Good conflict does not collapse into caricature. We remain open to the reality that none of us has all the answers to everything all the time, and that we are all connected. We need healthy conflict in order to defend ourselves, to understand each other and to improve. These days, we need much more of it, not less. High conflict, by contrast, is what happens when conflict clarifies into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them. (Location 123)

Most of us try to avoid high conflict whenever possible. This avoidance brings its own problems, as we’ll see. (Location 134)

Us-versus-them conflict is rarely about what it seems to be about. It has an understory, which is the most interesting part. (Location 144)

People do escape high conflict. Individuals—even entire communities—find ways to short-circuit the feedback loops of conflict. They don’t suddenly agree, and this is important: they don’t surrender their beliefs. Nor do they defect, switching from one position to the opposite extreme. Instead, they do something much more interesting: they become capable of comprehending that with which they still disagree. (Location 149)

As he shifted out of high conflict, he became more effective, not less. He was no longer wasting so much time, fighting battles against people who wanted many of the same things he did. (Location 343)

Wishing your opponent will finally see the light is a fool’s errand. It will only lead to heartbreak. Counting up the other side’s wrongs is a hobby that can last a lifetime. Obsessing over the next election is a delay tactic. Telling people to reject hate and choose love will not work. Because people swept up in high conflict do not think of themselves as full of hate, even if they are. They think of themselves as right. Hate is an important emotion. But it’s a symptom; conflict is the cause. And high conflict is a system, not a feeling. (Location 348)

In his mediation work, Gary refers to conflict as a “trap.” That’s a good description. Because conflict, once it escalates past a certain point, operates just like the La Brea Tar Pits. It draws us in, appealing to all kinds of normal and understandable needs and desires. But once we enter, we find we can’t get out. (Location 419)

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. (Location 423)

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. (Location 427)

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. (Location 430)

Then there are all the people who do not actively participate in the high conflict, the bystanders. They are so distressed by the fight that they tune out altogether. And this category includes most people. 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.” (Location 432)

This detachment is understandable, but it leaves high conflict untreated. The extremists take over. (Location 436)

Overnight, high conflict can shape shift into violence, as history keeps showing us. (Location 437)

This felt familiar to Cassidy, in a bad way. He’d seen his father let his ambition get away from him before. Despite his usual humility, despite his deep knowledge of the human psyche, his dad could suffer from visions of grandeur. He was doing it again, Cassidy saw, even now, a man in his seventies letting his ego run wild. It bothered him, to see this contradiction in his father and not be able to make him see it, too. (Location 491)

When you’ve finished your story, Gary will check to see if he has understood it. His questions might sound a little odd to someone trying to end a marriage. “What is one thing you understand about your husband’s view?” or “What would change in your life if you got what you wanted?” Gary tends to ask his questions with his head cocked to the side, eyes bright, as if he’s hearing something he’s never heard before. This posture communicates curiosity, which is contagious. (Location 507)

To get beyond conflict, you have to go through it; there’s no other way. (Location 513)

He could guess but he tries not to. He asks this question in a quiet voice, to show that he really wants to know the answer. (Location 516)

Humans tend to interpret new information so that it fits into their existing beliefs, a well-studied phenomenon known as confirmation bias. The worse a conflict gets, the harder it is to disrupt. (Location 521)

Eventually, both people feel more understood. Even as they continue to disagree about many things. (Location 532)

Gary’s approach remains unusual. He insists on keeping everyone in the same room and, together, digging up what lies underneath the conflict. (Location 537)

That surface-level work seems safer, and it is—in the short term. (Location 539)

Gary trains mediators to ask specific questions and to check to make sure they understand each answer, a process he calls “going down the Why trail.” If a couple is fighting over who gets the crock pot, he investigates why that crock pot matters so much. These questions help people lower their guard. Importantly, Gary trains his clients to do this for each other, in the same room. So the people with the problem also own the problem, not him. (Location 540)

“There is nothing more important to a person who is undergoing a life crisis than to be understood,” (Location 545)

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. (Location 560)

Because once people feel understood, they can relax their defenses. (Location 563)

Note: Lower

Show them you’re listening; don’t tell them you are. (Location 644)

On average, doctors interrupt patients after only eleven seconds of listening to them explain what ails them. When doctors don’t interrupt, patients stop talking on their own just six seconds later. That’s all the time they need to explain themselves: just seventeen seconds. But almost none of them get it. (Location 646)

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. (Location 649)

To grasp what someone really means, the musicians learned, requires both curiosity and double-checking. (Location 666)

