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High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out
When we are baffled by the insanity of the “other side”—in our politics, at work, or at home—it’s because we aren’t seeing how the conflict itself has taken over.
That’s what “high conflict” does. It’s the invisible hand of our time. And it’s different from the useful friction of healthy conflict. That’s good conflict, and it’s a necessary force that pushes us to be better people.
High conflict, by contrast, is what happens when discord distills into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them . In this state, the normal rules of engagement no longer apply. The brain behaves differently. We feel increasingly certain of our own superiority and, at the same time, more and more mystified by the other side.
New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist Amanda Ripley investigates how good people get captured by high conflict—and how they break free.
Our journey begins in California, where a world-renowned conflict expert struggles to extract himself from a political feud. Then we meet a Chicago gang leader who dedicates his life to a vendetta—only to find himself working beside the man who killed his childhood idol. Next, we travel to Colombia, to find out whether thousands of people can be nudged out of high conflict at scale. Finally, we return to America to see what happens when a group of liberal Manhattan Jews and conservative Michigan corrections officers choose to stay in each other’s homes in order to understand one another better.
All these people, in dramatically different situations, were drawn into high conflict by similar forces, including conflict entrepreneurs, humiliation, and false binaries. But ultimately, all of them found ways to transform high conflict into something good, something that made them better people. They rehumanized and recategorized their opponents, and they revived curiosity and wonder, even as they continued to fight for what they knew was right.
People do escape high conflict. Individuals—even entire communities—can short-circuit the feedback loops of outrage and blame, if they want to. This is a mind-opening new way to think about conflict that will transform how we move through the world.
That’s what “high conflict” does. It’s the invisible hand of our time. And it’s different from the useful friction of healthy conflict. That’s good conflict, and it’s a necessary force that pushes us to be better people.
High conflict, by contrast, is what happens when discord distills into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them . In this state, the normal rules of engagement no longer apply. The brain behaves differently. We feel increasingly certain of our own superiority and, at the same time, more and more mystified by the other side.
New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist Amanda Ripley investigates how good people get captured by high conflict—and how they break free.
Our journey begins in California, where a world-renowned conflict expert struggles to extract himself from a political feud. Then we meet a Chicago gang leader who dedicates his life to a vendetta—only to find himself working beside the man who killed his childhood idol. Next, we travel to Colombia, to find out whether thousands of people can be nudged out of high conflict at scale. Finally, we return to America to see what happens when a group of liberal Manhattan Jews and conservative Michigan corrections officers choose to stay in each other’s homes in order to understand one another better.
All these people, in dramatically different situations, were drawn into high conflict by similar forces, including conflict entrepreneurs, humiliation, and false binaries. But ultimately, all of them found ways to transform high conflict into something good, something that made them better people. They rehumanized and recategorized their opponents, and they revived curiosity and wonder, even as they continued to fight for what they knew was right.
People do escape high conflict. Individuals—even entire communities—can short-circuit the feedback loops of outrage and blame, if they want to. This is a mind-opening new way to think about conflict that will transform how we move through the world.
368 pages, Hardcover
First published April 6, 2021
About the author
Amanda Ripley
13 books343 followersFrom the author's website:
Amanda Ripley is an investigative journalist for The Atlantic and other magazines and a New York Times bestselling author. Her books include High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way, and The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why. Ripley spent a decade writing about human behavior for Time magazine in New York, Washington, and Paris. Her stories helped Time win two National Magazine Awards.
Amanda Ripley is an investigative journalist for The Atlantic and other magazines and a New York Times bestselling author. Her books include High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way, and The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why. Ripley spent a decade writing about human behavior for Time magazine in New York, Washington, and Paris. Her stories helped Time win two National Magazine Awards.
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April 16, 2024
I read this book within a day. The concept of high conflict is portrayed in a well-researched and relatable manner. Amanda Ripley is an eloquent writer and her organization of ideas and stories is brilliant - I was hooked from the Introduction and by the time I was at the end of the last chapter, I did not want this book to end. I wanted to hear more stories about people and situations of high conflict, how they got into them, how they succeeded in getting out of them and what they learned about themselves and society in the process.
While most of the people and places in this book was centered around the US, I appreciated examples from around the world. I learned about conflicts in Syria and Columbia, amongst other things, and had the opportunity to reflect on high conflict situations I have been stuck in as well as the us-and-them mentality that I sometimes find in my thoughts.
