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Step one: Do the Maths

Why we are all experts at arguing

One of the most common observations about children without siblings is that they are worse at negotiating than children who grow up in larger families. The latter’s skills are honed by having to entice a brother or sister to share their Lego Star Wars Battle Cruiser, or swap the last green triangle in the Quality Street for one of those yellow toffee pennies that always get left in the tin (at least in my house).

The idea that people have varying degrees of such skills may suggest to you that we possess a kind of innate propensity for collaboration and compromise. Buried somewhere in all our strands of DNA, there’s a diplomacy gene. That would be the optimists’ view.

But for those of a less sunny outlook, it’s easy to contend that we have no instinct for conflict resolution at all. Any skills we do have are hard won – and need to be nurtured.

The life’s work of Laurie Kramer, Professor of Applied Psychology and Director of the University Honors Program at Northeastern University, Boston, seems to suggest that there is a need to nurture. Kramer found that conflicts1 between young siblings (the 3–7 age group) arise at the phenomenal rate of 3.5 times an hour on average. Between those ages, the NHS recommends that kids need at least ten hours sleep every night. That leaves 14 free hours to have 49 disagreements every day – definitely not recommended by any health professional anywhere. Extending the maths, 49 × 365 × 5 tops out at a whopping 89,425 opportunities to bruise a knuckle on a sibling’s face during those crucial formative years.

Happy families!

Extrapolate that over a whole childhood, and you get a lot of practice at having a barney. For me, this is evidence that backs up a growing suspicion of mine that we have a species-wide inclination to fall out over stuff; it comes naturally. We might even genuinely have a gene for it (we’ll explore that later), and worse, every one of us may possess genius levels of ability at being disagreeable.

Malcom Gladwell’s 2008 bestseller Outliers describes the factors behind the success of those people who make mortals like you and I feel inadequate: high achievers in fields like business, law, politics, science, sport and popular culture. Outliers introduced the world to the now famous 10,000-hour rule. This is the minimum benchmark level of practice ambitious individuals, hell-bent on world domination in a particular field of endeavour, need to invest in order to rise to glory.

Gladwell famously did the maths on a broad sweep of luminaries, from Bill Gates to The Beatles, and found that they had all put in a 10,000-hour shift practising the things that later made them famous and/or rich. Annoyingly for us slackers, they had done so by the time they reached a very young age. In Gates’s case, before his 15th birthday. (Mum, if you’re reading this, I’m going to call you later to ask why the hell you didn’t drag me out of bed earlier in the day when I was a nipper!)

Now, keep the 10k rule front of mind and let’s return to Kramer. She contends that 3.5 sibling conflicts eat up around ten minutes in every hour. If that’s true, then this means – assuming they do actually get the recommended average of ten hours sleep – kids aged three to seven achieve 2.33 hours of meaningful practice during waking hours each and every day.

Doing yet more maths, the product of 2.33 × 365 × 5 (beginning at age three to end of age seven) is 4,252 hours. Not too far off halfway to 10,000. While no specific research has been undertaken on the frequency of sibling conflict in middle childhood, from age eight onwards, or in early adolescence, I have a sneaky feeling we can bridge the gap, and even surpass Gladwell’s rule, before we reach the age of 15.

Here’s the why and how.

While it may be hoped that sibling conflict reduces in middle childhood, and further again in adolescence, arguments will still happen – a lot. I know this because, while there’s no research on frequency, there have been many academic studies investigating the outcomes of sibling conflict at both of these life stages. This suggests to me that we, as quarrelsome kids, kept quarrelling in later childhood with enough regularity to justify expensive academic research to find out why.

For example, ‘Young Adolescents’ Conflicts with Siblings and Friends’, by Dr Marcela Raffaelli (Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 1997), found that two-thirds of verbal rucks ended in the total submission of one party or without any kind of agreement at all. In ‘Siblings’ Reports of Conflict and the Quality of Their Relationships’, Christina M. Rinaldi, author and professor at the University of Alberta, and Professor Nina Howe found that kids in middle childhood reported conflicts involving destructive, rather than constructive, tactics. This led to unresolved disputes or submission as much as 80% of the time, a figure comparable to that found in younger siblings of the two to seven age group (Howe et al. 2003, Siddiqui and Ross 1999).

It may be that hoping for improvements after early childhood is to hope in vain.

After all, there are also other people to fall out with – why would siblings be the only axis around which your arguments rotate? Parent/child conflicts abound, as do playground altercations and other disagreements with friends and associates. Many other hours will have been additionally ‘invested’ developing our conflict abilities with anyone we held close relationships with during our formative years.

Statistically speaking, we’ve all potentially clocked in 10,000 combat hours by our mid-teens – and very possibly, a lot more. If falling out with those around us was songwriting, by Gladwell’s standards most of us are at the level of Lennon and McCartney. A shame there are no royalty cheques for being a high achiever in having an argument.