When people feel understood, they trust the other person to go a little deeper and keep trying to get it right. (Location 669)

Once we feel understood, we see options we couldn’t see before. (Location 680)

Any system that pits groups of people against each other can lead to high conflict. (Location 757)

“Overcategorization is perhaps the commonest trick of the human mind.” —Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Location 764)

Categories save us time and energy, by allowing us to treat individuals the same way, so we don’t have to look too closely or think too much. (Location 771)

categories blur out important details. (Location 775)

Once we have a them to contrast with us, we change. (Location 775)

It takes shockingly little for groups to become tribes, for favoritism to emerge. It doesn’t require competition, ritual, pep rallies, or financial incentives; it only requires a belief that you are in one group and others are in another. (Location 780)

humans have survived by being aware of status differences, and we learn which categories matter in our society in all kinds of quiet, insidious ways. This is why it is so dangerous to set up binary choices in our communities, on purpose, as Jefferson and Adams understood when they railed against the idea of political parties. There are much better ways to do politics, as we’ll see, but we rarely question our binary traditions. (Location 798)

referendums collapse complicated issues into two categories: (Location 802)

In real life, most people have complex, ambivalent feelings about things like immigration, globalization, democracy, corruption, drug trafficking, and reparations for victims. (Location 807)

But the referendums forced them to choose a side, (Location 808)

My own profession of journalism seemed to be making everything worse. No news story changed anyone’s mind; it just left people feeling angry, disgusted, or hopeless. (Location 825)

From then on, I looped people whenever I interviewed them. I started looping my family, my friends, even strangers sitting next to me on an airplane. I didn’t always do it well—or at all. But when I did loop, I felt a little more present, a bit more useful. (Location 861)

I sometimes interview people with whom I profoundly disagree. Then, looping turns out to be particularly critical. It helps me listen, even when I don’t want to. (Location 863)

“What would it be like if you got what you wanted here?” “What do you want your opponent to understand about you? What do you want to understand about them?” (Location 867)

He felt, with each victory, like he’d lost something, something he couldn’t quite put a name to. (Location 937)

The problem is that the usefulness of labels begins to decay the moment the election results come in—that is, when the governing needs to begin. (Location 945)

This is the illusion of communication. We consistently overestimate our ability to communicate. We lack empathy for what it is like to be outside our own heads. (Location 977)

“The biggest problem in communication,” as the saying goes, “is the illusion that it has taken place.” This illusion comes from two profoundly human mistakes: First, we think we have conveyed our intentions and desires clearly when we haven’t. And second, we don’t really know what our intentions and desires are. In many conflicts, we have only the flimsiest grasp of the understory, both our own understory and the one belonging to the other side. (Location 979)

Note: Understory

When we consider other people’s behavior, by contrast, we reflexively blame their inherent moral failings. (Location 990)

The exclusion triggered an almost primal sense of distress in anyone who witnessed it. (Location 1060)

Williams began referring to the effects of rejection and ostracism as “social pain.” (Location 1066)

Humans have certain fundamental emotional needs, including the need for a sense of belonging, for self-esteem, for control, and for a meaningful existence. These needs are nearly as important to our survival as food and water. Social rejection threatens these needs. (Location 1069)

Rejection is especially debilitating when it blindsides us, (Location 1075)

“There is a high premium on being able to avoid really toxic conflicts.” (Location 1174)

Candidates undergo extensive psychological interviews, among other tests. Anyone who makes it through tends to be highly adaptable, socially agreeable, mentally stable, physically fit, and exceptionally good at working with other people under stress. Then, after they get accepted, astronauts get training on conflict management and communicating under duress. Their training, which includes simulations for managing conflict with other crewmembers, can give them an actual chemical advantage. They are less likely than the rest of us to experience dramatic spikes in stress hormones, the kind that degrade our ability to think clearly when we are frightened or angry. (Location 1175)

Conflict. It’s inevitable. “You can’t pick a crew without conflict,” said Kim Binsted, the principal investigator for NASA-funded long-duration space exploration simulations in Hawaii. “You can pick a low-drama crew. But not a no-drama crew.” (Location 1181)

Stripped of the nuance that comes from voice tones and body language, text communication is almost guaranteed to lead to misunderstandings. (Location 1201)

Note: Text

We want to feel like we belong in our group, like we are understood. One way to instantly build that connection is at the expense of the other group, (Location 1220)

Blame, like shame, makes our opponents dig in. (Location 1256)