This book opened my worldview and I feel better equipped to identity and handle high conflict. An important reminder of this book was that people change, as do the identities that we identify with. High Conflict is a treasure chest of knowledge and that last chapter about the cultural exchange between a New York synagogue and correction officers in Michigan was very impactful.
While the book does touch on polar political ideas, it is not just about that. It is about human psychology, our need to be accepted and all the invisible forces that surround us.
Many many thanks to the publisher for gifting me the ebook through NetGalley.
Read my in-dept review on my blog where I post a non-fiction feature of each month amongst other book reviews.
- Kriti, Armed with A Book | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram
While most of the people and places in this book was centered around the US, I appreciated examples from around the world. I learned about conflicts in Syria and Columbia, amongst other things, and had the opportunity to reflect on high conflict situations I have been stuck in as well as the us-and-them mentality that I sometimes find in my thoughts.
This book opened my worldview and I feel better equipped to identity and handle high conflict. An important reminder of this book was that people change, as do the identities that we identify with. High Conflict is a treasure chest of knowledge and that last chapter about the cultural exchange between a New York synagogue and correction officers in Michigan was very impactful.
While the book does touch on polar political ideas, it is not just about that. It is about human psychology, our need to be accepted and all the invisible forces that surround us.
Many many thanks to the publisher for gifting me the ebook through NetGalley.
Read my in-dept review on my blog where I post a non-fiction feature of each month amongst other book reviews.
- Kriti, Armed with A Book | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram
May 2, 2021
Recommended for
: all politicians
: Uncle Harry before the next Thanksgiving
: Many Fox News pundits
The last four years have been brutal. The election of President Trump, whether you liked the guy or not, sent everybody to their respective corners to hurl insults at each other and not even try to understand what the other side was saying. Polarization doesn't' seem to be a big enough word to convey this extremis situation. But the title of this book captures it perfectly. "High conflict" is akin to the electrons in a laser light that absorb energy and move from a lower-energy orbit to a higher-energy orbit around the atom’s nucleus. The difference though is that , in a laser, once you remove the energy source, the electrons go back to a low-energy orbit. In our current cultural and political environments today, we don't know how to turn off the energy. The author of "High Conflict" may have provided us a way to find the off-switch.
The author, Amanda Ripley, is quick to point out that not all conflict is bad. We all can't agree on everything. But there is a difference between a debate and a high conflict. High conflict has some definite indicators. See if you don't recognize some of these characteristics in today's political and cultural environments
1: Use of sweeping, grandiose, or violent language. Example: War on Christmas, Example: We want to defeat the other side regardless of the issue at hand.
2: Use of rumors, myths, or conspiracy theories. Example: QAnon. Example: Voting was rigged.
3: The spectrum of thought disappears leaving only two binary extremes. Example: Republicans vs Democrats, Example: Conservatives vs liberals.
4: The existence of Conflict entrepreneurs, people and organizations who benefit from fanning the fires of high conflict. These are Fire starters and use accelerants like establishing group identities (The Boogaloo Bois, The Proud Boys, and The Three Percenters) and humiliating the other side. Example: Rush Limbaugh, Example: Fox News commentary pundits. Example: Glenn Beck.
5: Rage and other factors pull people into high conflict despite their own best interests. Ripley refers these situations as conflict traps.
US politics has always been nasty. I'm not making the case here that this is a special time. It might be, but I'm not sure. But, with the amplification platforms from social media, I do believe this is a unique time for culture wars. Before social media, you never heard about what people really thought behind closed doors until Uncle Harry showed up at Thanksgiving every year and let us now how the government's use of Chemtrails is keeping the the citizens compliant. With social media, we hear about that all the time.
Ripley offers some techniques to take the energy out of this high conflict zone. They are hard to do but have proven useful in many real world situations that she describes (More on that in a bit).
1. Investigate the understory. Resist the rage you feel. Don't refute Uncle Harry point by point. Ask him what he is really afraid of. Try some empathy. Try using a third party mediator like in a divorce proceeding. Instead of an adversarial court appearance where somebody wins and loses, the mediators help the two sides get past the anger and come to a settlement.
2. Reduce the binary. Resist the urge to reduce everything to two sides: Republicans vs Democrats, Conservatives vs liberals.
