Interaction Models and Mediation

Finally read the October 11, 2010 New Yorker magazine. I liked the comment by Nora Ephron in her article about wills where she says, “”When you get divorced, and don’t get the house (like I did), you leave behind all sorts of things you don’t have the sense to know you’ll someday wonder about or feel genuinely nostalgic for.” I went on to read Talent Grab by Malcolm Gladwell where he asks and answers the question, why do we pay our stars so much money? See site to entire article at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/11/101011fa_fact_gladwell In the article he quotes Aya Chacar and William Hesterly article in the Managerial and Decision Economic which draws on the work of Alan Page Fiske. They say that, “Fiske is a U.C.L.A. anthropologist who argues that people use one of four models to guide the way they interact with one another: communal sharing, equity matching, market pricing, and authority ranking. Communal sharing is a group of roommates in house who are free to read one another’s books and wear one another’s clothing. Equality matching is a car pool: if I drive your child to school today, you drive my child to school tomorrow. Market pricing is where the terms of exchange are open to negotiations, or subject to the laws of supply and demand. And authority ranking is paternalism: it is a hierarchical system in which “superiors appropriate or pre-empt what they wish.” We see the same interaction in mediation. Being able to identify and understand these interactions makes it easier to deal with them in mediation. As always, you can post any comment about this blog or Divorce Mediation, or just Mediation by following the directions at the right in the green column or at the bottom of this website. Learn more about mediation at http://www.center-divorce-mediation.com/ WM(219) 5/14/11