The conflict trap makes it incredibly hard for us to dig ourselves out once we get stuck. We know we want peace. We figure out what we’re willing to compromise to get there. The other side does, too. We’re so close—but then we find we can’t budge. The invisible forces that pulled us into the Tar Pits, including binary choices, social pain, the illusion of communication, and the idiot-driver reflex, all become stronger. (Location 1304)

We don’t want to be the first to make a peace offering, even one we’re willing to make, because we worry this will be seen as a sign of weakness and then we’ll be asked to give up more. (Location 1307)

People have lost their peripheral vision to the conflict. They have blinders on, the psychological kind. “If you believe that the other side will never change, that they will always try to trick us, that we are the ultimate victims, there is no reason for you to even bother looking for this opportunity,” Halperin said. (Location 1321)

If you feel threatened, you cannot feel curious. (Location 1328)

Democrats with a postgraduate degree are three times as inaccurate in their perceptions of Republicans as Democrats who dropped out of high school. (Location 1334)

When people get sorted into oppositional categories, high conflict becomes more likely—by design. (Location 1353)

The Bahá’ís try to select people who do not crave attention and power. “Being elected is not a status symbol,” said James Samimi Farr, a Bahá’í spokesperson. “It’s a call to further humility.” (Location 1381)

Who else but a narcissist would have the motivation to endure the expense, the exhaustion, and the scrutiny of a long, contentious election? (Location 1385)

If, after some deliberation, her Bahá’í group votes to pursue an idea, everyone commits to trying it wholeheartedly, even those who originally disagreed. If it fails, the group holds another consultation and reevaluates. “ ‘I told you so’ is never permitted,” Lawson said laughing. (Location 1396)

“The aim is not to get kudos for yourself or show off as the one who yells the most. The aim is to solve the problem.” In those early days, she was surprised at how much her elected assembly could get done in one meeting, despite the need for consensus. (Location 1405)

Once people were actively trying to set their egos aside and work together, things got a lot easier. (Location 1407)

No, the big lesson is that humans can be nudged to demonize—or to cooperate. (Location 1412)

Most democracies use proportional representation and have more than two parties. The United States is the exception. Its reliance on winner-take-all systems and binary parties is, from a psychological perspective, designed to create high conflict. (Location 1435)

Binary thinking washes out all the details and contradictions so we can draw a crystalline partition between good and evil, right and wrong. (Location 1442)

The winner-take-all participants also behaved less generously toward others after losing. They held a little bit of a grudge. That’s how binary systems work. They cultivate grudges. (Location 1446)

Under proportional representation, the dominant parties still need to work with the less powerful parties to get anything done. (Location 1447)

There are different ways to get to less binary politics, but the larger lesson is clear. “We need a politics that scrambles our innate tendency to see the world in binary terms,” Lee Drutman wrote in Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, “by keeping political coalitions fluid and flexible, allowing enemies and allies to change.” (Location 1450)

In any situation where cooperation matters, keep the groups flexible. (Location 1453)

Avoid referendums. (Location 1457)

And for God’s sake, don’t communicate by Slack, Twitter, Facebook, email, chat, or text if you have something remotely sensitive to say. Unless you’re on a Mars mission, there is always a better way. (Location 1457)

Just as we are wired to group people into categories and discriminate accordingly, we are wired to cooperate. The difference is in the design. “Good institutions elevate our inner angels; bad institutions feed our inner devils,” Drutman wrote. (Location 1458)

The job swap confused the categories. It would have been a brilliant management (Location 1470)

I notice when my friends or family talk about us, referring to their fellow Republicans or Democrats (something that did not happen ten years ago but now happens often). I ask them who they mean, a small attempt to slow down the binary. (Location 1473)

But I’ll be honest. I fail all the time. The temptation to feel righteous, to claw back a sense of agency, to deflect blame, and seize the moral high ground, is hard to resist. (Location 1478)

That is why group identities are such potent fire starters: it only takes one or two rogue cousins to create mayhem. (Location 1618)

In laboratory studies, when people watch a loved one receive a mild electric shock, the part of their own brain that assesses the meaning of pain gets activated. Their brain responds as if the shock were happening to them, in other words. For those neurons, there is no apparent difference between literal, first-person pain and collective, group pain. (Location 1621)

We viscerally feel each other’s pain. And each other’s pride and joy. Basketball fans act differently after they watch their team win. They feel better about themselves, compared to fans who have just watched their team lose. They even predict they will perform better on puzzles and games. This is, in this context, a charming quirk of the human condition. We live by proxy. We overestimate our own abilities, riding high on a victory we had nothing to do with. (Location 1623)

