Conflict Style Test

There is no best conflict style

Most tests of this kind imply one. Collaboration gets described as the mature option, avoidance and accommodation as failures, competition as aggression.

That is not what the evidence supports. What predicts good outcomes is having more than one setting and using the one that fits — and each mode is correct somewhere.

Yielding is right when the issue matters much more to them than to you. Withdrawing is right when you are too angry to be useful, provided you say so and return. Asserting is right when something genuinely cannot be conceded. Collaborating is best in principle and expensive in practice, and using it on everything is its own imposition.

So a low score on a mode is reported here as a missing option rather than as a virtue. The problem with a single-mode profile is not the mode. It is that every situation gets the same response regardless of what it needed.

The one exception

Escalation is not a mode and there is no situation in which it is correct.

This matters because it separates two things that get confused: content and conduct. Disagreeing strongly, holding a position, being angry — all content, all legitimate, none of it predicts damage. Contempt, personal criticism, defensiveness and stonewalling are conduct, and they are what the research on couples finds actually predicts failure.

That distinction is unusually good news. It means you do not have to agree, concede, or feel differently. You have to change what you do while disagreeing, which is narrower and considerably more achievable.

Contempt is the specific one

Of the damaging behaviours, one stands out in the research: contempt — mocking, sneering, eye-rolling, sarcasm, an air of superiority.

It is the most corrosive because of what it communicates, which is not you are wrong but you are beneath me. Criticism attacks a position and contempt attacks the person’s standing, and nothing built on the second one recovers well.

If your escalation score is high, look specifically at whether contempt is part of it. It is more addressable than it feels, because it is a set of behaviours rather than a feeling — and the behaviours can stop before the feeling does.

The pursue–withdraw trap

The most common destructive pattern between two people, and it needs two people to produce it.

One person raises things and presses; the other finds the intensity unbearable and withdraws. The withdrawal increases the first person’s urgency, which increases the pressure, which increases the withdrawal. Both are responding reasonably to the other’s behaviour and the loop tightens on its own.

Neither person is the problem and neither can fix it alone. What breaks it is usually the withdrawing person saying they are withdrawing and committing to a time to return — which removes the ambiguity that was driving the pursuit.

About the items

The four strategic modes follow the standard two-axis model of conflict behaviour — concern for your own outcome against concern for the relationship. Escalation is added because conduct predicts more than strategy does. The statements are written for this test rather than reproduced from a copyrighted instrument.

The free run takes the first five statements of each facet, giving you a real reading on all five rather than a precise reading on two.