Us versus them conflict is rarely about what it seems to be about: it has an understory which is the most interesting part Why do some conflicts ignite lasting generations ### Confirmation Bias. The human tendency to interpret new information as confirmation of one’s preexisting beliefs. ### Conflict Entrepreneurs. People who exploit high conflict for their own ends. ### Conflict Trap. A conflict that becomes magnetic, pulling people in despite their own best interests. Characteristic of high conflict. ### Contact Theory The idea that people from different groups will, under certain conditions, tend to become less prejudiced toward one another after spending time together. ### Crock Pot. A shorthand term for the issue that a conflict appears to be about, on the surface, when it is really about something else. ### Cyberball. A simple online ball-tossing game created by researchers to study the effect of social exclusion. ### Fire Starters Accelerants that lead conflict to explode in violence, including group identities, conflict entrepreneurs, humiliation, and corruption.” ### Fourth Way. A way to go through conflict that’s more satisfying than running away, fighting, or staying silent, the three usual paths. Leaning into the conflict. ### Good Conflict. Friction that can be serious and intense but leads somewhere useful. Does not collapse into dehumanization. Also known as healthy conflict. ### High Conflict. A conflict that becomes self-perpetuating and all-consuming, in which almost everyone ends up worse off. Typically an us-versus-them conflict. ### Humiliation. A forced and public degradation; an unjustified loss of dignity, pride, or status. Can lead to high conflict and violence. ### Idiot-Driver Reflex. The human tendency to blame other people’s behavior on their intrinsic character flaws—and attribute our own behavior to the circumstances we find ourselves in. Also known as the fundamental attribution error. ### Illusion Of Communication. The extremely common and mistaken belief that we have communicated something, when we have not. ### La Brea Tar Pits. A place in Los Angeles where natural asphalt has bubbled up from below the ground’s surface since the last Ice Age. A metaphor for high conflict. ### Looping For Understanding. An iterative, active listening technique in which the person listening reflects back what the person talking “seems to have said—and checks to see if the summary was right. Developed by Gary Friedman and Jack Himmelstein and detailed in their book Challenging Conflict.” ### Magic Ratio. When the number of everyday positive interactions between people significantly outweighs the number of negative, creating a buffer that helps keep conflict healthy. (In marriage, for example, the magic ratio is 5 to 1, according to research by psychologists Julie and John Gottman.) ### Paradox No. 1 of High Conflict. We are animated by high conflict, and also haunted by it. We want it to end, and we want it to continue. ### Paradox No. 2 of High Conflict. Groups bring obligations, including the duty to harm—or, at other times, the obligation to do no harm, to make peace. ### Paradox No. 3 of High Conflict. No one will change in the ways you want them to until they believe you understand and accept them for who they are right now. (And sometimes not even then.) ### Power Of The Binary The dangerous reduction of realities or choices into just two. For example: Black and White, good and evil, Democrat and Republican. ### Saturation Point. The point in a conflict where the losses seem heavier than the gains; an opportunity for a shift” ### Telling “The use of superficial shortcuts (like clothing or hair color) to quickly figure out who belongs to which group in a given conflict. A term used in Northern Ireland. ### Understory. The thing the conflict is really about, underneath the usual talking points (see Crock pot).” ### High conflict is the invisible hand of our time “But there is another invisible force that, like gravity, exerts its pull on everything else. When conflict escalates past a certain point, the conflict itself takes charge. The original facts and forces that led to the dispute fade into the background. The us-versus-them dynamic takes over. Actual differences of opinion on health care policy or immigration stop mattering, and the conflict becomes its own reality. High conflict is the invisible hand of our time.” “But there is another invisible force that, like gravity, exerts its pull on everything else. When conflict escalates past a certain point, the conflict itself takes charge. The original facts and forces that led to the dispute fade into the background. The us-versus-them dynamic takes over. Actual differences of opinion on health care policy or immigration stop mattering, and the conflict becomes its own reality. High conflict is the invisible hand of our time.” “Any modern movement that cultivates us-versus-them thinking tends to destroy itself from the inside, with or without violence. High conflict is intolerant of difference. A culture that sorts the world into good “and evil is by definition small and confining. It prevents people from working together in large numbers to grapple with hard problems. “We are all connected. We have to adapt. This is the central challenge of our time. To