High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

by Amanda Ripley

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.

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.

High conflict is different from the useful friction of healthy conflict. That’s good conflict, and it’s a force that pushes us to be better people. Good conflict is not the same thing as forgiveness. It has nothing to do with surrender. It can be stressful and heated, but our dignity remains intact. 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.

Some people are more susceptible to high conflict than others. They are what therapists call “high conflict personalities.” These people are quick to blame, certain they are right, always on guard.

people in high conflict explain their frustrations as a justifiable response to the other side’s initial aggression. Regardless of the facts, both sides are convinced they are reacting defensively—somehow.

Very few of us actually want to live in perpetual tension with other people. So why do we continue to do it? Why can’t we get back to good conflict, even when we want to? That is the first mystery of this book,

Us-versus-them conflict is rarely about what it seems to be about. It has an understory,

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. Like someone who learns a second language, they start to hear the other side without compromising their own beliefs.

Lots of forces got us to this place, most of which you know about already. Automation, globalization, badly regulated markets, and rapid social change have caused waves of anxiety and suspicion. That fear makes it easy for leaders, pundits, and platforms to exploit our most reliable social fissures, including prejudices of all kinds.

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.

Good conflict is vital. Life would be much worse without it. It’s a lot like fire. We need some heat to survive—to illuminate what we’ve gotten wrong and protect ourselves from predators. We need turbulent city council meetings, strained date-night dinners, protests and strikes, clashes in boardrooms and guidance counselor offices. People who try to live without any conflict, who never argue or mourn, tend to implode sooner or later, as any psychologist will tell you. Living without conflict is like living without love: cold and, eventually, unbearable. But if conflict shifts into high conflict, it can burn down the whole damn house. The distinction matters.

The challenge of our time is to mobilize great masses of people to make change without dehumanizing one another. Not just because it’s morally right but because it works. Lasting change, the kind that seeps into people’s hearts, has only ever come about through a combination of pressure and good conflict. Both matter. That’s why, over the course of history, nonviolent movements have been more than twice as likely to succeed as violent ones.

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.

People are wired to sort the world into us and them, but we are also wired to expand our definition of us, under certain conditions. Big shocks like a pandemic can make us encompass the entire world, overnight.

“Rivalries and hatreds between groups are nothing new,” the psychologist Gordon Allport wrote in the 1954 preface to his classic book The Nature of Prejudice. “What is new is the fact that technology has brought these groups too close together for comfort.… We have not yet learned how to adjust to our new mental and moral proximity.” 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.

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.

People are drawn to Gary because he seems to do the impossible—tap into our best selves at our worst moments. Because as much as humans like to fight, we also want, very badly, to find peace. 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

While other people have popularized many different styles of mediation, Gary’s approach remains unusual. He insists on keeping everyone in the same room and, together, digging up what lies underneath the conflict. Other mediators separate the feuding parties into different rooms, because it’s easier. They stay on the surface, focused on fixing the immediate problem and not much more. That surface-level work seems safer, and it is—in the short term. Going deep into conflict is risky; it can ignite latent resentments, fueling ever more conflict.

“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.

“We are more willing and able to understand others when we feel understood ourselves,”

“completing the loop of understanding,” or “looping.” It’s one of his most powerful tools as a mediator. Basically, it means to listen in ways people can see. Show them you’re listening; don’t tell them you are. Most of us do not feel heard much of the time. That’s because most people don’t know how to listen. We jump to conclusions. We think we understand when we don’t. We tee up our next point, before the other person has finished talking.

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.

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

By its very nature, politics sorts us into binary categories: Democrats versus Republicans. Incumbents versus Upstarts. Old Guard versus New. Sorting almost guarantees conflict,

In regular life, we put people into categories all the time. That’s how we navigate the world, as social animals who evolved in small groups.

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. And categories also make us feel good about ourselves.