3. Marginalize the fire starters. Just turn them off.
4. Buy time and make space. Resist the urge to respond immediately with your points. Use the magic ratio technique that says you should look for five positive interactions to every one negative one. In conversation, use the looping technique, an iterative, active listening technique in which the person listening reflects back what the person talking seems to have said—and checks to see if the summary was right. Use the "Go to the Balcony" technique. Instead of immediately engaging the other side, go somewhere quiet and think about the issue as if you were neutral third party. As Ripley says, "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."
5. Complicate the narrative. Be suspicious of simple stories. Get curious about the issue. Ask questions. Try to understand. Use questions like
: What is oversimplified about this conflict?
: What do you want to understand about the other side?
: What do you want the other side to understand about you?
: What would it feel like if you woke up and this problem was solved?
: What’s the question nobody’s asking?
: What do you want to know about this controversy that you don’t already know?
: Where do you feel torn?
: Tell me more.
Ripley didn't come up with all of this on her own. She sought real world success stories and they are compelling. They are about about people and governments that fell into the conflict trap and have tried things to get out. Some worked. Some didn't.
: Mark Lynas. Environmentalist and author. Formerly an activist against genetically modified crops but realized that he was in a conflict trap, worked to get out of it, and eventually apologized on stage to the other side at his acceptance speech for the Royal Society award for science writing.
: Gary Friedman. World famous conflict mediator. Invented the practice of divorce mediation but in semi-retirement, ran for his local political office and immediately fell into the conflict trap.
: Sandra Milena Vera Bustos. A former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (the FARC) took advantage a government program to get FARC members out of the jungle and into private citizenship again. The Colombian government's program is fascinating because they give housing and jobs to former FARC terrorists when regular citizens don't have those things. It's obviously controversial, not intuitive, but essential.
: Black September. A mid-1970s, Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) covert commando unit that sought revenge for humiliations suffered by the Palestinian people. Black September had assassinated Jordan’s prime minister and had infiltrated the Olympic Village in Munich, kidnapping and eventually massacring eleven Israeli athletes. Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the PLO, needed to disband Black September. He introduced the members of Black September to a group of about a hundred Palestinian women. If any of the men and women decided to get married, they got $3,000 and an apartment with a new, nonviolent job. If these married couples had a baby, they’d get another $5,000. To the surprise of everyone involved, the matchmaking worked. All the members of Black September got married and had a reason not stay in the high conflict zone.
One of the tenets of a good book is that when you are finished, you find yourself thinking about it over and over again. That is what I'm doing with "High Conflict." None of the solutions to the high conflict state that Ripley is suggesting are easy to do. But before I read this book, I could see no path out of the current situation. With her ideas, at least we have options. And I'm grateful for it.
: all politicians
: Uncle Harry before the next Thanksgiving
: Many Fox News pundits
The last four years have been brutal. The election of President Trump, whether you liked the guy or not, sent everybody to their respective corners to hurl insults at each other and not even try to understand what the other side was saying. Polarization doesn't' seem to be a big enough word to convey this extremis situation. But the title of this book captures it perfectly. "High conflict" is akin to the electrons in a laser light that absorb energy and move from a lower-energy orbit to a higher-energy orbit around the atom’s nucleus. The difference though is that , in a laser, once you remove the energy source, the electrons go back to a low-energy orbit. In our current cultural and political environments today, we don't know how to turn off the energy. The author of "High Conflict" may have provided us a way to find the off-switch.
The author, Amanda Ripley, is quick to point out that not all conflict is bad. We all can't agree on everything. But there is a difference between a debate and a high conflict. High conflict has some definite indicators. See if you don't recognize some of these characteristics in today's political and cultural environments
1: Use of sweeping, grandiose, or violent language. Example: War on Christmas, Example: We want to defeat the other side regardless of the issue at hand.
2: Use of rumors, myths, or conspiracy theories. Example: QAnon. Example: Voting was rigged.
3: The spectrum of thought disappears leaving only two binary extremes. Example: Republicans vs Democrats, Example: Conservatives vs liberals.
4: The existence of Conflict entrepreneurs, people and organizations who benefit from fanning the fires of high conflict. These are Fire starters and use accelerants like establishing group identities (The Boogaloo Bois, The Proud Boys, and The Three Percenters) and humiliating the other side. Example: Rush Limbaugh, Example: Fox News commentary pundits. Example: Glenn Beck.
