
Donald G. EllisUniversity of Hartford · School of Communication
Donald G. Ellis
Ph.D
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81
Publications
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Introduction
Working on ethnopolitically divided groups where conversations are particularly "difficult." Such groups are typically divided by religion and identity conflicts characterized by distorted communication resulting from ingroup-outgroup distinctions. Follow related issues on my blog at: http://peaceandconflictpolitics.com/
Additional affiliations
August 1972 - July 1976
August 1983 - present
January 1980 - June 1983
Publications
Publications (81)
Argument has a long and noble history in the study of communication. Argument discourse , in contrast to traditional structural approaches to argument, is more sensitive to social actors in an interactive relationship who are trying to reconcile incompatible positions by engaging in " conversational reasoning. " Argument discourse focuses on the ro...
The focus of this article is the management of arguments between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Israelis and Palestinians are 2 groups that have been in severe conflict about land, culture, history, and national rights. In this study we draw on the traditions of conversation analysis, logic, and rhetoric to explain how participants used argume...
This study examined the argument patterns that result when Israeli-Jews and Palestinians confront each other during group dialogues. We tested predictions derived from two theories. The first was a theory of cultural communication which predicted that Israeli-Jews and Palestinians would argue in a manner consistent with their respective cultural co...
This article argues that deliberative processes, argument in particular, can be helpful to even the most divided groups; that is, it can assist with problems even in the case of the most intractable conflicts between groups. Conflict resolution requires a form of social cooperation that leads to argument and “good reasons.” Argument based discussio...
The article reviews intractability qualities and uses the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict as an example of the difficult conversations that characterize the conflict between competing groups. There are two typical research trends for analyzing group conflict. These are either a rational model or intractable conflict model. The rational model assumes t...
Makes the argument that Israel is not an apartheid state
Coherent development of theories of ethnopolitical conflict has been slow and scattered. Moreover, the role of communication has been seriously neglected. I theorize ethnopolitical conflict along two dimensions: the level in which the conflict is entered (macro state-level, mid civil society level, and individual level) and the type of communicatio...
We introduce, in this study, a gendering human rights model in which perceiving outgroups as having
stereotypical feminine traits predicts decreased support for violating their human rights through the
mediation of threat perception. This model is tested in the context of the asymmetrical protracted Israeli-
Palestinian conflict using Jewish-Israel...
This is an extended encyclopedia entry on ethnopolitical conflict.
Slightly longer version of discourse comprehension entry
This is the forward to the book "Impact of Communication in the Media on Ethnic Conflict"
Ethno-political conflict is explained as an intergroup conflict that distorts communication and perceptions between the groups. Ethno-political conflicts categorize and foreground ethnic and religious differences and thus alter the perceptions of the other side. These conflicts are intractable and particularly resistant to resolution as a result of...
Theoretical piece on epistemology and forms of social context
This is a one-page definition of discourse comprehension for an encyclopedia of communication edited by Wolfgang Donsbach in 2015.
The third in a trilogy on communication and ethnopolitical conflict, this book focuses on multicultural groups significantly divided by politics and religion. These groups have become «fiercely entangled»; that is, they are inescapably politically, socially, and culturally interdependent. Using the Israeli Palestinian conflict as the primary exampl...
Israeli religious settlers live in contested territory that they claim is promised to them by God. The settlers are at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and the recipients of international condemnation for their illegal behavior. Because the territories are neither sovereign nor legally recognized by Israel their definition is open to c...
This essay argues that narratives or stories are an essential communication mechanism that define the differences between two conflicting groups, especially in asymmetric conflicts. Stories told during conflict resolution experiences are typically assumed to be subjective and emotional versions of reality, but I argue that stories function as argum...
Conflict between two or more groups is termed " ethnopolitical " when ethnicity and religion are highly implicated in the ongoing state of hostility. These are intergroup conflicts where group member attitudes, stereotypes, and forms of communication reflect the ethnopolitical context. Group members interact with one another on the basis of social...
S unni-Shiite violence, political acrimony between Israeli-Jews and Palestinians, prejudice, discrimination, religious differences, labor-management disputes, and the different moral universes of pro-choice and pro-life groups in the United States are all the subject matter of intergroup conflict. Intergroup conflict is a subset of the more general...
The concept of argument has a long history in communication. An argument is a concluding statement that claims legitimacy on the basis of reason. But argumentative discourse is a form of interaction in which the individuals maintain incompatible positions. More specifically, argumentative discourse directs attention to the arguments of naïve social...
Volumes 1-3 published by Elsevier, and the attached copy is provided by Elsevier for the author's benefit and for the benefit of the author's institution, for non-commercial research and educational use including without limitation use in instruction at your institution, sending it to specific colleagues who you know, and providing a copy to your i...
Deliberation and conflict resolution online
Ethnopolitical conflicts are defined as ongoing states of hostility and opposition between two or more ethnic and/or national groups of people. This article discusses phenomena commonly observed by social and political scientists of misperceptions, biased construals, and miscommunication that occur between the two opposing sides in deeply set ethno...
A one-week period of talk-show broadcasts from a Salt Lake City radio station was recorded and transcribed,-in order to charact(Irize the patterns of interaction which emerged from the talk betweea the six radio ho.sets and their callers. The coding system used focused on'content and relationship aspects of communication-. Results indicated that wh...
This chapter examines the contributions of communication studies to peace education. It reports on empirical relations between dimensions of communication such as messages and media and outcomes associated with peace. We take a constructivist framework and demonstrate that communication and media studies are central to peace education. The chapter...
Intercultural communication and intractable conflicts.
