theory (ACT) – that views intergroup conflict as a matrix of control ratios between adversaries. On the basis of ACT, my colleagues and I developed the T-Politography project and decision-making tool. We will see the main features of this tool on two platforms: a JMP based platform for researchers and a web-based platform for decision-makers. We will go over the main features of this tool and see how it may be applied to the conflict. For instance, we will examine whether prolonged aggression may lead to frustration from aggression? What do American officials really mean when the say that Israel and the US have shared values and common interests? And, whether Israel’s settlement activity in the West Bank is achieving its goals.

Gilad Hirschberger is professor of social and political psychology at Reichman University, Israel, Associate Dean of the Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology, and co-director of the T-Politography project.  His work focuses on collective existential threats, and on how threat perceptions influence and shape political cognitions. This work is guided by a multidimensional model of existential threats that he recently developed. In his research, he focuses on threats located in the past that cast a long shadow on the present, such as the memory of collective trauma, as well as on the perception of threats looming in the future, such as the Iranian nuclear threat. This research also distinguishes between threats of commission that are immediate and local (e.g., terrorism) and threats of omission that are universal and slow to develop (e.g., climate change; viral pandemic). Studying populations worldwide, he shows that the perception of these threats is contingent on political ideology such that liberals and conservatives perceive certain threats while ignoring others. Prof. Hirschberger also conducts applied research for various non-government organizations. This research, aiming to define the parameters of a sustainable agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, includes opinion polls and experimental surveys conducted on the general Israeli population and on specific West-Bank settler populations. He occasionally writes for magazines and newspapers in Israel (Haaretz, YNet, Alaxon) and the US (Washington Post).