WHEN DOES A DISPUTANT’S CULTURE AFFECT MEDIATION?

It seems that there is a recognition that one’s culture can have an impact on how one deals with conflicts. That is true, but the problem is that people tend to stereotype other people’s cultural identification.

In a recent neighborhood dispute regarding the cries of a caged dog and disruptive street parking, one neighbor complains that the other confines a dog to an outside cage while also renting rooms to college students who park on the street blocking access to the their mailbox. The conflict issues appear fairly straight-forward.

However, in a pre-mediation interview, the complaining client describes his neighbor as being Chinese and one who appears to house strictly Asian students. He goes on to attribute his neighbor’s behavior to the their Chinese identity. The complainer appears to be White and middle class. During the pre-mediation interviews both parties speak of each other in stereotypical terms:  The one neighbor describes the Chinese-Americans as quiet, shy, standoffish and deceitful. The Chinese-American neighbors describe their middle class White American as arrogant, distant and self-centered. Both increasingly begin to see each other and the conflict in terms of cultural stereotypes. What may have begun as a conflict over a caged dog and parking, now is seen in cultural terms.

Can the mediator ignore the cultural differences the parties are presenting and focus only on the issue of the caged dog and the street parking? I’ve put this question to several mediators.

Some are clear that the issues are just the dog and the parking and say they would restrict the mediation to those topics. Others say that the cultural aspects must be taken into account. Good arguments can be made for either perspective.

Communication research would suggest that one way to deal with this conflict is to help the parties begin to accept a new shared “cultural” identity as “neighbors.” Using this approach the mediator might ask the parties to explain what each understands it means to be neighbors.

Based on how they agree to define one another might make it possible for them to find a way to work out their differences, arrive at some level of understanding and acceptance that makes it possible for them to be neighbors in the best sense of the word.