Of our daily lives and that is the challenge of what you label high conflict. As you define it a distinct Good Conflict orr natural conflict or the type of conflicts that resolved into a true us versus them and so i want to take a little bit of time talking with you today about that and diving into some of the markers in the investigative work that you did to bring this book and this concept forward. But i thought i would start by asking you to talk a little bit about what got you interested in this particular topic . In some ways what i found so fascinating about reading it was that it is in so many ways what we are living through an so many stories in her daily life right now that thought about in a way most of us stopped to that when these daily news stories unfold. Thank you and thank you everyone for joining us today. Im so glad to be back with you all talking about this. Its like an appropriate baxter and we can get back to that. Four years ago i felt like as a journalist i had to do something differently. I felt like it was easy as a journalist to make our political conflicts even if you didnt intend to print but some people intend to. Most dont and it just felt like there was an understanding about what was going on in the country and thats a problem. Has been a lot of people people with times who have studied conflict at all time personal political professional and individual and the study of conflict is a system particularly intractable conflict to me really puts Everything Else in the place. There are a lot of forces that got us where we are. Thats the overlay that suddenly made everything make sense and it distorted kind of way. Then the question became all right what can we learn from people who have been through conflicts and gone to a better place so id talked to a politician and an environmental activist in england and frustrated republicans are maremack michigan and the whole goal was to see how did they get from high conflict which is this really unpleasant toxic destructive kind of conflict to Good Conflict because the problem is in conflict. They can feel that way but the problem is the complex and all those people did make that journey which was incredibly encouraged in and there were patterns ofth what happened fir, second and third so the book is really about how they did that and how more of us could do the same. You talk a little bit about in the context of the round that this most naturally comes to mind which is very intractable forces some i wonder its just to help viewers and listeners to understand this framework and you talk about how this appears in divorce cases. You talk about high conflict is the Mysterious Force that incites people to lose their minds and political views or gang vendettas and i was so struck in the start of the book as ru you begin to talk about the context of the wars. Thats where the phrase high conflict comes from. They are people who work in the divorce world like psychologists lawyers in the report are high conflict divorce is one which they are pervasive negative exchanges in a environment where the conflict is the destination. The conflict doesnt go anywhere. And about a quarter for american divorces each year could be categorized as high conflict so thats 200,000 divorces so it turns out they are also high conflict politics, high conflict companies high conflict people so i think its a useful way to understand this special category of conflict in which there is not progress, where you are just kind stuck. It is something, theres an distinct difference between conflict and high conflict. For me it helped me get out of the mindset of and the narrowing compounds of the idea that we either havet to have bipartisan unity or be at each others throats. Ke those are not the only two choices. Just like in a marriage you dont have to get along all the time and you also dont have to verbally emotionally or physically abuse each other. There are a lot of states and between now. One of the things and you have this quote but i just love that is clarifying for me of what youre talking about where you quote the present of germany says you are experiencing permanent and that seems like part of the challenge that you are wrestling with in our politics. The names matter, the names change but the outrage doesnt. And im curious as you trace this back and as you build into this and looked at the roots of this when did america lose its mind . When did american politics tip over from a natural tension over policies and philosophies into something that is much more i can today to a very sports rivalry . Right, the interesting thing is to most of the research on polarization dates back to roughly around the 80s in the aftermath of watergate and vietnam and other things that brought down the trust level of our institutions and also boosted the adversarial traditions of the news media. Many many reporters still think they are breaking watergate everyday are trying to and thats adversarial mindset on things like that and you find their Media Outlets that figured out they could reliably not target the whole country to use that fear and greed and anger. Much of the time in order to give an audience coming back and other Media Outlets have figured that h out owned social media platforms so we designed a lot of her institutions to incentivize high conflict and the important thing about that is you can redesign them. They are not from so we can design them to incentivize Good Conflict and you see that in your own life. Youve probably been to places in a church or synagogue or a neighborhood where there are cultures that dealt with conflict differentlyha. Some places where people avoid it and thats pop down how the leadershipe deals with it. That doesnt work are usually and other places were conflict is combustible like its out of control and destructive to the thing that the organization is supposed to be about another places have traditional rituals and policies in place to make conflict healthier. It is possible to tap into just as we are hardwired for high conflict humans are hardwired for Good Conflict