The Cognition of Conflict: Ontology, Dynamics, and Ideology - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 18

Hostility is a quite unavoidable consequence of social conflict : if agent X believes
that there is a conflict with the goal of agent Y, she will not just have an opposite
goal; she will have the goal that the other does not achieve his goal.
When each agent actively pursues his or her goal, trying to prevent the other from
achieving his or her goal or to damage the other (aggressive move), there is a new
level of conflict: fighting .
Y has the goal of preventing or thwarting the aggressive action/goal of X: her
goal is the aggressive goal that X fails (defensive move), and so on.

1.5.4 Epistemic and Social Conflicts

Epistemic conflicts are likely to generate new social conflicts in yet another way:
Epistemic conflicts (even among cooperating agents):

(Goal X p) and (Goal Y p) goal agreement
(Bel X (q > p)) and (Bel Y (q > (Not p))): belief conflict
(Goal X q) and (Goal Y (Not q)): conflict

Belief conflicts can generate goal conflicts.
Conversely, epistemic conflicts can generate cooperation, goal agreement, among
people with conflicting goals, for example, between enemies:
if

goal conflict (Goal X p) and (Goal Y (Not p))
belief conflict (Bel X (q > p)) and (Bel Y (q > Not p))
! goal agreement (Goal X q) and (Goal Y q)

In this form of cooperation, one of the two agents is wrong and is acting in a
self-defeating way.
Of course, goal social conflicts do not presuppose or necessarily imply epistemic
social conflicts: agents can be in a social conflict while being in perfect belief
agreement: they know the same things but they want different things.
Two agents in an epistemic social conflict are not necessarily in a goal social
conflict. However, as we have seen, a simple epistemic conflict can generate a goal
conflict.

1.5.5 Individual Selfishness and Social Conflicts

In our analysis, social conflicts are due not to the selfish attitudes of social actors,
that is, to the fact that the actors caring only about their own goals and welfare. On
the contrary this is an implicit premise of social conflict theories or an explicit claim
as in Randall Collins' theory (Collins 1974 ).