Research Digest: Why Our Individual Relationship Efforts Matter For A Peaceful Society
In March 2021 I struggled to engage on Instagram “as normal” as I followed the news in horror as Russia waged war with Ukraine. My content felt so insignificant when compared to the suffering and loss I was seeing unfold before me. And here I am again, in 2023, having the same thoughts about the atrocities in the Israel-Hamas war.
In 2021, I grappled publicly on Instagram about what to do, and to my surprise, during these musings, I discovered I small community of people to talk to… Some of the most interesting and powerful conversations I had were with complete strangers. And from those interactions, I realised that what war threatens is the small, trivial, everyday moments and that through relationships, community and connection, we can recover, protect and preserve peace. And, as such, an account like mine, that asks you to focus on showing care, love and kindness to others, even in seemingly trivial ways, is the basic building block we need to be reminded of in times like these.
Then I turned to the research to see if this notion has support.
It does…
What Makes a Society Peaceful?
An interdisciplinary group of scholars have been working together since 2014 to understand how we build thriving, peaceful societies. Their body of work spans mathematical modelling, linguistic analyses, case studies, reviews of scientific and historic literature and more. By studying the individual, community and macro level qualities that are evident in peaceful societies, they were able to map the effects of each variable (see the article in Berkley's Greater Good Magazine for specifics). This produced a very complicated looking visual representation, but thankfully, they summarise it as follows:
“Through this work, we’ve found that sustaining peace can be understood as a high ratio of positive intergroup reciprocity to negative intergroup reciprocity that is stable over time. In fact, this is exactly the type of interpersonal dynamic that researchers have found to lead to more thriving, stable marriages and families.”
This might remind you of one of the key findings in Gottman’s research: the “magic” 5 to 1 ratio... From longitudinal studies that began in the 1970s, Gottman found that couples that had stable, happy marriages had 5 times more positive interactions during conflict than negative ones.
How this applies to your relationship
Conflict is inevitable, but even when you’re in the thick of escalating negativity, engaging positively is crucial.
Negative interactions include:
Eye-rolling
Being dismissive, ignoring them or walking away
Putting your partner down
Getting defensive
Positive interactions include:
Holding hands or being affectionate
Showing you’re listening
Asking open-ended questions
Highlighting the good
Empathising and validating their concerns
Seeking agreement and solutions
Being playful and making them laugh
Obviously thinking about how to sustain peace is a hugely complicated area of research, but if we can take one thing from it, it’s that our individual contributions matter. Every time we show kindness, compassion, respect and cooperation, whether it’s to our partners or strangers, we are helping to make society more peaceful.