and i would say most of Human History is about Good Conflict that got us to this point. One of the things you talk about is reducing high conflict is breaking out of the binary. Its the idea that you cant reduce a situation whether its political or personal ors professional to the idea that there are only two sides into possible solutions. When you say our institutions dont cometi from you do talk about one that you saw and learned about in the context of naturally setting up a system that does not reduce things to Political Parties or to political binaries. I wonder if you could justnd tak about what you saw and teaching us about how do you do politics better . Its funny because i didnt know anything before he started workingt on it but the book was about casting a wide net in seeing are there examples of institutions thatat do conflict better institutionally enshrined in what they do. Its reallye interesting. The concept of visit that we are all connected there is no us or them. Its fundamental and foundational eventr idea is they are very interdependent so in some ways particularlyly appropriate for those moments in history as we are seeing with the pandemic and many other things. The idea is that jesus and the prophet mohammad believing that one comes from all one Spiritual Force started in the 1800s and their 150,000 adherents to the United States the largest in india. Whats interesting is small. Global faith and there are no ministers so how do they make decisions . What they do with and potentially this is one form of politics each spring everyone in each of the 17,000 locations gather together to elect leaders. A democracy operating at 233 countries. Heres the twist. Everything about these elections is designed to reduce the odds of d r high conflict so the thig about high conflict is once you are and it is very tricky to get out. Its very magnetic. Its there are lots of psychological and sociological reasonsan for that. The idea is to stay out of it and dont let it start. There are no parties allowed no binary categories. People are not allowed to Campaign Even if they want and you cant discuss that person you can only discuss what quality and basically its a pretty process. After prayer each person writes down the names of nine people who they think has experiencing character to lead the community at that moment and then the nine winners are announced. Theres no celebrating. Its considered a duty not of victory and once they have the people in place and they have to make the decision to deal with complex that arise in the budget and that sort of things they have other things to keep the ego in check and keep high conflict less likely one of which the meetings are called consultations and they do things like if you could post an idea once i propose that its no longer my idea. So these Little Things may sound small. Actually s playing into how they can work particularly in conflict to help reduce the odds of the kind of binary dynamic that no one tents to leave the high conflict. You also mentioned the pandemic and that was the subject that i want to spend some time talking with you about. You are a writer for the atlantic and i wrote a piece at the start of the pandemic forget last year that i continued in my mind whether i got it terribly wrong and i was thinking a lot about them in the contextd of your book and your writing on high conflict. I wrote about you know in the first year of the pandemic way back at the beginning what i saw ishe this unique spirit in amera this National Moment of unity and desire to Work Together as americans that i saw as a unique moment in american history. A lot of my own history from 9 11 and thinking about the unity that the country had after 9 11 never forget and united we stand and feeling like you are in the same moment in the beginning and the middle of march last year where you thought individual americans making these choices about the pandemic and closing their businesses with a head upon the government told them that the schools were closing ahead of the government telling them to and at that moment i was celebrating the spirit of 2020 that america is coming together amid the pandemic and then of course every week since then it has felt less like a United Nations in the face of the pandemic and that sort of keep coming backin to, in the frame f high conflict this question of sort of how it seemed like americans got the response to the pandemic right and then politics messed it up. And sort of how do you think about your own high conflict frame the america that you lived during this last year . I think you were right then and there was an opportunity for it to last longer than it did. All over the world not just america there was a reall coming together and like you have covered lots of disasters and attacks and its always true that there is this golden hour after a catastrophe or during what theres a very strong human poll to come together to help one another. You can really feel it and its an amazing and amazing experience and i think one of our great powers as a society but it has to be harnessed. Has to be sustained. The son late march of 2020 that 90 of americans said they believed we are all in it together up from 63 of the fall of 2018. Tarcher member of the u. S. Senate passed a massive First Federal stimulus bill by a vote ofs 960. So you are quantitatively absolute correct. Peopley are wired to the world for us and them and we are wired expand their definition of us understood and conditions and a big shock like the pandemic can make us and comment on the whole world overnight. Its a hugeor opportunity in conflict to use those shocks. Peter polmann writes about this a lot. High conflict is a system with interlocking diebolt vocal parts that are self perpetuation liket a motion machine. When you have a big shock that could be a weather event. It could be a death or could be violent or new common enemy like a virus. When you have a shock taken up and temporarily some of those interlocking systems but you have to seize thatou opportunity which is usually leadership of