Keep Your Friends Close. . . Your Enemies Closer?
You know the old saying, keep your friends close but keep your enemies closer? A new study has found that encouraging adversaries to have more interpersonal contact to find common ground may work on occasion, but not necessarily in the U.S. Senate, according to new research, as reported at newswise.com. Researchers studied the interactions among U.S. senators from the 1970s to the 2000s. Senators either moved closer together or further apart in their voting behavior as a function of their political identities and how much contact they had with each other. This pattern was especially pronounced when contact occurred in Senate committees that were more divided. “Conventional wisdom says interpersonal contact between people will foster collaboration and consensus,” says co-author Sameer B. Srivastava , assistant professor, Haas Management of Organizations Group at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. “We found that increasing physical contact between people who hav...