Game theory, which uses mathematical models to study human behavior and interactions in games, has applications in areas that range widely from politics and economics to warfare and international relations. It has even been used in the study of conflict and cooperation.

One of the best known examples of game theory in action is the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a non-zero sum game used to analyze cooperation.

The basic premise of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is this: the police have arrested two individuals suspected of being co-conspirators in a crime. The police keep these individuals in separate cells to prevent them from communicating with each other. The police lack enough evidence to convict either of them but offer each of them a deal in the hopes that either or both of them will confess. They tell each prisoner that if he betrays his accomplice, he will go free. If both prisoners refuse to talk, they will both receive only a very light prison sentence because of the lack of evidence. If one betrays the other, the one who betrays will go free, and the one who says nothing will be punished with a lengthy prison sentence. If, however, they both betray each other, they will receive prison sentences, but not as lengthy as if only one confesses.

The dilemma of course is that neither prisoner can speak with the other, so neither knows which course of action the other will choose—will they remain silent, thereby cooperating with each other, or will one or both of them betray the other? The biggest payoff for one prisoner occurs if one betrays while the other remains silent; the best outcome for both prisoners occurs if they both remain silent, thereby drawing only a light sentence.

The choice lies between cooperation and competition. Does the prisoner think only of himself or take his fellow prisoner into account?

(Interesting aside: according to Wikipedia, there is actually a television game show, “Friend or Foe“, which utilizes the Prisoner’s Dilemma in dividing up winnings among members of the team that scores the lowest on the show.)

Of course in real-life conflicts or negotiations, people are able to do what the prisoners in the Prisoner’s Dilemma are unable to: talk to each other. Communication removes the risk and unpredictability that silence produces: without communication, an individual can only anticipate or guess what the person across the bargaining table will do. Communication with the disclosure it brings reveals interests and builds trust. Through communication it is possible to address or minimize risk, discuss contingencies, design mutually beneficial outcomes, and optimize proposals already on the table to maximize benefit. This provides significant rewards for cooperative behavior.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma can be played online at several web sites. These include:

• The Serendip web site, a “gathering place for people who suspect that life’s instructions are always ambiguous and incomplete” (you can’t argue with that).
• Iterated-prisoners-dilemma.net, which allows you to change players’ strategies and run simulations using a number of different variables.
• Prisoners-dilemma.com, where you can also play the game against the computer using different strategies. Click on the link for http://www.princeton.edu/~mdaniels/PD/PD.html to play the game.

One of the lessons which those of us who are conflict management or negotiation trainers seek to reinforce is the notion that it pays to be honorable and trustworthy in our interactions with others. In other words, it is possible to be an effective negotiator and still be a nice guy at the same time.

But people frequently operate under the mistaken belief that if they don’t want to be taken advantage of in a conflict or at the bargaining table or even in life in general, they need to be rude, overbearing jerks.

Being a jerk, however, is generally not an effective strategy in human interaction. It’s a really small world not matter how big we like to think it is. We simply never know when we’re going to cross paths with someone again.

And while people often remember acts of kindness, fairness, or generosity, they never, ever forget when they’ve been treated badly. (If you don’t believe me, just ask any group of people to describe their worst customer service experience—people will outdo themselves in recounting their stories of personal humiliation and outrage at the hands of maitre d’s, store clerks, cab drivers, airline ticket counter attendants, etc. In fact, you won’t be able to get them to shut up.)

It is true that memories of nasty and brutish encounters come back readily when summoned, with all the visceral impact and vividness that they possessed at the moment of their occurrence.

Although less likely to provoke the depth of emotion that these negative memories produce, memories of positive interactions with our fellow human beings possess a certain compelling and luminous quality of their own. These memories are every bit as enduring.

That both these kinds of memories persist is important, especially when you stop to consider how connected all of us are, and that often there are far fewer than six degrees of separation that stand between us and a chance encounter.

Recently I had a chance encounter of my own that brought all of this home—one of those moments that reinforces the beliefs that I hold as a conflict resolution practitioner.