the national or local level. On the one hand i would say that opportunity was not cease particularly at the National Level. Lots of barriers around the world and around the country on that. You saw it in some places in some towns and its also true that the duration of this particular kind of cataclysm is important that its very hard for humans to sustain that feeling when he goes on and on and theres no chance to recover. Its like war and other things and this is why looking forward to future pandemics its so important from the site psychological and physiological and biological view to really start strong and united with very clear consistent messaging thats been tested on humans in real time to try to frontload the reaction so you can make it short. And thats fundamentally too much to ask for humans who are social creatures who need socializing and ritual and interactions especially children just the way they need food and water and its too much to ask for it to go on this long. I think those are true. It was a huge opportunity and there was a moment but we had a preexisting condition in the pandemic which was extreme high conflict so that those in galway when these kinds of things happen and another thing id say about this and hope for hyperpolarized society is one of the things we start to see is the news media becomes relentlesslytl negative on all sides of theiv spectrum. There are a lot of reasons for that but i think that does not help us because even when the caseload was down when vaccines started to look like they were going to work we didnt see a huge change in the tone and emphasis of a lot of the headlines. E there was a study done on us by the way about comparing the negativity of major u. S. News accounts during the pandemic to International News accounts of the pandemic and the u. S. Coverage was much more negative and even more negative than journalist coverage of the negative the pandemic. The bottom line is when you have this level of high conflict its very hard to seize those opportunities. He talked a lot about it and i will shorthanded here is a rogue t cousin problem that we e in some ways all in conflict scenarios the most combustible people in the group were loyalties. You talk a lot about the competing groups in competing loyalties and identities and i wonder if you could talk about the way you end up calling the fire starters. What are the things that cause people to see the source of high conflict . They are brogue cousin comes from the story of the hatfield and mccoys feud which many people may have heard of. Very quickly in 1878 friend of my cory and the hatfield farm on the border of kentucky and wests virginia these two families had lived sidebyside for generations farming the land and Randolph Mccoy thought that he recognized one of the on Lloyd Hatfield farm and it must have been stolen from his farm. No one could convince him to drop it. A quite complained to the authorities and organize a trial. Mccoy lost the trial and you know that wasnt a great experience for him but he let it roll off and everyone moved on. The problem is the hatfield mccoys and the many relatives all over the area. For a year and a half after the trial a few of the employees nephews got into a fight and testified against mccoy in the big trial and they beat the man to death. This is the moment the feud became a high conflict dispute a morphed into an intractable one over therp course of the next decade there was a stabbing vigilante shooting and Supreme Court case. Women were beaten, 80 people got drawn to the feud across the nation. I explained this to say that one of the conditions that reliably lead to high conflict and every case ive looked at are powerful Group Identities that are made salient by leaders. This is because when we experience collective emotion its geometrically compounds the conflict. You dont personally have to be attacked or humiliated. If someone in your group is attacked or humiliated it and we humans process is this in the same part of the brain processes pain it feels like its happening to you and mirrors is true. And the reverse is true. You feel pride just like sports fans after their team wins a basketball game they feel like theyey are more likely to be abe to get through adversity in a game or contest which is really not true but its a collective emotion that feels churn asked her and it is our perceptions of this powerful Group Identity particularly when there are two. Theres something about this binary ishi where particular political system of winner take all system where there are two parties is really designed for high conflict based on what we know about Human Behavior and conflict. Those powerful oppositional groups, it doesnt bring out our best conflict instincts of humans i think its her to say. Amanda one of the things that i was fascinated or curious to talk with you about in this is what does america do with the lessons that you have laid out in this book . We are locked into this intractable high conflict like with our politics and most of us dont want to be there. I think thats another part of your book talking about how out the middles and thats something thats in politics and consists in war zones. What advice do you have two the country as we wrestle with where we are right now . C at the collective level and the macro level one thing that goes to what we were just talking about about the binary is to make significant reforms to our electoral system, to make third parties possible. The Founding Fathers did not want there to be parties let alone just to. Theres no reason we have to stick with thisle formula. We know fromhi the research abot polarization in countries that have multiple parties at things like rank Choice Voting in representation tend to be a less polarized and have more trust in the system is more fair and it feels more fair and it is more fair which changes everything. It lowers the volume of injustice when you lose. Some states have moved in this direction. Others are trying to actively. Every session theres a bill introduced in congress to make this happen. Thats