Keep the Peace

A little bit of conflict now and then is unavoidable. Here’s how to butt heads the better way.

- Matthew Halliday

THE COMPLAINTS BEGAN a few months after Frances* moved into her new apartment. Last year, the Calgary health-care worker and her roommate began receiving messages from the building’s concierge, passed on from the woman living in the unit below: they were too noisy, moved chairs too often and their guests were too rambunctious.

To Frances, the noises were part of everyday living. Her roommate was an acknowledged klutz, who tended to drop things. Friends’ children occasionally visited and ran around. “It was frustrating,” says Frances. “Anything we did caused her to complain—and she owns and we rent, so if we couldn’t solve it, we assumed it was us who would have to move.”

To make matters worse, Frances and her neighbour couldn’t talk to each other. The key fobs for their building allowed access only to their own floors. Though they lived just metres apart, they had no way to reach out and bridge their divide—across which Frances could feel bad feelings swelling. “When you don’t know the person, you expect the worst,” says Frances. “We thought this neighbour hated us.”

Conflict is inevitable, and it often occurs between people who can’t just walk out of each other’s lives. Fortunately, there are many ways to navigate life’s disagreements, large and small, without boiling over.

Don’t Make Assumptions

Frances had no way to know what her neighbour was thinking or what she was like, so she found it easy to presume the worst. Social psychologists call it “fundamental attribution error,” the act of believing that what a person does reflects their essential character. If a colleague makes a paperwork mistake, we think they’re lazy, when they might just be over-worked. If someone cuts us off in traffic, we assume they’re careless, rather than potentially dealing with an emergency.