I had a meeting at the offices of a business with which I have been negotiating. One of their managers welcomed me warmly when I arrived and introduced themselves to me. I realized with surprise that it was someone I knew from one of my first jobs straight out of college more than two decades ago. I identified myself, explained where we had met before, and the two of us had a joyous reunion as we discussed people and places I hadn’t thought about in 20 years.

I had fond memories of this person at this job long ago—they had treated me with great kindness, taking me under their wing, and offering me encouragement and good humor at times I needed them most. It was great to be able to tell this person after all those years how much that encouragement and compassion had meant to me at a time when I was fresh out of school, totally inexperienced, and new to the corporate world.

The manager then told our story to the senior executive I was there to meet with. And it led to a discussion at the meeting of the great value in developing and maintaining relationships with the people with whom we work and do business. And as a result the meeting with the executive resulted in a solid foundation for moving forward. On some deep level, that connection had made a difference to the meeting’s outcome.

This was one of those moments when you realize just how very small the world is and how sometimes, without knowing it, we come full circle and arrive at the places and the people where we began.

It is this connectedness that is critical. It stands as the foundation of our ability to create bonds with others. Relationships do matter, whether in families, neighborhoods, or in business. Our capacity to connect, to network, to establish ties, build trust, address conflicts, and problem-solve differences, determines our likelihood of success in business and work—and everywhere else in our lives.

For the first time (at least this is the first time I’ve run across this) the word “mediation” has been used in a promotion for a Hollywood film. In this case, it’s Monster-in-Law, a film due to be released May 13 starring J. Lo and Jane Fonda.

As part of its promotion for the film, Zap2It.com is offering the chance to enter a Monster-in-Law contest to win what it describes as a “‘Monster-In-Law’ Mediation Kit” “containing everything you’ll need to manage your better half’s family”.

If you’re curious about what’s in the kit, it’s definitely not copies of conflict resolution classics Getting to Yes and Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most. Instead the kit provides “24 hours of movies and music that should help extinguish familial flare-ups”.

The Boston Globe recently published “The college rejection letter”, a column by David Nyhan first appearing in 1987, which offers hope by putting into perspective for high school seniors the college application process.

It is indeed that time of the year when around the country high school students await (or dread) the arrival of the college acceptance letter. It is an important rite of passage and marks the transition from dependence and childhood to independent adulthood.

Planning and making decisions about college education involves parents as well, since more often than not it is they who will be providing financial support to enable their children to pursue their academic and career goals. It can be a tough issue even for happily married couples to wrestle with.

But what happens when couples are divorced or going through a divorce? Disputes over how to pay for college are understandably common among divorced or divorcing parents.

Mediation can of course make a tremendous difference here in two cases.

First, as part of the divorce process, a mediator can help a divorcing couple work together to address how to pay for college. Planning ahead can be hard—often when parents divorce, the children involved are young and college seems years away. It can be hard for parents to even imagine their preschoolers as high school graduates. Mediators can make sure parents think not only about the short-term, but think realistically about and plan for the long-term as well. This is where it can definitely make sense as part of that process to consult with a financial planner who can help parents strategize about ways to finance college education.

Secondly, couples who have been divorced for a number of years and and who are having a hard time reaching agreement about paying for college can use mediation to resolve their differences and work out a plan that will be acceptable to both parents.

Apart from being a means for reaching consensus about financing and paying for college, mediation is also useful to address other issues relating to children and their education. For example, children may wish to participate in extracurricular activities or attend summer programs. Or, parents may want to enable their children to attend private schools to give them educational advantages prior to going to college. Although these objectives are important to parents and to kids, in the case of divorced parents, paying for these opportunities can be difficult when there are now expenses for two households instead of just one. As a result, disagreements can arise and tempers flare.

These kinds of differences of opinion can also be addressed through mediation, which means that parents can work together to create their own plans that will fit their budgets and at the same time help their kids achieve their ambitions.

