Overview
Avoidance-avoidance conflicts are choices between two things we don’t want. It is the choice of A or B, when we don’t want either. These forced-choice situations are not easy to resolve.
We tend to procrastinate doing either. We hope a new option will come along. We are stuck on the head of a pin until we decide one or the other.
Examples
- Being alone for Thanksgiving or listening to Uncle Earl’s stories
- The choice between losing your rook or your bishop in chess
- Being late for work or getting a speeding ticket
- Not going to prom or going with your cousin
- Cleaning the garage or getting yelled at
Video Transcript
The third level of conflict has a little conflict in it. It’s an avoidance-avoidance conflict. This is a choice between two things we don’t want.
We don’t want to take out the garbage and we don’t want to get yelled at. We don’t want to go to work, but we don’t want to be poor.
So this is a choice between two things that we don’t want to do or two things that we dislike.
This takes a little more effort and a little more time to resolve than an approach-approach conflict. In avoidance-avoidance conflicts, we try to avoid the situation completely. We try to ignore it. We tend to hope that it goes away.
In Dollard & Miller studies, they used rats in a maze. The maze is a single long maze. They put the rat in the middle of the maze and at one end they would put shock, it’s a mild shock but it’s there. At the other end, they put shock. And the rat in the middle of this long maze would do what you would do: nothing. It just sat there. It wouldn’t run toward one end because there is shock there, and it wouldn’t run toward the other end because there is shock there.
So it would just sit.
Experimenters began taking this long single maze and making it shorter and shorter and shorter, until it became known as a shuttle box. It was a choice between being on this side or being on that side of a small fence or a line between the sides.
You would get shocked on one side, and then when you jumped to the other side. The animals act like we would. They tried to stay in midair, not making the decision at all. Not go on one side or the other, just trying to stay away from it.
That’s an avoidance-avoidance conflict, a choice between two things you don’t like. We don’t like either one.
We would like to avoid all of it. None of the above please.
Audio
Infographic
