Intro

• High conflict: conflict that becomes self-perpetuating & all-consuming, everyone ends up worse, usually us-vs-them; a system more than a feeling

Part I: Into Conflict

1: The Understory of Conflict

• High conflict → no destination, vs healthy conflict, which leads somewhere
• Humans → two intrinsic capacities when it comes to problem solving: for adversarialism and solidarity
• One strategy in mediation (e.g. for divorces) = following the Why Train, helps people feel understood, which allows then to be less defensive and try to understand the other
  • Looping: listening in ways people can see → feeling heard lowers anxiety, helps people make more coherent points, perform better, follow directions
  • “What would it look like if you got what you wanted here?”
  • “What do you want your opponent to understand you? What do you want to understand about your opponent?”

2: The Power of the Binary

• The word category comes from Greek for “accusation”
• Danger of categories: once we have a them to contrast with us, no matter how arbitrary, we show bias vs the other
  • Binary decisions flatten complex feelings people have toward most issues
• Often assume we are communicating more than we are
• Fundamental needs for belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence all threatened by social rejection
  • Responding with aggression, demonization → gives sense of control and self-esteem, even purpose, but ultimately only intensified social ostracism
• Imagine the other side as more extreme, disliking us more → all prevents us from being curious and actually engaging
• How to nudge people toward more cooperative forms of interaction? (ex. Bahá’í religion)
  • Give people more than two choices— ranked choice voting, proportional representation
  • Avoid yes-no decisions, clear winners and losers
  • Try having groups switch roles with each other

3: The Fire Starters

• What are the factors that make conflicts explode?
• Group identities— norms abs traditions dictate how to deal with conflict, what is considered an affront; widens scope of what makes you feel a certain way
  • Develop default frames to look at and understand the world, prioritize diff emotions
    • Finnish word sisu = a kind of inner fire, ferocity in the face of great odds
    • Inuit group, the Utku → ihuma: kind of deep self-control producing outward calm or laughter, instead of anger
  • Constantly remind us of and immortalize conflict
• Conflict entrepreneurs— people important to the lives of people in conflict, become central to group identity → lots of influence over whether a conflict escalates or resolves
  • Political leaders (Trump, Assad, Modi) who intentionally stole rival identities to boost their power, divert attn from their own crimes
  • Encourage people to find meaning in conflict
• Humiliation— the “nuclear bomb of the emotions,” jeopardizes our deepest sense of self, that we matter → often leads to exploding conflict
  • Relates to victimization, desperation
  • Because it is subjective & depends on person’s experience, context, can manipulated, purposely incited
  • Exposure to violence → chronic stress/trauma → primes the brain to be hypervigilant, react to even small things as threats…then not responding to these things becomes humiliating
  • Pursuit of revenge vs humiliation can be exploited by conflict entrepreneurs
• Corruption— weak or complicit governments
  • Have gotten better at preventing war in recent years, but chronic nonwar violence still widespread— when govt cannot be relied upon for justice, people take it into their own hands

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Part II: Out of Conflict

4: Buying Time

• Saturation point: when losses of a conflict finally outweigh the gains
• Time & space = critical to shifting the out of high conflict
• Challenge is that even if you leave the conflict, it still exists all around you → common to vacillate back and forth
  • Important to replace role in conflict with new identity— recategorization of a narrow identity to a broader one
• Contact theory → help people recategorize each other from “us vs them” by spending time together under certain conditions
  • How effective is this, actually? Requires specific conditions, or else can make things worse:
  1. Everyone involved should have ≈ equal status
  2. Support of a respected authority
  3. Have people not just talk, but actually work together
  4. Everyone in pursuit of some shared goal, aligned motivation— people who want to leave high conflict (at saturation point)
• Key is to slow down conflict by buying time → makes peace possible… use tactics like:
  • Avoiding fire starters (move to new location, stay off social media)
  • Tweak situation to lessen emotional power
  • Rhythmic breathing
  • Distraction
  • Reappraisal (longest lasting tactic?) → reframing how you think about a situation

5: Making Space

• Investigate your own understory → awareness of your emotions
• Break the binary: recategorize and re-individualize people with different identities
• Work to achieve magic 5:1 ratio of positive to negative interactions → plan and participate in more positive activities (games, meals, celebrations)
• Make what you say more hearable by reframing it in other side’s moral lanfuage
  • Before speaking: 1) Does it need to be said? 2) … by me? 3) … by me right now? Usually not.
  • In politics, liberals prioritize care, fairness, liberty; conservatives → loyalty, authority, liberty, sanctity

6: Reverse Engineering

• How to clear the path out of high conflict for large groups? Governments experimenting with Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration plan with mixed results
• Counterpropaganda
  • Found that demobilization announcements shown during World Cup game btw Colombia and Brazil, when seen, led to increase in desertions by FARC members! (Opposite to role of radio in Rwandan genocide)
• Lessons from Colombia
  1. Must clear the path to help people out of conflict at scale → make it safe, legitimate, easy to find
  2. Don’t ask people to betray their remaining identities that transcend conflict (ex. to family)
  3. Help solidify new identity (again, often through ties to family, children)

7: Complicating the Narrative

• Conflict is necessary and essential to make people and ideas better— must intentionally cultivate honest conflict to preempt outbreak of high conflict
  • Allow complex, nuanced positions to exist
  • Complexity is contagious → complicate the narrative early and often
• Looping during conversations boosts positive:negative ratio
• Listening isn’t necessarily agreeing, but being curious about the understory, what’s behind someone’s different POV (vs shaming or humiliating them)
• Establish some ground rules, eg. 1) Take seriously the things everyone holds dear, 2) Don’t try to convince each other we’re wrong, 3) Be curious

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Applications to Life

• When in high conflict argument…
  • Take a few minute break
  • Deep breathing
• Break out of binary decisions and identifying a person with each side
  • Recategorize the options, expand beyond two
• Cultivate 5:1 ratio of positive:negative experiences
• Practice looping
• Establish ground rules to promote healthy conflict (see above)