Zero-Sum Thinking in Conflict. Member Spotlight: Jameson Lingl

From Ventura County, California, Jameson Lingl is a mediator, consultant, instructor, PhD Researcher, and Graduate Research Fellow with the Harvard Program on Negotiation and The Hague Humanitarian Studies Centre. Jameson found the field of conflict resolution quite early in life, when his father transitioned his law practice to mediation. Even though Jameson was only 10, his father began taking him to sessions. Jameson has been involved in the field one way or another ever since. Today, identity and natural resource conflicts are two of his main areas of focus, along with his PhD research on zero-sum thinking. Throughout his career in the field, Jameson has always put humility, self-reflectiveness, and empathy first in both his practice and his teaching.

Jameson’s Path to Mediation

In the years after Jameson’s father shifted to a mediation practice, he took Jameson along to work regularly. At the time his father was the President of the Ventura Center for Dispute Settlement which is now the Conflict Resolution Institute of Ventura County. Already fascinated by the field, Jameson continued to sit in on mediation trainings throughout his teenage years and grew up around inspiring mediation figures like Ken Cloke. Soon he started volunteering at the Conflict Resolution Institute himself.

“I grew up around mediation in these very formative years, and it really shaped my life. I found conflict so interesting because you can hear so many different perspectives at the same time.”

Jameson continued to pursue this passion throughout his academic career. He did his bachelors in Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies and his masters in Negotiation, Conflict Resolution, and Peacebuilding. Alongside mediation, Jameson also began working in legislative advocacy, politics and as a community organizer for civil rights. As he traveled doing political work, he would always stop to find community mediation centers and see what he could do to help. In 2014 he switched full time to mediation and conflict resolution, and somewhere along the line he became fascinated with integrating research, theory and practice. This interest motivated Jameson to pursue a PhD in Social and Behavioral Sciences at Tilburg University. He is currently in his last year and conducting his writing during his Graduate Research Fellowship with the Harvard Program on Negotiation and as a Guest Fellow with The Hague Humanitarian Studies Center.

Today Jameson also teaches a mediation course at UC Davis in the Land Use and Natural Resource Program. Additionally, he does consulting and conflict management coaching with several State Agencies dealing with natural resource conflicts.

Zero-Sum Thinking in Conflict

Jameson’s PhD research is on zero-sum thinking as a cognitive heuristic. He’s found this to be key to understanding the psychology of resource conflict, which is rooted in the belief that one party’s gain is intrinsically another party’s loss. However, Jameson’s research is also centered on symbolic resources. His research shows that we often perceive things like power, status, or love as finite material resources even when they’re not, causing the zero-sum mechanism to work the same.

“When I started doing research on zero-sum thinking, I started seeing it everywhere. I was a practitioner at the time, and I realized we just don’t know enough about it.”

Jameson is hoping to identify several key factors of zero-sum thinking during his PhD. To uncover the necessary conditions and the sufficient combination of conditions for zero-sum thinking to occur, he’s chosen to analyze conflict dynamics contextualized by race in the United States. He notes that today a majority of white Americans see racial discrimination as a zero-sum game. They believe that as discrimination decreases for black Americans, it will go up for white Americans as if it’s a fixed, distributive resource.

In Jameson’s opinion, better understanding of what brings about this kind of thinking is vital. He believes that how practitioners intervene in zero-sum thinking conflicts should depend on the causal mechanism behind it. Zero-sum thinking can be hugely destructive to any process, and Jameson’s contributions to the field will likely be vital in learning to effectively dismantle it.

“Research shows that zero-sum thinking is associated with higher levels of competition, hostility, and aggression. It reduces collaboration and cooperation. Cognitive psychologists think that it serves to rationalize selfish and discriminatory behavior.”

Jameson recently received a fellowship from The Hague Humanitarian Studies Centre in the Netherlands, where they’re helping him develop a resource collaboration project. Here they’ll be looking at how to bring scientists, policy makers, and conflict practitioners together to work on environmental conflict through this zero-sum lens. This interesting new project will allow Jameson to further develop his interest in combining theory with practice.

“There are a lot of strategies in mediation that already relate to zero-sum thinking. As a mediator we’re constantly looking to find the connectors and dividers between people. We try to reframe and strengthen those commonalities and weaken the dividers. That’s already an important tool to address zero-sum thinking.”