create institutions and societies designed for healthy conflict, not high conflict. Built to respond to problems without collapsing into dehumanization. We know this is possible “because people have done it, in big and small ways, all over the planet, as we’ll see.” ### High conflict is a system not a feeling “High conflict makes us miserable. It is costly, in every sense. Money, blood, friendships. This is the first paradox of conflict: we are animated by conflict, and also haunted by it. We want it to end, and we want it to continue” ### The Conflict Trap “That’s the main difference between high conflict and good conflict. It’s not usually a function of the subject of the conflict. Nor is it about the yelling or the emotion. It’s about the stagnation. In healthy conflict, there is movement. Questions get asked. Curiosity exists. There can be yelling, too. But healthy conflict leads somewhere. It feels more interesting to get to the other side than to stay in it. ***In high conflict, the conflict is the destination. There’s nowhere else to go.” “In normal life, humans make many predictable errors of judgment. In high conflict, we make many more. It is impossible to feel curious while also feeling outraged, for example. We lose access to that part of our brain, the part that generates wonder. High conflict degrades a full life in exchange for moments of fleeting satisfaction, and the implications are physical, measurable, and punishing. When they fight, couples experience spikes in cortisol, a stress hormone, as do political partisans after their candidate loses an election. In high conflict, cortisol injections can become recurring, impairing the immune system, degrading memory and concentration, weakening muscle tissue and bones, and accelerating the onset of disease.” ### The Exhausted Majority “About two thirds of Americans are fed up with political polarization and wish people would spend more time listening to one another, according to the nonpartisan organization More in Common, which labeled this group the “exhausted majority.” “Most of us avoid all kinds of conflict, often for very good reason. We eventually stop hanging out with that friend who complains incessantly about his ex-wife. Or we stop reading the news. We keep our heads down. This detachment is understandable, but it leaves high conflict untreated. The extremists take over. Overnight, high conflict can shape shift into violence, as history keeps showing us. One isolated act of bloodshed leads to collective pain on the other side, and then a need for revenge. In war, the us-versus-them mindset is an essential weapon. It is much easier to kill, enslave, or imprison people if you are convinced they are subhuman.” “He came to realize that human beings have two intrinsic capacities when it comes to solving problems: one is our capacity for adversarialism. The pursuit of mutually exclusive, selfish interests by groups working against one another. This is how the legal system traditionally operates. Husband versus wife. Prosecution versus defense. Our other capacity, also evident throughout human history, is our instinct for solidarity. Our ability to expand the definition of us and work across differences to navigate conflicts. In fact, our evolutionary success as a species has depended more on this second capacity than the first.” “During the coronavirus pandemic, billions of people responded to a highly unfamiliar, ever-changing threat with breathtaking cooperation and selflessness. Citizens around the world began staying home days before official stay-at-home orders were issued by their governments. This happened in poor countries and rich. After the U.K.’s National Health Service put out a call asking for 250,000 volunteers to run errands for at-risk people in quarantine, three times that many signed up.” “There were exceptions. Specific leaders and small numbers of regular people who scapegoated others and divided the world cleanly into us and them. But for months, the vast majority of people felt a visceral pull in the opposite direction, toward collective unity. Now imagine what might have happened had more of our traditions been designed to encourage that instinct for collaboration, rather than adversarialism” “Institutions can be designed to incite either version of human nature, to provoke adversarialism or unity. But in modern times, we’ve erred on the side of adversarialism. We see everything, from politics to business to the law, as a contest between winners and losers” **There is nothing more important to a person who is undergoing a life crisis than to be understood,” Gary likes to say. Being understood is more important than money or property. It’s more important even than winning.” “Most of the time, people trapped in conflict don’t know the understory. They get so focused on false flags like the crock pot or the Legos that they get stuck. High conflict is like a trance in this way. It’s hard to look away. So Gary helps people step back and look at the Legos from a small distance, with his questions and his listening, so they understand what lies underneath. “Because once people feel understood, they can relax their defenses. People can let many things go while holding fast to the things that matter most, once they know what those things are. “We