Policy conflict, policy consistency, and interpersonal understanding

Abstract.— A number of studies have shown that inconsistency in the subjects' policies is a major reason for disagreement in policy conflict. It has been hypothesized that the lack of consistency makes it hard for subjects to understand each other's policies. The present results provided evidence for this hypothesis by showing that subjects asked each other more questions about policy when their policies were less consistent in an experiment where policy consistency was manipulated by varying the predictability of the conflict task.