There are several web sites where parents and prospective college students can begin their search for information on financing college education, including links relating to scholarships, loans, internships, and grants. These web sites are:

• CollegeBoard.com
• The U.S. Department of Education Free Application for Federal Student Aid Web Site
• The SmartStudent Guide to Financial Aid

For information about certified financial planners, you can visit CFP.net, the web site for the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, Inc., or visit the web site for the Financial Planning Association.

Recently, unable to get to sleep one night, I found myself playing a game of Googlewhacking. For those of you who haven’t yet heard of this phenomenon, Googlewhacking is a word game you can play, alone or with friends, on any computer with an Internet connection. The object of Googlewhacking is to come up with a two-word query (no quotation marks allowed) that will produce only a single result using the search engine Google. (There is even a web site dedicated to this pastime.)

Besides being an occasional insomniac, I am also a devoted fan of The Lord of the Rings. I therefore tried plugging in names of various characters from the trilogy into my Googlewhack queries, along with (of course) the word “mediation”. (In case you were wondering whether this posting has anything whatsoever to do with mediation, your wondering is about to end.)

To my utter astonishment, one of my queries produced some interesting results, one of which turned out to be a law review article entitled “Gollum, Meet Sméagol: A Schizophrenic Rumination on Mediator Values Beyond Self-Determination and Neutrality”, written by Professor James Coben, Director of the Dispute Resolution Institute at Hamline University School of Law, and published in the Spring 2004 edition of the Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution.

Despite its fanciful title, this is a serious article that challenges mediation’s long-cherished notions of self-determination and neutrality–foundational principles of mediation practice. It invites readers to reflect honestly upon the influence and role the mediator possesses in shaping parties’ interactions, and to consider the importance of other values in mediation: justice and community, and the connection and interplay between the two.

“Gollum, Meet Sméagol” is well worth a read for any self-reflective practitioner, whether you’re a Tolkien fan or not. You can find the article by going to the web page for Professor Coben by clicking here and then scrolling down to the title of the article, which is a link to the article itself in PDF format.

Online multiplayer games abound on the Internet. In these virtual worlds, players adopt avatars or personas as their online identities, acquire and manipulate objects, engage in commerce, own real property, participate in community life, and forge bonds and relationships with other online personalities.

As a result it is no surprise to learn that the virtual worlds in which these games unfold have grown similar to the real world in one significant way: conflicts occur in them, arising out of online relationships and conduct. Indeed, recently in China a man murdered a competitor over the theft of a virtual sword in an online game. And CollisionDetection.net reports that virtual spouses, suspecting their partners of cheating, have hired virtual detectives to produce evidence of infidelity. Can virtual divorce mediation be far behind?

As it turns out, the fields of law and online dispute resolution have directed their attention to the conflicts and issues that result from virtual world interactions.

The web site for the New York Law School Law Review provides links to essays and articles presented at the Institute for Information Law and Policy Symposium: State of Play, which explore the legal and public policy implications which emerge in virtual worlds. Be sure to read “Bringing Online Dispute Resolution to Virtual Worlds: Creating Processes Through Code”, an article by Ethan Katsh, the Professor of Legal Studies and the Director of the Center for Information Technology and Dispute Resolution at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The experience of addressing conflict in virtual worlds will no doubt have applications to real-life conflicts in cyberspace.

For additional articles at the New York Law School Law Review web site relating to virtual worlds and online gaming, click here.

Mediation is inherently a creative process. Under the guidance of the mediator, the parties define problems, set goals, and generate solutions. The range of solutions that can emerge from the mediation process is potentially limitless.

The skill a mediator brings is the ability to tap into that potential, stimulating the imagination of the parties to enable them to solve problems creatively and collaboratively.

Several web sites provide ideas, strategies, and techniques useful for anyone who participates in or facilitates group problem-solving processes. These include:

Innovationtools.com offers a list of creative thinking tools available on the Internet. These include downloadable text-based and web-based tools, games, and activities.

