Nikolai S. Rozov

Group decision in a conflict is interpreted as attempts by the parties to impose their ritual on participants with appropriate attitudes and lines of behavior. The concept of interactive rituals (the tradition of E. Durkheim, W. Warner, E. Goffman and R. Collins) is enriched by the concepts of conflict interaction, habitus and attitudes, operant conditioning. The core scheme is as follows: two or more individuals are in the same physical space, perceive each other’s reactions and under certain conditions (common focus of attention, synchronization of behavior and psychophysiological processes) begin to experience a common emotion and acquire a general subjective reality. On this basis they change their social relations (from solidarity to hatred) and adherence to certain sacred objects (sanctities, symbols, values). A habitus includes cognitive attitudes (frames, pictures of the world), social attitudes (the internalized relations between people), value-motivational attitudes (adherence to sacred objects and values), existential attitudes (identities), and behavioral settings (stereotypes of reactions, actions, practices, strategies). In a successful full-scale ritual, attitudes of all five types can be strengthened or destroyed, actualized or deactualized (become latent) by effects of operant conditioning (B. Skinner, G. Homans, P. Blau). A radical change of attitudes is called ‘reframing’. In these terms, hypothetical regularities are formulated, whose applicability and validity is verified through a theoretical interpretation of one particular case of conflict that occurred in the summer of 1917 in Petrograd and described in the memoirs of the commander-in-chief of the Petrograd Military District troops Peter A. Polovtsev