Why Does Conflict Emerge Late and Escalate Rapidly: The Mechanism of Transition Failure and Accumulation

This study explains why conflict tends to emerge late and escalate rapidly by redefining the core mechanism of conflict formation not as “early alignment failure,” but as “transition failure” occurring at a subsequent stage. Existing conflict research has primarily focused on conflict avoidance, lack of communication, or failures in emotion regulation; however, these approaches do not sufficiently explain why recognized misalignments fail to translate into action. Accordingly, this study shifts the analytical focus of conflict from alignment itself to the transition process between recognition and execution. Transition is defined as the process through which a recognized misalignment is converted into an actionable object within a relationship. This process does not occur automatically but is activated only when specific conditions are satisfied. This study models transition as a multi-variable gating structure, in which factors such as relational cost, emotional overload, meta–expression gap, and social inhibition function to block or delay transition. Transition failure does not occur as a single event but operates as a repeated structure, in which misalignments remain suppressed and accumulate over time. In this process, suppressed experiences are reinforced through memory reactivation and cognitive amplification. Once a certain threshold is reached, conflict becomes activated in a nonlinear manner. Furthermore, repeated transition failure leads to the formation of an “abandonment state,” in which attempts at intervention are structurally discontinued. This state functions as a key mechanism linking delayed conflict with its sudden escalation. As a result, conflict should be understood not as the outcome of a single event, but as the product of repeated transition failure and accumulation within a state transition process. This study reconceptualizes conflict not as a problem of “how to resolve it,” but as a problem of “why it failed to translate into action,” thereby shifting the analytical focus from post-expression dynamics to pre-transition structures. This provides a new theoretical framework for understanding conflict as a condition-based state transition process rather than a result-oriented phenomenon.