Teamwork: Skills for Collaborative Work “is a web site developed to provide support for group communication processes”. It offers information, links, and even self-assessment instruments aimed at building and improving teamwork. The section focusing specifically on problem solving in groups describes three different types of problem-solving processes—reflective, conflict-based, and creative.

Mycoted Ltd., which concentrates on “creativity and innovation in science and technology,” offers links to a dizzying array of creativity techniques whose usefulness extends well beyond the realm of science and technology, offering inspiration for any group, regardless of its focus. The web site also includes some fun lateral thinking puzzles to jumpstart the creative process.

Many of the concepts and techniques described on these web sites could be readily imported into mediation practice. Or try them yourself in your next departmental meeting or brainstorming session.

In a story reported this morning by The Globe and Mail of Toronto, the Ontario Bar Association has joined an appeal opposing an Ontario Superior Court judge’s order requiring a mediator to testify regarding the details of a settlement agreement in a complex and contentious business dispute.

Critics of the judge’s order are justifiably concerned about the public policy implications such an order, left unchallenged, could hold for a process which depends upon confidentiality to enable parties to conduct settlement discussions openly and candidly.

As readers of this blog know, a judge’s decision in Massachusetts raised similar concerns for dispute resolution practitioners in the Commonwealth.

The Canadian case will undoubtedly be watched closely by mediators and members of the bar alike. The appeal of the judge’s order will not be heard until September, so it will be many months before the fate of this appeal is known.

To read more about this case, click here for the full story in The Globe and Mail.

Back in February, I discussed here on this blog the phenomenon known as “doocing”, or firing an employee because of something they posted on their personal blog—an issue that ADR practitioners specializing in workplace issues are undoubtedly becoming increasingly familiar with.

Two articles appeared on the Internet this week that are relevant to the issue of employee blogging. The first, 3 Questions: The Pluses and Pitfalls of Corporate Blog Policies, is aimed at corporate executives. It features thoughts and recommendations from a labor and employment attorney regarding the benefits and downsides of creating a corporate policy regarding employee blogs. (To see an example of a clearly articulated corporate policy on personal web sites and blogs, check out this one from Groove Networks.)

The second, How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else), comes from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is targeted towards employees (as well as others) who wish to blog without fear of jeopardizing their jobs or of legal repercussions.

This week is National Youth Violence Prevention Week, sponsored by the Association for Conflict Resolution. The goal of this “web-based initiative” is “educat[ing] students, teachers, school administrators, counselors, school resource officers, school staff, parents and the public on ways to reduce and prevent youth violence.”

Each day of the initiative focuses upon a different topic: Day One addresses respect and tolerance; Day Two, anger management; Day Three, the use of peaceful means to resolve conflict; Day Four, safety concerns; and Day Five, unity.

Although this initiative takes place this week, educators, students, parents, and communities can continue to work together the remaining 51 weeks out of the year to further the goals of National Youth Violence Prevention Week. Its web site provides plenty of inspiration and ideas.

For more information, or to find out what you can do to address violence among children and teens, please visit ViolencePreventionWeek.org.

The premise of Numb3rs, CBS’s hot new TV police drama, is that crimes can be cracked through the use of mathematics. In each episode viewers get to see math whiz Charlie Eppes (played by actor David Krumholtz) assist his FBI agent big brother Don (Rob Morrow) bring bad guys to justice through the creation of mathematical formulas and algorithms.

Improbable, you say? Whether algorithms have real-life applications in crime busting is a question that some other blogger will have to answer. However, as it turns out algorithms very much have a place in conflict busting.

One of the challenges that people in conflict often face is how to divide things up so that afterwards no one feels envious of the share the other person ended up with (as anyone knows who has ever tried splitting a slice of cake for two six-year-olds). Mathemetician Francis Edward Su, determined to create a way to help people achieve fair divisions, has invented the Fair Division Calculator, “a java applet for interactive decision making” which uses algorithms “to find envy-free divisions of goods, burdens, or rent”. The Fair Division Calculator may ultimately be used as a part of a web-based system for group negotiation and decision-making. Be sure to try out the Fair Division Calculator to divide up a cake, split household chores, or allocate rent among roommates.