5: Rage and other factors pull people into high conflict despite their own best interests. Ripley refers these situations as conflict traps.
US politics has always been nasty. I'm not making the case here that this is a special time. It might be, but I'm not sure. But, with the amplification platforms from social media, I do believe this is a unique time for culture wars. Before social media, you never heard about what people really thought behind closed doors until Uncle Harry showed up at Thanksgiving every year and let us now how the government's use of Chemtrails is keeping the the citizens compliant. With social media, we hear about that all the time.
Ripley offers some techniques to take the energy out of this high conflict zone. They are hard to do but have proven useful in many real world situations that she describes (More on that in a bit).
1. Investigate the understory. Resist the rage you feel. Don't refute Uncle Harry point by point. Ask him what he is really afraid of. Try some empathy. Try using a third party mediator like in a divorce proceeding. Instead of an adversarial court appearance where somebody wins and loses, the mediators help the two sides get past the anger and come to a settlement.
2. Reduce the binary. Resist the urge to reduce everything to two sides: Republicans vs Democrats, Conservatives vs liberals.
3. Marginalize the fire starters. Just turn them off.
4. Buy time and make space. Resist the urge to respond immediately with your points. Use the magic ratio technique that says you should look for five positive interactions to every one negative one. In conversation, use the looping technique, an iterative, active listening technique in which the person listening reflects back what the person talking seems to have said—and checks to see if the summary was right. Use the "Go to the Balcony" technique. Instead of immediately engaging the other side, go somewhere quiet and think about the issue as if you were neutral third party. As Ripley says, "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."
5. Complicate the narrative. Be suspicious of simple stories. Get curious about the issue. Ask questions. Try to understand. Use questions like
: What is oversimplified about this conflict?
: What do you want to understand about the other side?
: What do you want the other side to understand about you?
: What would it feel like if you woke up and this problem was solved?
: What’s the question nobody’s asking?
: What do you want to know about this controversy that you don’t already know?
: Where do you feel torn?
: Tell me more.
Ripley didn't come up with all of this on her own. She sought real world success stories and they are compelling. They are about about people and governments that fell into the conflict trap and have tried things to get out. Some worked. Some didn't.
: Mark Lynas. Environmentalist and author. Formerly an activist against genetically modified crops but realized that he was in a conflict trap, worked to get out of it, and eventually apologized on stage to the other side at his acceptance speech for the Royal Society award for science writing.
: Gary Friedman. World famous conflict mediator. Invented the practice of divorce mediation but in semi-retirement, ran for his local political office and immediately fell into the conflict trap.
: Sandra Milena Vera Bustos. A former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (the FARC) took advantage a government program to get FARC members out of the jungle and into private citizenship again. The Colombian government's program is fascinating because they give housing and jobs to former FARC terrorists when regular citizens don't have those things. It's obviously controversial, not intuitive, but essential.
: Black September. A mid-1970s, Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) covert commando unit that sought revenge for humiliations suffered by the Palestinian people. Black September had assassinated Jordan’s prime minister and had infiltrated the Olympic Village in Munich, kidnapping and eventually massacring eleven Israeli athletes. Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the PLO, needed to disband Black September. He introduced the members of Black September to a group of about a hundred Palestinian women. If any of the men and women decided to get married, they got $3,000 and an apartment with a new, nonviolent job. If these married couples had a baby, they’d get another $5,000. To the surprise of everyone involved, the matchmaking worked. All the members of Black September got married and had a reason not stay in the high conflict zone.
One of the tenets of a good book is that when you are finished, you find yourself thinking about it over and over again. That is what I'm doing with "High Conflict." None of the solutions to the high conflict state that Ripley is suggesting are easy to do. But before I read this book, I could see no path out of the current situation. With her ideas, at least we have options. And I'm grateful for it.
January 1, 2022
Updated: I originally rated this book as a 4-star read after devouring it this summer (I must have been feeling really stingy with stars that day!), but I'm bumping it up to 5-stars and giving it a place on my favorites shelf. After going over all of the books I read in 2021, I realized that this is the book I talked about, thought about, and recommended the most during the year. It significantly changed the way I think about conflict by framing it in a positive and approachable way, and I would say I consider the lessons from the book on a daily basis (as there is no shortage of conflict in the world today!). Amanda Ripley is a gifted writer, and I'm still thinking about all the stories in the book several months after reading it, not only because of the lessons on conflict but all of the characters were also so intriguing. I was excited to see that Adam Grant chose this as one of his favorite books of 2021, because I think as many people as possible should be aware of this book!