The goal of this study is to empirically determine the extent to which controlled intergroup communicative contact—such as structured intergroup meetings between Israeli-Jews and Palestinians—increases the propensity for peaceful conflict resolution. The proposed model in this study was tested on public opinion data from a representative sample of...
Previous research with face-to-face groups found that majority–minority theory was a better predictor of argument patterns between Israelis and Palestinians than cultural codes theory (D. G. Ellis & I. Maoz, 2002; I. Maoz & D. G. Ellis, 2001). But, because of the difficulties of organizing face-to-face contacts between Israelis and Palestinians (e....
This book examines the communication and social psychological processes associated with intergroup political conflict.
The North American network, ABC-Television, broadcast the news-panel program, Nightline, from Jerusalem during the beginning days of the Second Intifada. One of the main themes of this discussion was the violence, pain and trauma – the civilians killed or wounded, the military's actions, and how it all started. Even the horrible facts of violence m...
This essay argues for the existence of two codes termed pragmatic and syntactic. A code is a system of signs that are interactionally relevant to contexts, appropriateness, genres, and situations. The essay offers a perspective on the problem of how language users both converge on meaning, and thereby establish stability and predictability in inter...
have always been interested in matters related to politics and conflict because I sprang forth from the breast of liberalism. My father was a Jewish labor organizer and life-long liberal who was not going to let his young son escape lectures on the litany of horrors that befell the world. Our dinner table crackled with discussions of politics and e...
This paper describes a communication and cultural code approach to ethnonational conflicts. More specifically, it describes theory and research emerging from transformative communication events aimed at building constructive relationships betwetact necessitated by conflict. These are dialogue groups organized according to principles established by...
The North American network, ABC-Television, broadcast the news-panel program, Nightline, from Jerusalem during the beginning days of the Second Intifada. One of the main themes of this discussion was the violence, pain, and trauma—the civilians killed or wounded, the military’s actions, and how it all started. Even the horrible facts of violence mu...
This article reports on linguistic features and patterns of coherence in two levels (mild and advanced) of discourse produced by Alzheimer's patients. It argues and demonstrates that as the disease progresses, the discourse of Alzheimer's patients becomes pregrammatical in that it is vocabulary driven and reliant on meaning-based features of discou...
This article attempts to stabilize the concept of communicative meaning, responding to theorists who maintain that meaning has lost its moorings, that historical and linguistic forces disturb the idea of meaning so thoroughly it is impossible to achieve. In the first section, I argue that the assumption of semantic realism is necessary to any intel...
This research began by taking measures of communication competence and then cross-referencing measures of communication competence with various linguistic discursive devices. The correlations between communicative competence in various discursive devices are discussed.
This paper argues that people speak in speech codes. A code is a general orientation toward language and interpretation. It identifies types of codes and explains the communication implications.
Book about group processes from a communication perspective
This research identifies and describes the nature of codes in interpersonal relationships. It derives from the linguistic mediation assumption, which holds that language reflects and mediates the social world. However, some intermediary organizing concept linking language to the social world is necessary, and a code is offered as this organizing co...
This study examined respondent proficiency at reconstructing a sequence of utterances (discourse). Theories of text hold that participants in a discourse must construct and arrange the sense of the text; that is, they must make decisions about discourse coherence. We had respondents reconstruct a conversation and we made predictions about discourse...
Individuals use a variety of terms to designate the nature of their relationships with others, e.g., friend, lover, pal, etc. Although expectations for certain types of communicative behavior surely accompany the use of these terms, it was not clear what their communicative referents were. The first phase of this study obtained intimacy‐scaled rati...
This study examined the use of relational control modes in sex‐typed groups. The relational communication generated by sex‐type males, sex‐type females, and androgynes working in groups on unstructured tasks was analyzed according to frequency of use and sequential structure. The sex‐type male and the androgynous groups employ significant amounts o...
This paper reports the results of two experiments designed to test the impact of certain task variables on implicit communication theory. More specifically, the solution multiplicity dimension of tasks influences the formality and cooperation dimensions of an individual's implicit communication theory; and difficulty also affects perceptions of equ...
Using Markov chain and phasic models of group interaction, this study examines and explains relational control interaction patterns in two decision‐making groups and two women's consciousness‐raising groups.
This study attempted to identify clusters of traits which best predicted the use of relational control style. After 125 subjects interacted in different settings, their interaction was coded using two interaction analysis systems designed to code relational control. Subjects were then assigned to control style groups. Each subject completed a batte...
Empirical research and past conceptualizations of small groups are reviewed, focusing on attempts to identify the essential characteristic of "groupness." An alternate conceptual schema is suggested which integrates the study of groups into a single morphological system emanating from modern system theory. (Author)
Little is yet known regarding structured or patterned interaction in complex communication systems. Conceptualizing complexity of communication systems as “organized complexity” in time, this study analyzed a variety of communication systems at multiple levels of complexity. Results indicate that the amount of structure contributed by increasing le...
A great need exists for increased attention to standards of rigor in collecting sequential interaction data. As in any other research strategy, powerful statistics are not sufficient to organize data meaningfully. A knowledge of individuals, their relational histories, and communication are all necessary to insure proper conclusions about the conce...
Previous research on conflict emanates from a variety of theoretical perspectives and yields inconsistent conclusions. The purpose of this study was to describe the nature of conflict and communication by answering the following question: How does conflict function in the process of achieving group consensus? Transcriptions of classroom groups were...
Systematic method of measuring classroom instruction
Questions
Question (1)
An effort to maximize the number of people involved in a participatory system designed to make the decision.