The frequency of all this falling out has an inversely proportional effect on what should be one of our most valuable qualities – the ability to unbegrudgingly compromise. Fewer than 12% of sibling conflicts reached consensus in some of the studies cited earlier (Howe et all 2003, Siddiqui and Ross 1999). Raffaelli’s 1992 study reported similarly, with compromise being reached only 9% of the time.2

It’s a relief that at least some children are blessed as peacemakers and diplomats. But largely it’s the falling out that comes naturally. Thankfully, there’s plenty we can do about it.

Heading childhood conflict off at the pass

Kramer says her life’s work leads her to conclude that leaving siblings to work it out among themselves is the absolute worst thing you can do, tempting though it may be. And it becomes especially tempting when you learn that doing nothing in the teeth of sibling conflict has a grand and scientific sounding title: passive non-intervention – a phrase almost designed to sound like good parenting!

I remember a flare up in an Asda freezer aisle between my three kids when they were much younger. My daughter Millie had raised the urgent query: “Is Noddy a boy or a girl?” This rapidly overheated when her eldest brother, Jake, observed that Noddy was probably hermaphrodite. When frozen ice pops were cast to the ground and stomped on, we were admonished by a stern shop assistant. Our family might still have been welcome in the nation’s favourite grocer if I’d known all I needed to do was pull the assistant up on her ignorance of what constitutes good parenting. I could have pointed out I was dealing with this outrage by passively non-intervening.

As it is, we now do our food shopping online.

The accepted wisdom is to back off and let children sort things out themselves, don’t be in a rush to fix your child’s problems for them, let them learn through their own mistakes. What if, as Kramer argues, that’s completely wrong? She argues for hands-on intervention if you don’t want to suffer the long-term consequences of inaction. Here’s how to get properly stuck in to all that belligerent behaviour. There are some interesting lessons here for all of us – whether we’re children or parents or CEOs.

1 Pre-emptive strikesThe most effective strategies are pre-emptive strikes aimed at fostering positive sibling relationships. Never mind passive non-intervention or the authoritarian ‘because-I-say-so’ approach! Tie both these imposters into a large sack and beat them to death with an olive branch. You need collaborative problem solving. This demands that you work with your kids to identify the root of the conflict and a possible solution which you can then help them implement.This means waiting until the heat of battle has subsided and getting all parties round a table. This very thing was done in a 2006 study called ‘How Siblings Resolve Their Conflicts’ by Hildy and Michael Ross – both distinguished professors emeritus at Waterloo University – and Professors Nancy Stein and the late Tom Trabasso of Chicago University. Pairs of siblings were asked to revisit an unresolved dispute and attempt to solve it through discussion. As a result, 42% of discussions ended in a compromise – a huge improvement on the swathes of research I’ve referenced here, which dealt with observed naturalistic conflict as it arose.

2 Walking the walkModelling positive behaviours also helps. If you dream of sibling harmony then you need to demonstrate what harmonious relations look like with your partner and others close to you. Trying to minimise your brood’s exposure to arguments by keeping it out of the room, for instance. Getting this wrong can lead to distinctly biblical consequences according to some academics: “When parents lack a stable value system by which to settle sibling disputes, or when their principles are capricious, bizarre, or arbitrary, the sibling relationship can become chaotic or even murderous.” So said Stephen P. Bank and Michael D. Kahn, in The Sibling Bond (1997). You’ve been warned!

3 Reward and praise

Finding an appropriate way to reward your offspring for being co-operative, respectful and friendly in their sibling interactions is a further winning strategy. Well done for sharing, Tarquin, let’s all get a Cornetto – that sort of thing.

Forensic psychologist Gina Stepp (in an article about sibling conflict for vision.org) says that reward-and-praise strategies require parents to review their behaviour: instead of brushing off bullying, aggressive altercations or heated verbal exchanges as a harmless preoccupation of growing up, parents should make it clear they expect their kids to treat each other with warmth and affection. Taking the time to celebrate such behaviour when it occurs helps children to understand what is expected of them in future. Just make sure you do it consistently and frequently.

Why we fail to use these strategies

Alarmingly, while these strategies are the most effective and seem so obvious, they are also the least used. Kramer said parents don’t talk much about managing conflict; it’s emotionally draining, which creates a tendency to favour the authoritarian approach, or doing nothing.

Let’s not kick ourselves, though – or our parents. In the 10,000 hours or more they spent squabbling over who got the last rhubarb and custard Chupa Chups when they were young, they probably never got an intervention from their folks either. Who never got one from theirs. It’s cyclical. It might well be that adults – in their general failure to help kids with maintaining a positive emotional climate, perspective-taking and other things that build positive relationships – are actually flagging that they need help with these things too.

Never mind the kids, what about the grown-ups?