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Amanda Ripley is an amazing storyteller and she uses her talents to explore high conflict, the destructive all-consuming, us-versus-them type of conflict that seems to be so present in the world today. Ripley goes deep into the lives of a handful of people who have been trapped by high conflict to illustrate how it happens and how to break free. All of the stories are highly engaging and well laid out; it is easy to follow along with Ripley’s thought process and gain a complete understanding of high conflict.
I walked away with a new perspective on conflict and it has me rethinking past and current events in a new light. A very thought-provoking book – read it!
Next Big Idea Club Reading Selection - June 2021
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Amanda Ripley is an amazing storyteller and she uses her talents to explore high conflict, the destructive all-consuming, us-versus-them type of conflict that seems to be so present in the world today. Ripley goes deep into the lives of a handful of people who have been trapped by high conflict to illustrate how it happens and how to break free. All of the stories are highly engaging and well laid out; it is easy to follow along with Ripley’s thought process and gain a complete understanding of high conflict.
I walked away with a new perspective on conflict and it has me rethinking past and current events in a new light. A very thought-provoking book – read it!
Next Big Idea Club Reading Selection - June 2021
October 20, 2021
This book is an Interesting discussion on conflict but it contains a lot of interpretation and opinion. To explain, “Good conflict” is healthy conflict in which questions get asked, in which there is curiosity and movement in opinions. “High conflict” on the other hand is what happens when conflict devolves into a good versus evil kind of feud. The conflict takes on its own life and draws us in like a tar pit.
The book gives many examples of high conflict and explains how they came to be; the Hatfield’s and the McCoy, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, our current political division, couples getting divorced, gang warfare, guerilla warfare, civil war, etc. The book focuses much attention on Gary, a friendly lawyer who rather solves conflict than benefit from it, as is typically a lawyer’s job. Gary runs for a local office and wins but because he is thinking a little bit too highly about himself and his abilities he by mistake excludes some really knowledgeable, willing and helpful people from what he refers to as “the old guard”, which leads to a high conflict that he himself created. However, in the end he becomes part of the solution. It is a good story.
The author makes a lot of interesting observations such as; we have group belongings, we form factions, we need belonging, giving people two choices is dangerous, a proportional representation system might be better than the current American system, people have biases that inflame conflict such as confirmation bias, and there’s a conflict industrial complex. There are fire starters; group identities, conflict entrepreneurs, and humiliation. Media and social networking can function as conflict entrepreneurs. The areas in Rwanda where the radio reception was better there were more killings.
To escape high conflict, we need to recognize the conflict entrepreneurs around us, avoid excluding and humiliating people, and recognize that people want to be heard. Getting out of high conflict include recognizing a saturation point where people had enough, building new broader identities, reframing the situation, and clear the path for combatants. Welcome former combatants home rather than shaming them. Avoiding conflict involves complicating the narrative from the beginning. Simplifications do damage. I felt all that was pretty good advice.
Then on page 183 a strange claim is made, implying that very few people concerned about climate change would want a “carbon fairy” to solve climate change (that carbon fairy could be nuclear power) because they want to use “climate change” as vehicle for something else. I am volunteering in a climate change organization and I have never met anyone who isn’t part of it primarily to solve carbon emissions. Half are pro nuclear power the other half skeptical about it being a “climate fairy” (I am pro nuclear). Some are pro-capitalists, others more left leaning, a substantial minority are Republicans, and world views are all over the spectrum. So obviously page 183 makes a false claim probably for sensationalistic reasons.
That’s just one dubious claim, but it alerted me to read the book more critically and I realized that the author is far from objective. She definitely wants to promote her ideas and make her book look more interesting. She is doing that by carefully selecting examples and stories, interpreting those cherry picked situations, and there’s a lot of opinions, and who knows what she may get wrong or misreporting? It seems at first to be an authoritative work, but it is not a scientific book. That doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. I believe a lot of what the book claims to be true, but I do not know. It is a journalist’s opinion and interpretation of conflict and it is therefore less than I expected.
