High Conflict Quotes

“Understanding people doesn’t change them. It’s not nearly enough. But almost no one changes until they feel heard. That’s the third paradox of conflict. People need to believe you understand them, even as they realize you disagree, before they will hear you.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“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.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“Another simple but powerful tactic is distraction. Intentionally focus your attention on something else, even in the midst of conflict. Sometimes, Curtis imagines the young men he works with as they looked when they were small children, innocent and sweet. “I look at everyone and see my grandchild,” he said. “That’s the state I have to see them in.” He recategorizes them in his mind. They are not gangbangers. They are people who were children once, who lost a first tooth, who needed help tying their shoes, who liked to dance.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“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.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“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?”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“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.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“1. What is oversimplified about this conflict?
2. What do you want to understand about the other side?
3. What do you want the other side to understand about you?
4. What would it feel like if you woke up and this problem was solved?
5. What's the question nobody's asking?
6. What do you want to know about this controversy that you don't already know?
7. Where do you feel torn?
8. Tell me more.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“High conflicts tend to erupt in places with low trust. When there is low trust, it is very hard to create a consensus about the facts. People become so suspicious of one another that they can believe anything. This makes it easy for conflict entrepreneurs to inflame the conflict further. And every attempt to end the conflict, by, for example, prosecuting people who shoot wolves, fuels more distrust. This is the trap of high conflict.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“There are lots of ways to rehumanize people, but one way is through great storytelling. It can be more powerful than any peace treaty.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“The smartest way to help people stay out of high conflict is keep the new identity alive. Help them cultivate those newly revived roles.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“For everyone, in any high-emotion situation, the most tried and tested method is to practice rhythmic breathing. Taking slow, deep breaths is one of the few actions that influence both our somatic nervous system (which we can intentionally control) and our autonomic system (which includes our heartbeat and other actions we cannot consciously access). The breath is a bridge between the two. That’s why breathing is used by Special Forces soldiers and by martial arts practitioners and by pregnant women in labor. Because it is the best tool we have in the moment.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“Most of human history, there were no nation-states, no country identities at all. Humans did not assume they had anything in common with other humans whom they would never lay eyes on, hundreds or thousands of miles away. But since humans invented national identities, we’ve gotten quite convinced of their realness, willing even to kill and to die for them.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“Over a quarter of American adults say they are currently estranged from a relative. That translates into about 67 million people, more than the number of Americans who suffer from allergies. Half of these estranged adults have had no contact for four years or longer. Most of these rifts came between parents and children or between siblings. Almost everyone in a rift says the estrangement is upsetting to them.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“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.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed and humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed,” he wrote, “and that did not represent the attempt to prevent or undo this ‘loss of face.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“Hamilton called political parties the “most fatal disease” of popular governments. In his farewell address, George Washington warned that “they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“This is why shaming politicians typically backfires. It can feel good. It can restore that sense of agency, temporarily. But shaming is an extreme form of social rejection. It is different from applying pressure on someone who cares what you think or who needs your support for some reason. That can work. But shame has the opposite effect. It almost always makes the opponent stronger. Especially if someone from another group does the shaming. It cements the division, bringing the other side closer together in fear or anger, emboldening them.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“Aggression usually guarantees more social rejection. But it does succeed in one way: it gives us a renewed sense of control over our environment, thus restoring one of our most fundamental needs, if only temporarily. Likewise, if we demonize people who have excluded us, we can help restore our damaged self-esteem: we are good and they are evil. Demonization can give us a sense of purpose, as well. We are fighting evil. What could be more meaningful?”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“Anyone who has served in any form of public office will recognize this problem. Extremists have outsized influence because they always show up, when everyone else stays home.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“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.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“Be suspicious of simple stories,” as the economist Tyler Cowen has said. In difficult conflict, simplicity can blind us. And the cure is curiosity, in my experience. It is contagious. If you can get curious, really curious, about people who disagree with you, it can make conflict healthier, almost immediately, depending on the situation.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“Want to convince other people that you are right and they are wrong? Stop trying to do it on social media. Or through shame, in any medium. It will backfire. Persuasion requires understanding, and understanding requires listening.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“Another way to slow down conflict is to “go to the balcony” in your own mind, as the negotiator William Ury does (or the opposite end of the island, if you happen to be on one). Remember the marriage hack? Couples made conflict healthier in their own relationships just by writing about an argument from a neutral third party’s point of view. It sounds so simple but these tricks interrupt the spiral of conflict, so we can think again.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“In real life, a group of boys actually were shipwrecked on a remote Polynesian island in 1965, as Rutger Bregman described in his book Humankind. What happened in this true story? The kids hollowed out tree trunks to catch rain water. They worked in pairs, drawing up a schedule of chores to ensure that gardening, cooking, and guard duty all got taken care of. They started a fire and kept it going for 15 months, until they were rescued. How did they manage such remarkable cooperation? Whenever they got into conflicts, they had a ritual. Each boy would go to opposite ends of the island to calm down. They created time and space, in other words. Then, after about four hours apart, they’d come back together and apologize.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“Listening doesn’t mean agreeing. It doesn’t mean legitimizing or amplifying what other people say. I still decide what to put in the story—and what to keep out. Listening deeply does not mean creating false equivalencies”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“Shame rarely has the desired effect, even with people we know. It never works outside of your own tribe, and reporters are almost always on the outside.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“One fundamental lesson for anyone who wants to cultivate healthy conflict is to complicate the narrative early and often. For a leader of a school or business, this might mean listening to everyone and then amplifying the contradictions and nuances you’ve heard. Point out the variance within groups of people, which are often greater than the differences between them. Get curious. It is infectious.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“This is another toxic legacy of conflict entrepreneurs. They vilify them, the very people who will need to join us for high conflict to end one day. This creates a huge challenge. Just as the enemy got dehumanized, they must be rehumanized.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“This is the second lesson from Colombia. If you want to help people out of high conflict, don’t ask them to betray their remaining identities, the ones that transcend the conflict. These are the identities they will need to stay out of the conflict. “When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in,” Nelson Mandela wrote, “he has no choice but to become an outlaw.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

“This is the first lesson from Colombia: to help people out of conflict at scale, you must clear a path. And the path must be safe, legitimate, and easy to find. In a civil war, it might require a government agency with a transparent, step-by-step process. In a less violent high conflict, such as the political polarization afflicting America and many other countries in recent years, it may require a third party—or another legitimate, alternative, easy-to-find group for people who have reached their saturation points and need a new way to matter.”
― Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out