But categories blur out important details. They’re efficient yet slippery. Once we have a them to contrast with us, we change. We know this from decades of research, all over the world. Under the influence of categories, we are less likely to cooperate with the other group and more likely to become hostile. We subtly adjust how we think and act in order to better fit our category.

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.

In real life, most people have complex, ambivalent feelings about things like immigration, globalization, democracy, corruption, drug trafficking, and reparations for victims. Their knowledge is uneven, and their opinions are manifold. But the referendums forced them to choose a side, to see the world in two dimensions. After all these referendums finished, splicing Britain from the European Union, adopting a newly restrictive constitution in Thailand, and rejecting a peace deal in Colombia, The New York Times asked political scientist Michael Marsh whether referendums were ever a good idea. “The simple answer is almost never,” he said. “They really range from the pointless to the dangerous.” Labels get created to serve a purpose for someone at a given point in time. Then the categories take on lives of their own. Which is one reason referendums are so risky. One person’s idea of a category is different from another’s, and soon the category can be hijacked by others.

“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?”

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.

“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.

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.

“In very few conflicts is one side totally right and the other side completely wrong.”

This is one way we get caught in a conflict trap: if we think someone is hateful, we are not going to try to understand them.

there is one particular kind of conflict that’s virtually guaranteed to happen: conflict between the crew and Ground Control, down on earth. It’s the power of the binary all over again. There are two groups: this one here in space, my group, and that one down there on earth, the other. So a lot of the astronauts’ frustration gets redirected onto Ground Control. In that Mars simulation, the crew reported five times as many conflicts with Ground Control as with each other. It was the New Guard and the Old Guard all over again. In space, they call it the “Ground-crew disconnect.” “The crew thinks Ground is asking too much, being unreasonable, being unresponsive, asking the impossible without knowing what it’s really like to be there,” Binsted said, rattling off all the ways this “Ground-crew disconnect” manifests itself. Meanwhile, “Ground thinks, ‘Why are they being such prima donnas? I’m just asking them to do this one thing!’ ” Of course, Ground Control is easy to hate. They aren’t there. They can’t empathize with what you’re going through. And on a Mars mission (or simulation) it takes forty minutes to send them a text message and hear back. There’s no way to have a phone or video call with earth from deep space, so all the conversations are by text. Which means the interactions are stilted and unsatisfying. Stripped of the nuance that comes from voice tones and body language, text communication is almost guaranteed to lead to misunderstandings.

Defending himself was fine; doing it by attacking others out of hurt and anger wasn’t. Not because it was wrong, but because it doesn’t work. Blame, like shame, makes our opponents dig in.

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. 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. We don’t trust that the other side really wants to make peace. Every objection to making peace speaks directly to our biases and stereotypes. We can’t stop thinking of our side and the other side. This happens even in much bigger, more intractable, and more consequential conflicts. For instance, two thirds of Palestinians and two thirds of Israelis support the basic elements of various peace plans that have been proposed in the past. And people want to live peacefully, without the gauntlet of checkpoints or the fear of bombings. Yet, the conflict continues.

If you feel threatened, you cannot feel curious. If you think the other side is more extreme and hateful than it actually is, you will vote for anyone, no matter how unhinged or divisive, to keep the other side out of office.

When people get sorted into oppositional categories, high conflict becomes more likely—by design. In the legal world, Gary had created an entirely new design, with a new set of rules, for handling conflict. And it had worked! People flock to mediation all over the world, proof that adversarial systems are not the only—nor the best—way to manage conflict.

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.”

Bahá’ís try to constrain the ego and induce unity. In every meeting, they follow a protocol called “consultation,” and it’s designed to allow people to speak their mind without getting too attached to their own brilliance. If, for example, Lawson suggested that the group expand their educational programs by partnering with a local nonprofit, that idea would become the property of the group the moment she uttered it. It would not be Nwandi Lawson’s Idea. As a result, she might feel less of a need to defend the idea, should other people offer up alternatives or criticisms. It wasn’t about her anymore.

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.

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