Note: Live by proxy

Here’s the tricky thing about groups: they can ignite conflict, but they can also extinguish it. This is the second paradox of conflict. Groups bring obligations, including the duty to do harm—or, in other groups at other times, the obligation to do no harm, to make peace. When people find a way in and out of violent conflicts, there is almost always a group at work, in the background. Everything depends on the group’s norms and traditions. What is the right way to deal with conflict? What constitutes an affront? When is it time to turn the other cheek? The way the brain evaluates the meaning of pain or threats depends, in part, on the group’s leaders. (Location 1647)

In fact, the loving ideal that we think of when we talk about brothers and sisters turns out to be relatively rare. Only about a third of American adults report having a close, supportive relationship with a sibling. Another third have either a hostile or a competitive relationship. The rest are generally apathetic about their sibling—or have fond feelings but rarely speak. (Location 1664)

All sibling relationships start in conflict, as children competing for our parents’ attention, and the crock pots accumulate. It’s like a political campaign that lasts a lifetime. (Location 1668)

One way to prevent high conflict is to learn to recognize the conflict entrepreneurs in your orbit. Notice who delights in each new plot twist of a feud. Who is quick to validate every lament and to articulate wrongs no one else has even thought of? We all know people like this, and it’s important to keep them at a safe distance. In practice, this can be hard to do, especially for people trapped in the conflict themselves. Because conflict entrepreneurs are often very important in people’s lives. They can be loving, persuasive, and charismatic. The best ones make themselves essential. They become central to a group’s identity, and without them, it’s harder to feel like there’s an us. (Location 1686)

In the beginning, groups get created in order to solve a problem for someone. That means they can be based on ethnicity, religion, shared kin, or whatever works as a glue to bring people together. The nature of the group can change as the nature of the problem changes. Decades can go by in relative peace, and then something happens, usually a dispute over land, money, or politics, and new life is injected into old grievances. Groups are part real, part lies. And the worse the conflict gets, the bigger the lies get. (Location 1714)

In this spasm of violence, people began to retreat to groups for safety, awakening old, latent identities. It was a way to survive, physically and mentally. People needed a compass with which to navigate the carnage, and many grabbed the one most readily available to them. (Location 1725)

The old religious and ethnic cinders, quiet for many generations, roared to life, fueled by conflict entrepreneurs. “Ethnic wars do not just happen,” political scientist Gary Bass wrote, “they are made.” (Location 1737)

Fire starter leaders seize the opportunities embedded in conflict and turn them to their advantage. Assad’s regime needed Syrians and other global leaders to feel even more terrified of his opposition than of him, and so the regime intentionally helped the more radical elements among his opponents. They released extremist prisoners and even funneled weapons to protesters. It sounds crazy. Why would a dictator like Assad help the people trying to overthrow him? Because he understood fear. He knew that fear hardens group identities. He needed to make the conflict about fighting terrorists, rather than about his own crimes against his own people. (Location 1739)

Identity manipulation is very hard to resist, given our basic wiring as humans. But not impossible. To begin, it is important to be vigilant. To notice when one of our identities feels newly electrified, and to ask the question: Who does this serve? (Location 1747)

Note: Newly

Just as leaders can exploit our worst instincts, they can call us to our best selves. We each contain many versions of ourselves, which can be summoned or suppressed, depending on the moment. (Location 1750)

Note: Summoned

Conflict can explode when social pain becomes unbearable. When it becomes something worse than exclusion, when it becomes humiliation. (Location 1806)

Humiliation poses an existential threat that jeopardizes the deepest part of ourselves, our sense that we matter, that we are worth something. (Location 1809)

In his travels around the world, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman noticed this omission. “If I’ve learned one thing covering world affairs, it’s this: The single most underappreciated force in international relations is humiliation,” he wrote. Most journalists pay far more attention to battle strategy or the pursuit of land, oil, or power. But to ignore humiliation is to miss a powerful understory, driving all manner of conflict. (Location 1819)

But what constitutes humiliation? This is a slippery question. During World War II, guards in concentration camps would order prisoners to make and remake their beds until they were perfect, Holocaust survivors told psychologist Nico Frijda. Male Holocaust survivors said they felt humiliated by this experience. But the female survivors did not feel humiliated. They interpreted it differently, another indignity among many. Either way, the guards were harassing the inmates. But whether it felt humiliating depended on a person’s identity and concept of the world. What it means to be a man. To matter and not matter. (Location 1830)

