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The current research reveals that the pursuit of peace entails an inherent paradox. The urgent need to save lives and alleviate human suffering necessitates swift solutions to the problem of intergroup conflict. However, because the human mind associates peace with longer time horizons, people anticipate peace more when considering the distant rather than the near future. Six experiments demonstrate a robust and large effect whereby thinking about the distant future promotes the prospects of peace compared to thinking about the near future. These experiments also provide evidence for the role that construal fit, that is, the tendency to match high temporal distance with abstractness, plays in this effect. We discuss implications for shorter-term and longer-term peace interventions.

Six experiments show that the mere possibility of third-party intervention increases cooperation in interpersonal and intergroup interactions, that third parties often fail to increase collective gains by withholding intervention, and that reducing the risk associated with intervention significantly increases peacemaking by self-interested third parties. These findings highlight the interdependence between disputants and third parties, thereby complementing existing models that solely focus on unidirectional influence of third parties on disputants. These findings underscore the role self-interest plays in shaping third parties' intervention decisions and demonstrate that selfish third parties can promote peaceful conflict resolution by literally changing the game disputants are playing. Overall, we explain why, how, and when self-interested third parties intervene in others' conflicts, to everyone's benefit.

Two experiments utilized a new experimental paradigm—the Intergroup Prisoner's Dilemma— Maximizing Difference (IPD-MD) game—to study how relative deprivation at the group level affects intergroup competition. The IPD-MD game enables group members to make a costly contribution to either a within-group pool that benefits fellow ingroup members, or a between-group pool, which, in addition, harms outgroup members. We found that when group members were put in a disadvantaged position, either by previous actions of the outgroup (Experiment 1) or by random misfortune (Experiment 2), they contributed substantially more to the competitive between-group pool. This destructive behavior both minimized inequality between the groups and reduced collective efficiency. Our results underscore the conditions that lead group members to care about relative (rather than absolute) group outcomes and highlight the need to differentiate between the motivation to get ahead and the motivation not to fall behind: the latter, it appears, is what motivates individual participation in destructive intergroup competition.

Leveraging the social hierarchy literature, the present research offers a role-based account of the antecedents of interpersonal conflict. Specifically, we suggest that the negative feelings and emotions resulting from the experience of occupying a low-status position interact with the action-facilitating effects of power to produce vicious cycles of interpersonal conflict and demeaning behavior. Five studies demonstrate that power without status leads to interpersonal conflict and demeaning treatment, both in specific dyadic work relationships and among organizational members more broadly. Study 1 provides initial support for the prediction that employees in low-status/high-power roles engage in more conflict with coworkers than all other combinations of status and power. In Studies 2a and 2b, a yoked experimental design replicated this effect and established low-status/high-power roles as a direct source of the interpersonal conflict and demeaning treatment. Study 3 used an experimental manipulation of relative status and power within specific dyadic relationships in the workplace and found evidence of a vicious cycle of interpersonal conflict and demeaning treatment within any dyad that included a low-status/high-power individual. Finally, Study 4 utilized survey and human resource data from a large government agency to replicate the power without status effect on interpersonal conflict and demonstrate that power interacts with subjective status change to produce a similar effect; increasing the status of a high-power role reduces conflict whereas decreasing its status increases conflict. Taken together, these findings offer a role-based account of interpersonal conflict and highlight the importance of making a theoretical distinction between status and power.