the kind of thing you can tangibly get behind that just makes a lot of sense. The other thing i think is important to realize how much of this is also operating at the individual level and its operating on elites so that the people in power need to change what they are doing and they are also captured by high conflict. So i want to talk very quickly about the individual things that people do not just elites that everyone in what ive done in my own life. Another precondition of high conflict is the presence of conflict entrepreneurs who are people, companies, platforms, pundits who intentionally exploit conflict on their own end. It could bee forprofit. Often i find it for attention, for a sense of meaning and comradery or for power. So becoming aware of who those people are in your own life or in your social media feed or your news diet and trying to put some distance between you and them if you want to stay out of high conflict. Thats something we know is very effective in the people i follow in the book including this politician who found himself caught in the vortex of high conflict one of the first things he did was to start relying on different people. He moved away from the seasoned veteran political organizer that have been advising him who saw the world as black and white when fight lose those words and classic conflict entrepreneur. He found a lot more nuance in humanity and to take a more extreme example of former gang leader that i a lot of time with in chicago he moved across town so he could get out the conflict which he was and which was the minears langevin data. And when things went bad as they always do and his cousin who he was very close to us brutally murdered he didnt know who had donee it. He couldnt react and way he normally would to retaliate because of that distance. Everything we can do toato slow down conflict is very important. At the individual level but also at the level. And the last question before i open it up to the audience. You started by saying this book grew out of where you saw yourself in journalism and the stories that you were covering and wondering where they came from and why they were so challenging. So i wonder how has this book changed the way you do your journalism it change the way he you talk to your family because you talk about the ways you try to listen differently around the dinner table that when youre out doing your job how do you report differently and how do you write differently and how do you explain differently in this backdrop . The rules of engagement for journalism or anything dont apply the same way in that conflict. They will not work and they will often backfire. I had to develop a whole new set of rules of engagement and its hard. Out. Till figuring it im interested in suggestions and im working a lot with the Journalism Network which is a nonprofit that helps them do this too. How do you cover controversy in ways that eliminate rather than exacerbate the conflict in one of the overarching ideas from researches that you have to complicate the narrative that your audience have in a really polarizing issue. And as far as knowing what that narrative is in figuring out the places where that narrative is not true in very limited or using history or different locations or broader lens a wider lens on the problem to see what is really happening to help your audience have a more useful view of either the conflict of the other side or themselves. Thats now how i try to measure success. Is this story going to help eliminate anything about this conflict and h if not im not going to do it. Its easier said than done but i actually think many newsrooms and editors right now and not all but particularly the National Level have a fundamentally underestimated their audiences desire and ability to handle complexity right now and i think most americans want to beat different from a news and what they are getting. Theres a huge opportunity to di journalism differently particularlyic in conflict being useful to people at the moment when we arent being as useful as we think. Switching over to a question from the audience here from richard did you change your mind on any principals or theories as this book unfolded in the research of it and what surprised you about the research . Oh man, many things. One thing i change my mind about what i had different conflicts in different categories and i now think like about polarization was a thing like political polarization. I dont think thats very helpful. Everything ive seen in Human Behavior and different kinds of conflict whether its gang conflict or war or political conflict the behavior at a fundamental level is not that different. So im trying to be less silo than how i look at the research and how it looked at storytelling. The other thing i would say is you know ive s become much more suspicious of my own righteousness when it flares up and i want to be careful here because sometimes people say you know it sounds like im saying you can be passionate or you can be angry or you can have radical ideas. I think we really need to get more nuanced as we talk about these things because you cant have radical visions and movements to social change and we need those, without being in high conflict, right . Some of the differences between Good Conflict in high conflict are telltale signs and you can see them all around you. One is in Good Conflict they are still a curiosity in there might be moments of surprise. You experience a range of emotions not just to emotions. High conflict everything feels really clear like much clear than it probably is and you begin to generalize about many millions of people you dont know one will never meet. So that lack of humility, that lack of complexity ive come to see is quite dangerous not just for the country, even though it is, but the chilling part about high conflict and every so or you follow was that everyone involved in high conflict eventually begins to mimic the behavior of their adversary. You eventually do the same things consciously or not that you went into the fight to stop. The politicians and