Reflections on the Field of Mediation

For Jameson, one of the biggest challenges as a mediator is persuading people to commit to a process, when they are already so committed to combat. He recognizes that when the process is done right, it will almost always have a better outcome for everyone. Nonetheless, people are often skeptical of a solution that will also benefit the other party, especially when their identities have already become wrapped up in it.

“The beauty of the process is to change the way people see their relationship and the situations they were involved in. So to be able to persuade them that the process can be very good for both them and the other party, before that has taken place, is the most challenging.”

Something that worries Jameson about the state of mediation today is that many new mediators are coming from the legal system while maintaining a legal system mindset. This concerns him because they tend to introduce practices in which the parties never talk to each other at all. The trend of all-caucus mediations goes entirely against what Jameson knows mediation to be, which revolves around making relationships between clients better and working to find win-win solutions. Instead, the legal orientation is leading practitioners to seek settlements in win/lose compromises.

“As the field is growing, I’ve seen it become more and more controlled by the system that has failed people in the first place. I’m very worried about this co-opting of alternative conflict resolution.”

While Jameson thinks it’s important to combat this trend, he’s had many former judges in his class come out saying their view on conflict resolution has been completely changed. He is seeing tremendous growth in the applied practice and there are plenty of reasons he stays in the field. First and foremost, Jameson stays in mediation simply because he adores it. When the parties come in, he describes them as laden with anxiety, stress, anger and exhaustion. They are visibly tense and unhappy. However, after the process of about three hours, Jameson almost always sees a tangible change. After the session, Jameson has seen so many people happy, laughing, and shaking each other’s hands. To Jameson, it’s the most beautiful thing in the world to see people come out with a completely transformed relationship with each other and themselves.

“I don’t know how to describe it but there’s no better feeling in the world than participating in a mediation. I’ve never experienced anything that can rival that.”

Jameson’s Advice

Jameson has two main pieces of advice for new mediators. Firstly, Jameson is a big advocate of a reflective practice. While it’s important to have the skillset for working with other people, he notes that it’s equally important to have the skillset for understanding ourselves. In his classes, Jameson emphasizes self-reflection and thoughtfulness, and he includes discussions about how conflict styles and personal relationships to conflict vary. He hopes to get students to reflect on their own life experiences and understand themselves more deeply before working on other people’s conflicts.

“First, we need to be able to identify how we’re being affected by the conflict we’re a part of. If you’re not paying attention or in tune with yourself, it will affect your decisions as a mediator.”

Jameson’s second piece of advice is don’t come into the job with a set mindset. He refers to Ken Cloke’s thinking, and explains that if you show up to the conflict with a set way of how you’re going to see conflict you’re not going to be effective. If you go in thinking you have the single right answer, you won’t see that that there are multiple right answers, and many different outcomes that could spread from it. To be effective, Jameson believes that a mediator must come in with a very open mind. 

Future Aspirations

Jameson plans to continue being a practitioner, a teacher, a researcher, and a theorist. He also hopes to continue working on identity and land/natural resource conflicts, while taking his PhD research into practice by assessing how practitioners can identify zero-sum thinking and strategically intervene.

Jameson’s message to those reading is to keep working and exposing as many people as possible to these skills. He loves how MBBI is connecting people from all over the world with these same kinds of ideas on how to make the world a more peaceful place and looks forward to learning about other members. He notes that if anyone is interested in analyzing their practice in the context of theory and research, he would love to hear about it. He’s very passionate about getting more academics to relate to practice, and vice versa for practitioners. Lastly, Jameson would love to connect with those who have observed zero-sum-thinking in their work, no matter what they’re doing.

“Coaching, consulting, mediating, all of it. I want to do whatever I can to make the world a better place.”

Jameson believes strongly that as individuals we are shaped by the systems that we live in. He explains that we are shaped constantly by our families, communities, and governments. But he also believes that as individuals we shape the systems around us too. He thinks that there must be a threshold, where if enough people are exposed to non-violence, better communication, and training on these vital conflict resolution skills, the system itself could change. As Jameson does all he can to spread this knowledge, he serves as a powerful example of someone who truly has an impact on the systems around himself.

Article by Elise Webster, MBBI Writer