ontact and conflict with other individuals,
acquires a status and develops a personality, so groups of individuals,
in conflict with other groups, achieve unity, organization, group
consciousness, and assume the forms characteristic of conflict
groups--that is to say, they become parties, sects, and nationalities,
etc.

2. Types of Conflict

Simmel, in his study of conflict, distinguished four types--namely, war,
feud and faction, litigation, and discussion, i.e., the impersonal
struggles of parties and causes. This classification, while
discriminating, is certainly not complete. There are, for example, the
varied forms of sport, in which conflict assumes the form of rivalry.
These are nevertheless organized on a conflict pattern. Particularly
interesting in this connection are games of chance, gambling and
gambling devices which appeal to human traits so fundamental that no
people is without example of them in its folkways.

Gambling is, according to Groos, "a fighting play," and the universal
human interest in this sport is due to the fact that "no other form of
play displays in so many-sided a fashion the combativeness of human
nature."[218]

The history of the duel, either in the form of the judicial combat, the
wager of battle of the Middle Ages, or as a form of private vengeance,
offers interesting material for psychological or sociological
investigation. The transition from private vengeance to public
prosecution, of which the passing of the duel is an example, has not
been completed. In fact, new forms are in some cases gradually gaining
social sanction. We still have our "unwritten laws" for certain
offenses. It is proverbially difficult to secure the conviction, in
certain parts of the country, Chicago, for example, of a woman who kills
her husband or her lover. The practice of lynching Negroes in the
southern states, for offenses against women, and for any other form of
conduct that is construed as a challenge to the dominant race, is an
illustration from a somewhat different field, not merely of the
persistence, but the gradual development of the so-called unwritten law.
The circumstances under which these and all other unwritten laws arise,
in which custom controls in contravention of the formal written code,
have not been investigated from the point of view of sociology and in
their human-nature aspects.

Several studies of games and gambling, in some respects the most unique
objectivations of hum