Expectations And Conflict

 Motivation

In the course of purusing goals, intelligent agents naturally form plans. In humans, it seems that the planning function and the expectation function are somewhat joint, so that deviations from a plan are jointly perceived as breaches of expectations.

The emotion of anger arises when expectations are breached.

Anger-fueled conflict between two intelligent agents is prone to escalation, as each harm breaks the fundamental expectation of (?? going concern ??), triggering Anger and additional retaliatory violence.

As technology progresses and we are provided with more affordances, individual's propensity for effective action also increases. This enables accelerated Conflict escalation.

Therefore, a crucial component of the survival of the human species, which is instrumental to all other goals, is to design social systems which avoid or inhibit conflict.

 Negative and Positive Expectations

Positive expectations (expecting another to act in a certain way) are fundamentally unstable. While living in the world, a variety of situations present themselves, some of critical importance. If a critical situation emerges, addressing it will likely overwhelm any possible induced motivation to fulfill any positive expectation. Moreover, multiple positive expectations can conditionally trigger at once, causing an internal conflict.

Negative expectations (expecting another to not act in a certain way) are generally stable (though they can be constructed to be unstable). Just as every effect has an infinitude of causes, so every goal has an infinitude of possible paths to achievement. Negative expectations establish bounds on the kinds of behaviors one may employ in service of their goals, but because of the boundlessness of affordances in the world this tends to not exclude goals unless those goals are identical to that which is not expected to happen (such as a goal to kill someone in a society with a negative expectation against murder).

Negative expectations form the most stable and conflict-free basis for societies. Negative and positive expectations form a healthy basis for communities. This distinction between society and community is one of the most critical innovations for reducing conflict.