are more willing and able to understand others when we feel understood ourselves,” Gary and his coauthor Jack Himmelstein wrote in their book Challenging Conflict” “The traditional, adversarial legal system is designed to play into our worst conflict instincts, to go to war over Legos. Like cable TV news and many social media platforms, the law is designed mostly to perpetuate itself. Stock market millions have been made by inciting high conflict systematically, creating a vast conflict-industrial complex. By offering a way to go through conflict, without making it worse, Gary and other pioneering mediators have done more to subvert this conflict-industrial complex than most people alive today. Mediation typically costs a fraction of what a traditional divorce would cost. In money and also in spirit” ### The Importance of Listening “And there are real consequences to our bad listening, the kind you can measure. When people don’t feel heard, they get slightly anxious and defensive. They say less, and whatever they do say tends to be oversimplified. The walls go up. But when people do feel heard, magical things happen. They make more coherent and intriguing points. They acknowledge their own inconsistencies. Willingly. They become more flexible. Customers who feel heard by their financial advisors are more likely to trust them—and to pay for their services. Workers who feel heard perform better and like their bosses more. Patients, if they feel understood, leave the hospital more satisfied and more likely to follow their doctor’s orders. Among couples, people who feel more understood by their partners can make use of conflict without doing damage. Arguing actually seems to make them feel better, not worse, even as they continue to disagree. The conflict is healthy. Gary knew there was no way to get out of a conflict trap without better listening skills. So he divided the musicians into pairs and had them practice looping. One person listened while the other explained why she’d joined the orchestra to begin with. When the “talker said something that seemed important to her, the listener “played it back” to her to see if he’d understood. The listener didn’t repeat what she’d said word for word, like a robot. He tried instead to distill what he thought she’d meant into the most elegant language he could muster. Then he asked if he’d gotten it right. “So it sounds like you joined this symphony originally because you wanted to challenge yourself, to play alongside some of the greatest musicians in the world. Is that right?” One of two things happened when the musicians did this. First, the listeners did not get it right as often as they’d expected. That’s partly because we all make assumptions when we hear people talk, some of which are off base. And it’s partly because it’s hard for any human to convey exactly what she means the first time she’s asked. For example, the violinist might refine her point when it gets played back to her: “Actually, I was looking for inspiration, not just challenge. I wanted to feel that sense of wonder, I guess you’d call it, that I’d felt for music when I was younger.” To grasp what someone really means, the musicians learned, requires both curiosity and double-checking. Second, the listeners learned that people really, really appreciate being heard. When they’d looped the talker correctly, the talker almost always responded the same way: their eyes lit up, and they said, “Exactly!” For Gary, it was a lovely thing to see. When people feel understood, they trust the other person to go a little deeper and keep trying to get it right. This iterative back-and-forth process helped the musicians identify what was really important to them as a group. The goal was to find what lay beneath their various contract demands. Why was the crock pot—or the vacation allowance—important to them? “This was a fascinating exercise for me,” one violinist said. “I’ve been playing alongside Phil for the last fifteen years, and we’ve talked about a number of things, but until now, we never talked about why we love doing what we do.” In this way, the musicians were able to identify their most important, shared concerns—and come up with a shorter list of priorities. They wanted better pay not just for the cash money but also because they worried about fairness and the future: they wanted to feel that their compensation was commensurate with other symphonies so they could attract new talent. Management wanted those things, too, as it turned out. But there had been no opportunity to come to that realization, because neither side was really listening to each other. “I came to understand how important it was for me to listen,” said Pastreich, the chief negotiator on the management side. “It became clear to me that one of the things that the musicians were angry with me about was[…]” “It became clear to me that one of the things that the musicians were angry with me about was they felt [that] I wasn’t even listening to what they were saying. And I think it is true,” he said. “Nor do I think they were listening to us.” Once we feel understood, we see options we couldn’t see before. We feel some ownership over the search for solutions. Then, even if we don’t get our way, we are more accepting of the result because we helped build it.”