This is not to say that humiliation is imaginary; the pain is real and excruciating. But one of the most startling revelations of modern science is that emotions and thoughts cannot be separated. They are intertwined. (Location 1835)

When we feel humiliated, it’s because our brains have conducted a rapid-fire evaluation of events and fit it into our understanding of the world. (Location 1837)

If humiliation is the nuclear bomb of conflict, and humiliation is subjective, then it can be manipulated. It can be incited on purpose. This is a radical idea. Today, more than ever perhaps, many people think about emotions as being reflexes, triggered by events. That’s where the concept of safe spaces comes from on many college campuses: the idea that people need to be protected from triggers that can set off emotions. And yet, a century of research has not been able to identify a universal physical pathway for emotion. There is no identifiable, consistent, and objective measure of anger, for example. Emotional experiences vary wildly from culture to culture—in how and when they are understood and expressed. Emotions, in other words, are socially informed. We help create them. (Location 1845)

Anything that reminds our brain of previous trauma is interpreted as a threat, even when it is not a threat. (Location 1867)

“It was embedded in our minds that we were better than the Folks,” Curtis said. “There was always this thought of supremacy, that we’re better than. And I think that whenever that’s in there—a better-than, a less-than—there’s always room for war.” (Location 1892)

The group rivalry provided purpose and order, a coherence where there was none. (Location 1911)

We all have this tendency, to look for a narrative that makes sense of the world. This is why conspiracy theories take hold. (Location 1912)

There is a perverse comfort in these falsehoods. Conspiracy theories reassure us that life is not, after all, fragile and chaotic. No, in fact, powerful people are pulling the strings, on purpose. And they must be stopped. (Location 1914)

“The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.” —Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (Location 1919)

Emotions are more contagious than any virus. You can catch them through stories, without any human contact. And of all the emotions people experience in conflict, hatred is one of the hardest to work with. If humiliation is the nuclear bomb of emotions, hatred is the radioactive fallout. That’s because hatred assumes the enemy is immutable. If the enemy will always be evil, there is no reason to ever consider any creative solutions to the conflict. (Location 1928)

Over time, humiliation and hatred accumulate, making it feel impossible to abandon the conflict. The more people invest in a conflict, the harder it is to withdraw, even if it’s in their interest. Anyone who defects from the turmoil would also have to betray the group. So group conflicts go on and on because of all the cheerleaders and reinforcements. (Location 1938)

As with gang conflicts and most other feuds, political preferences are more arbitrary than we think. The vast majority of Americans did not “choose” their political persuasion. They followed the political persuasion of their parents. They are not making rational choices about politics based on years of study of all their options—no more than they’ve studied all religions before choosing one (or none). It’s often a matter of chance, but it doesn’t feel that way. (Location 1970)

But something significant happens when groups assign meaning to superficial cues. The enemy is caricatured. It is easier to dismiss and demean a cartoon villain. In conflict, you feel some contempt for a caricature, and, in peacetime, you might just avoid discussing politics with them. (Location 1974)

Revenge is a way to escape the pain of humiliation. It is rational, at least in the short term. It may lead to more loss eventually, but for a brief period, revenge works. It can rebalance the equation. (Location 1990)

Violent conflict gives people a sense of meaning that they don’t want to lose. The hotter it gets, the more essential it feels. (Location 1993)

Conflict entrepreneurs encourage people to find the meaning in conflict, and it’s not hard to do. (Location 1994)

Conflict entrepreneurs draw on absolutist rhetoric, sweeping language that tends to make people more attached to conflict and less flexible. (Location 2004)

But I’ve learned to pause when someone uses the language of war (absent an actual, honest-to-God war, of course) and ask myself that question again: Who does this serve? Grandiose language is one way conflict entrepreneurs manipulate our emotions. It clarifies everything, washing away important details, energizing us to fight, to sacrifice, to ignore the costs. (Location 2023)

Revenge can stanch the pain of humiliation, but it exacts a punishing cost. It requires total devotion, the kind that eventually becomes a sort of prison. (Location 2033)

“Violence helps the individual to escape the irrelevance of his existence, fills the emptiness of his life and provides him with the heady experience of power over himself and over others.” —Alison Jamieson, The Heart Attacked: Terrorism and Conflict in the Italian State (Location 2099)

The conflict with the Disciples became a war by proxy, or what psychologists call displacement. (Location 2133)