the politics make it more inclusive you make it more toxic and less inclusive than there a million examples. This is a warning about high conflict. If you want to change the world this is important. Make sure that you cultivate Good Conflict because otherwise youll end up risking the thing you hold most dear. Are there any political leaders or state level political leaders that you see as the embodiment of the good type of conflict that we want to be encouraged in . Who does this well on the state or thet National Level . Its funny you should say that because im trying to work on right now project of actually ranking for quantifying numbers of Congress Another highprofile leaders not justle in politics t in news media and other places to figure out who are the conflict entrepreneurs in ways we can measure and who are the conflict interruptors and most interesting who is a conflict entrepreneur and is not any more . Our system especially at the National Level incentivizes conflict entrepreneurs just like twitter does. You set up every incentive for this and no disincentive really at this point and again it be fixed and changed but we are asking people to be different than what theyve been awarded for being for many years. I think a great question and im working on it. I have some theories that i want to use the data instead of my intuition. So back i have no shortage of examples that i would side of conflict entrepreneurs in our modern society but the flip side ocof that would be the project d i look forward to reading it. A question from warren. What is the role of technology in encouraging high conflict and how much of this is basically the tools that we are using to live in the digital age versus something that is new to our society . I think any intention economy is going to play the high conflict, whether its news media or social media. Anything that makes money off of appeasing your attention literally the cheapest way to do that is through fear and indignation. That is the race to the bottom that we have seen in many differentn industries. I think thats definitely accelerated. That said i think we focus a lot on social media which is definitely important to focus on and reform but you know the started way before social media and some of the most, some of the people who are the most captured by high conflict inpt their rhetoric and the way estranged that estranged family members in these thingss in the research are not on facebook and twitter. If you look back where do you see a lot of the starting from a Technology Point of view is with talk radio and cable news. I think its important to cast a broad net when you talk about a the ways that technology has incentivized high conflict. Think its its true and its not just social media. Another question here from elizabeth that i will play with a little bit. Her a question is how do we help kids develop a muscle to handlee complexity and avoid high conflict and i will personalize a little bit by saying how do you parent differently now that you understand high conflict . Yeah, its tricky because i mean i have a teenage son and hes living in the world. N hes reading the news. It is very easy for him to slip into sweeping generalizations about good people and bad people and i get that. And i dontt want to be the person whos always well lets look at the full picture but i also i have found if i try to connect it to his own life or a of our own family that can be helpful. How you resolve conflict among your friends who are in soccer games or in our families and think about how would we overlay back . It sounds simplistic but i think its quite complex to try to make thatpl connection and the thing that i do which you mentioned and i did it and all of my interviews and this is a the thing that change must for me personally and professionally as they do this technique and their other forms of it out there but when someone is telling me something that they are bringing any level of a motion to end up somebodys upset and lets say my kid is upset about something happening in the world or to his life the first thing that people want us to be heard. Theres a ton of research on this. Thats what people want and they almost never get it. Once people feel heard and you do this by showing them like proving beyond a doubt that you heard them and not just by nodding and smiling. Actually sang it sounds like what youre saying is you feel like its fundamentally unjust that you can go back to school in person even though your teachers are vaccinated. Up. Making this you acknowledge that you have heard them and this is easy to forget you have to ask if he you got it right. Did i get that right . And you cannot fake it. When we do this its amazing, it is amazing what it unlocks and people. People who are different from you and who have different political views; and Life Experiences than i do once they feel heard which they dont mistake for agreement by the way. Theyen dont think i agree once they feel like you are trying to get them they open up andpe Research Shows this. They say less extreme things afterward and acknowledged less ambivalent complexity which all of us carry in the cycle of high conflict and we are open to information they want to hear. Often in parenting once you have done it the issue is over. Its amazing. You dont have to fix fix it anu dont have to argue it or make the case. You make sure you feel heard and everyone can move on. Its an Incredible School that we should absolutelyha be usingo finally answer the question. Amanda thank you so much for joining us and thanks for such a wonderful and relevant and timely book. If you are listening and if youre watching out there you can pick up amandas book anywhere that you buy books but there are partners at politics and prose here in washington used the code special pen and check out for an extra discount. I want to thank ambassador silver horn for sponsoring this book and amanda thank you for putting such an interesting book about the backdrop and background of our modern times. Thank you garrett. Thanks for having me. I enjoyed coming