One organization which has developed a commercially successful Internet-based system for resolving disputes is SmartSettle, which uses “patented optimization algorithms to achieve fair and efficient solutions that are truly Beyond Win-Win®.” According to the web site, SmartSettle’s applications are far-reaching, capable of handling virtually every kind of dispute, including family, workplace, business mergers and acquisitions, community, government and international, and beyond.

If you’re interested in experiencing SmartSettle first hand, SmartSettle has extended an invitation to those attending Cyberweek 2005 to participate in an International eNegotiation Tournament which will utilize the SmartSettle system. Registration for the competition will be open until April 9, 2005. For more information, click here.

- Author unknown

Do a Google search on the word “mediation” and you’ll turn up with some 8,460,000 hits. That’s a lot of web sites to comb through if you’re looking for information about the mediation field.

To save you some time, I’ve compiled a short list of some of the most useful conflict resolution and mediation-related web sites I’ve encountered in my travels through the Internet. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list by any means—just a place for you to start your own journey.

I’ve tried to steer clear of web sites that have an overly commercial feel to them, or whose useful content is overpowered by ads and sponsored links. I’ve also made an effort to stick with web sites that contain up-to-date information and have links that work. And, since I’m a big believer that web content should be free, I’ve only included links for sites that cost nothing to use.

In no particular order Online Guide to Mediation’s web picks are:

Conflict Resolution Information Source
http://crinfo.org/

The Conflict Resolution Information Source (CRInfo) is, its own words, “a free, online clearinghouse, indexing more than 25,000 peace- and conflict resolution-related Web pages, books, articles, audiovisual materials, organizational profiles, events, and current news articles.” A comprehensive source for ADR-related information, CRInfo offers separate pages for practitioners, educators, students, researchers, and anyone who has a conflict to enable them to easily locate resources targeted for their respective needs.

Mediate.com
http://www.mediate.com

Mediate.com describes itself as the Internet’s most frequently visited ADR web site. I can well believe it. It’s a great resource for the mediation practitioner or the general public, offering a searchable, on-line library where over 800 articles on a wide variety of mediation and dispute resolution topics may be accessed. At the web site you can also subscribe to Mediate.com’s newsletter and receive regular updates on new articles. As I’ve discovered, they also welcome article submissions from practitioners, so Mediate.com can be an effective way to get your message out to the ADR community.

Guide to ADR Links
http://www.adr.af.mil./general/guideadr.doc

Guide to ADR Links was compiled by Deborah S. Laufer, an attorney and Executive Director of the Federal ADR Network. One of the best and most complete sources of information available online about dispute resolution, it offers a comprehensive compilation of dispute resolution links.

National Association for Community Mediation
http://www.nafcm.org/pg23.cfm

The web site for the National Association for Community Mediation includes a page devoted to links to articles, organizations, and “hot topics” of interest not just to community mediators but to other ADR practitioners as well.

Katsuey’s Legal Gateway
http://www.katsuey.com/index.cfm

Providing access to information on a number of legal practice areas and topics, Katsuey’s Legal Gateway includes an Arbitration/Mediation Legal Directory. This directory provides links that include the usual suspects (Association for Conflict Resolution, the American Arbitration Association) but also more exotic offerings such as the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Arbitration and Mediation Center, and the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy Database.

Campus Conflict Resolution Resources Project (Campus-adr.org)
http://www.campus-adr.org/

Listed last but certainly not least, Campus-adr.org has quickly become one of my favorite places to visit on the web. Although created to promote the use of conflict management in higher education, there is plenty here for anyone who is interested in conflict resolution and mediation in other contexts. Check out the section entitled Conflict Resolution Training Tools, where plenty of resources are available for trainers (and for some fun while you’re at it, don’t miss the links for the Handling Difficult Workers simulation game and Know Your Legal Terms Bingo).