It’s all very well discussing how better management of early-years conflict might improve the future lives of our kids, but what about adults in the here and now? It’s not as if any of us can travel back through time to re-run all those myriad conflicts or reverse 10,000 well-rehearsed combat hours. But don’t worry. It’s not too late to change. There are three easy fixes we can make to ensure harmony becomes a frequent visitor to the shores of our adult endeavours:

Take perspective. Take a vow. Take a clear position.

Three ways to achieve immediate harmony

The lifeblood of the business I run is selling campaign ideas to advertisers. We are in the creative industries, a space where there is much conflict – indeed, many creative people would contend that to create exceptional work, conflict is vital. This makes managing creatives an interesting behavioural study in perspective taking.

On the one hand, you have a person who is sensitively attuned to the finest vibrations of not only their deepest feelings but those of the rest of humanity – if it were otherwise, how could they meaningfully connect with an audience? On the other hand, you have a person who may be willing to shed blood at any perceived slight to their creative output or ego. I have witnessed many assertive defences of creative territory in order to ensure that a campaign idea is the one that makes it through to the pitch.

To understand the true perspective of two people with differing creative approaches to the same client brief, when both are very vocal about the advantage of their idea versus the inadequacies of the other, I often resort to an exercise I ripped off from Carl Ransom Rogers.

Rogers gave the world the theory of self-actualisation and is credited as the founder of the humanistic approach to psychology. Among many other things, he said, “As no one else can know how we perceive, we are the best experts on ourselves.” I read this as a comment on how hard it is to grasp a perspective beyond your own. Making it salient to this exercise.

Remember, we have two creatives with a beef over the brief. To ascertain if either is acting from naked self-interest, or in fact has a legitimate case for the superiority of their idea, I ask both to outline, without interruption, the other’s creative concept: the rival scheme they didn’t create.

I then ask the original creator to confirm whether or not the other has grasped their idea. We then run the exercise in reverse. If either fail in the task, then they have clearly not been listening. That means they haven’t taken a wide perspective and seen things from the other’s point of view.

In this exercise, the failure of both sides happens a lot!

It helps, of course, if the mediator (me in this case) fully understands both sides’ positions. This guards against anyone subverting the process (they could cheat by saying the other has not understood their vision, when in fact it has been clearly grasped – it happens!).

The results of a two-part study by Jacquie D. Vorauer and Stephanie-Danielle Claude, called ‘Perceived Versus Actual Transparency of Goals in Negotiation’ (1998), showed that negotiators overestimated the transparency of their own objectives. Not only that, it was found that neutral observers to a negotiation, who had been informed about the participant negotiator’s goals in advance, also overestimated the extent to which those goals would be transparent to an uninformed observer. Indeed, uninformed observers were actually more likely to find it harder to distinguish the negotiator’s goals during the negotiation. This same document also mentions other bodies of research (Brandstätter et al.) which show that negotiators typically attribute any deadlock to the other person and give more credit to themselves for reaching an agreement – the phenomenon I mentioned in the preface known as attribution bias.

The above academics also found that combatants typically assumed that the validity of their position in the negotiation was glaringly obvious (my words) to their adversaries. Consequently, they saw their adversary’s opposition as self-interested and hostile.

So, the knowledge that people have long entrenched habits, and may have a self-centred narrow perspective, has definitely helped me reframe my approach to having difficult conversations. If I know I’m going to say ‘I don’t agree’ to a colleague, friend or partner’s current point of view, an important step I take is to enter into a little self-reflection and examine my own motivations.

I make a mental vow to be more transparent when communicating my goals. For me at least, the act of making a vow has an almost sacred effect. It keeps coming to the front of my mind to nudge me into compliance during any debate. On top of all that, I also assume attribution bias will influence my judgement. And given all of the above, my potential to get into a range of minor and major heated situations – well-rehearsed and practised since my formative years – could be a habit that’s difficult to dislodge. I’ve done my 10,000 hours and then some.

For those of you thinking, surely we’re all adults now, aren’t we grown up enough to work our way through the behavioural overhangs we developed in our younger years? Well, hopefully we are, but such a feat is more difficult than you might think. It transpires that such behaviour is likely to be governed by Darwinism.

1 Kramer defines a conflict as three sequential hostile exchanges. Lesser exchanges such as a single push or an insult increase the count still higher. Studies in other age groups also show higher ratios of conflict: Jeffrey Kluger in his book, The Sibling Effect, quotes Michal Perlman and Hildy Ross of the University of Toronto and Waterloo respectively. They found an average of 6.3 conflicts hourly between siblings in the 2–4 age group. Klugger also references Kramer extensively.

2 Ross, Hildy; Ross, Michael; Stein, Nancy and Trabasso, Tom. (2006). ‘How Siblings Resolve Their Conflicts: The Importance of First Offers, Planning, and Limited Opposition’. Child Development. 77.