The book gives many examples of high conflict and explains how they came to be; the Hatfield’s and the McCoy, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, our current political division, couples getting divorced, gang warfare, guerilla warfare, civil war, etc. The book focuses much attention on Gary, a friendly lawyer who rather solves conflict than benefit from it, as is typically a lawyer’s job. Gary runs for a local office and wins but because he is thinking a little bit too highly about himself and his abilities he by mistake excludes some really knowledgeable, willing and helpful people from what he refers to as “the old guard”, which leads to a high conflict that he himself created. However, in the end he becomes part of the solution. It is a good story.
The author makes a lot of interesting observations such as; we have group belongings, we form factions, we need belonging, giving people two choices is dangerous, a proportional representation system might be better than the current American system, people have biases that inflame conflict such as confirmation bias, and there’s a conflict industrial complex. There are fire starters; group identities, conflict entrepreneurs, and humiliation. Media and social networking can function as conflict entrepreneurs. The areas in Rwanda where the radio reception was better there were more killings.
To escape high conflict, we need to recognize the conflict entrepreneurs around us, avoid excluding and humiliating people, and recognize that people want to be heard. Getting out of high conflict include recognizing a saturation point where people had enough, building new broader identities, reframing the situation, and clear the path for combatants. Welcome former combatants home rather than shaming them. Avoiding conflict involves complicating the narrative from the beginning. Simplifications do damage. I felt all that was pretty good advice.
Then on page 183 a strange claim is made, implying that very few people concerned about climate change would want a “carbon fairy” to solve climate change (that carbon fairy could be nuclear power) because they want to use “climate change” as vehicle for something else. I am volunteering in a climate change organization and I have never met anyone who isn’t part of it primarily to solve carbon emissions. Half are pro nuclear power the other half skeptical about it being a “climate fairy” (I am pro nuclear). Some are pro-capitalists, others more left leaning, a substantial minority are Republicans, and world views are all over the spectrum. So obviously page 183 makes a false claim probably for sensationalistic reasons.
That’s just one dubious claim, but it alerted me to read the book more critically and I realized that the author is far from objective. She definitely wants to promote her ideas and make her book look more interesting. She is doing that by carefully selecting examples and stories, interpreting those cherry picked situations, and there’s a lot of opinions, and who knows what she may get wrong or misreporting? It seems at first to be an authoritative work, but it is not a scientific book. That doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. I believe a lot of what the book claims to be true, but I do not know. It is a journalist’s opinion and interpretation of conflict and it is therefore less than I expected.
August 8, 2021
I found this book interesting but not particularly useful.
Ripley very capably tells the easy parts of the story, roughly captured in the subtitle: why we get trapped and how to get out. But the trickier parts, though often alluded to, are otherwise avoided: what is high conflict, when is it necessary, and how can you tell if your 'good vs. evil' narrative is justified?
I mean, I get it: I deactivated my FB account and almost never post on Twitter because it seems to me that every issue, no matter how minor, is immediately compared by all participants to the Lord of the Rings, and everyone spends their time figuring out who's Sauron, who's the Fellowship, who's the Ring-bearer, how to get them to Mordor, and then goes about slaying all the Orcs absolutely believing that they have the right of it. Sometimes it's justified (slavery, misogyny, etc.) and often it's not, though I rarely feel qualified as an outsider to weigh in (nor do I want to, because that is the shortest possible distance to being labelled Sauron).
I have often been labelled the Sauron by all sides in any particular dispute, which I think is typical for those in environmental or climate careers: on the one side, I've had conservatives criticize me to my face and in the press as an anti-freedom hoax promoter determined to destroy their lives, capitalism and Canadian democracy; and I've had those farther to the left of me criticize me personally and publicly as willing to allow large numbers of people to die unnecessarily, pro-capitalism, and probably (or definitely!) racist. It seems extremely unlikely that both of these portrayals are true, and neither feel helpful. I would love to find a way to create spaces for more constructive conversations, but I don't know if this book helps me get there. I already try to do a lot of the things she writes about, but if someone is determined to see you as a source of evil, in my experience, they will continue to.
I tried to consider her analysis from the vantage point of 'high conflicts' I've been involved in, willingly or not (mostly not), in the course of my life and career, and rarely found much that could or would nudge someone involved to consider whether or not it was a good use of their time or energy. For example, my years working in wind energy: I worked for a small family consulting company hired by small also mostly family businesses building wind projects, but we were routinely demonized in the press and to our faces as corporate overlords making huge salaries by destroying rural communities (I took a pay cut for that job).
