8125

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 8125
• Author: Moore, C. W.
• Title: Editor
• USFW Year: Series
• USFW - Doc Type: 1986
• Copyright Material: YES

26 The Mediation Process
to manage intense anger, bluffing, bargaining in bad faith, mis-
trust, or miscommunication are all in this category of specific
interventions. While some contingent moves, such as the caucus-
private meetings between the parties and the mediators-are
quite common, they are still in the contingent category because
they do not happen in all negotiations.
Hypothesis Building and Mediation Interventions
For a mediator to be effective, he or she needs to be able
to analyze and assess critical situations and design effective in-
terventions to counteract the causes of the conflict. Conflicts,
however, do not come in neat packages with their causes and
component parts labeled so that the parties, or the intervenor,
know how to creatively respond to them. The causes are often
obscured and clouded by the dynamics of the interaction.
To work effectively on conflicts, the intervenor needs a
conceptual road map or "conflict map" of the dispute (Wehr,
1979) that should detail why a conflict is occurring, should
identify barriers to settlement, and should indicate procedures
to manage or resolve the dispute.
Most conflicts have multiple causes; usually it is a combi-
nation of problems in the relations of the disputants that leads
to a dispute. The principal tasks of the mediator and the parties
are to identify central causes of the conflict and take action to
alleviate them. The mediator and participants in a dispute ac-
complish this by trial-and-error experimentation in which they
generate and test hypotheses about the conflict.
First, the parties and the mediator observe the aspects of
the dispute. They examine attitudinal or behavioral problems in
the interactions of the disputants, disagreements over "facts,"
compatible and competing interests, interaction dynamics,
power relations, and value similarities and differences. From the
observations, the mediator tries to identify the central critical
situations or causes of the dispute. He or she often uses a frame-
work of explanatory causes and suggested interventions such as
those identified in Figure 2. Once the mediator believes that a
central cause has been identified, he or she builds a hypothesis.