For the public consultation sessions I managed, my staff were often assaulted; people would stand on their chairs with bullhorns and yell into them, "This is a police state!" Most of those projects were five or ten turbines. Wind energy is a necessary part of the energy transmission; these were communities where there had never been energy projects before, so one could not argue they had been asked to contribute too much to the common good. As I listened (audiobook version), I asked if there were anything here to nudge a wind opponent into considering whether the good-vs-evil narrative was true, or a good use of their time and energy, but I don't think there was.
I've just re-listened to Appendix 1 which is "How to Identify High Conflict in the World." One of her questions is about "language that is disproportionate to the conflict," and it seems pretty clear to me that comparisons to a police state (or getting worked up enough to punch a young man in the face who had been hired to help with the logistics of the public meeting) were disproportionate. But I can't see any of the meeting attendees agreeing. To them this really was an apocalyptic scenario.
On the other hand, if I think about communities or people who have genuinely been abused, where true evil has been involved, it often happens that they are told they're being "overly sensitive" or misremembering or otherwise being disproportionate in their response, when say they want not to spend time with their abusers or want them to have legal consequences for their actions. I remember during the Ghomeshi trial when two of the complainants said in texts or emails to each other that they wanted Ghomeshi to lose. "I want so badly for that piece of shit to pay for what he's done," one of the complainants wrote to another. But is that really disproportionate, under the circumstances? The judge ruled yes, and the case was dismissed.
So what gets counted as "disproportionate language" depends entirely on perspective and context, and bring you right back to the question you started with: whether or not the language was disproportionate depends on whether or not the high conflict was merited. It's a circular argument.
I don't blame Ripley for not having the first idea how to resolve this, but it should have been more thoroughly addressed and acknowledged in the text. For many political "high conflicts," there is a kernel underneath of justified grievance where some participants may be involved in a legitimately good-vs-evil confrontation, and where that's true, I can't see the value of the "contact" Ripley proposes as a method for leaving the conflict. Almost all of the examples in her book are ones where the people involved in peacemaking were observers (eg. liberal Jewish New Yorkers meeting conservative Christian rural Michiganers for a cultural exchange; none of those involved in the debates about gun control, say, had lost loved ones to gun violence). One wonders what would have happened if the cultural exchange involved, say, Black Americans descended from slaves and Klu Klux Klan members. What kind of burden would that place on the Black participants? Would it be fair or humane? Isn't this a true good-vs-evil situation, where high conflict is understandable and possibly even required, and where any potential peacemakers would need to be sensitive to the emotional and psychological toll this would have on those most affected?
(There have been such exchanges. One here in Canada that I really appreciated was a reality TV show where anti-indigenous racist White Canadians went to live in homes in various Canadian indigenous communities, and learned more about the cultures and communities that they assumed they already understood perfectly well. There were significant transformations that, though not universal or perfect, were really lovely to watch. https://www.aptn.ca/firstcontact/ Still, I think it is impossible to discuss such projects ethically without acknowledging the burden this places on those who have been harmed, historically.)
Isn't that conflict, in fact, and more like it, at the heart of the political polarization happening in America today? No matter how it's metastasized, no matter how many of the sub-arguments and platforms have grown into unjustified High Conflicts of their own, it's hard to see how the polarization in America can be addressed without some truth and reconciliation process (another term that Ripley does not mention in this book, though I kept waiting for it) around the slavery, genocide, and misogyny at the foundation of the American experiment. Indeed, I would expect any long-lasting peace from any conflict resolution process would need to include relevant and appropriate apologies, but that too was never mentioned. Trust can only grow where any previous harm has been acknowledged, and a process for amends has begun.
What else she does mention:
1. Low Trust. Again, one would expect in genuine good-vs-evil situations where high conflict is justified, that trust would be very low. Low trust in a particular conflict doesn't tell you on its own that a conflict is too high, because the question is self-referential.
2. Do other people withdraw from the conflict, leading to two binary extremes? Again, this is a self-referential question. In situations of abuse, even extreme abuse, bystanders often "withdraw" from the conflict, leaving the abused person feeling abandoned and alone. "Two binary extremes" can be a predator protesting their innocence and a victim determined to get out of the situation and a bunch of mushy bystanders not wanting to 'take sides.' "Two binary extremes" can look like the descendants of former slaves demanding compensation for the economic benefits of the infrastructure and economy their ancestors were forced to build for free, and the descendants of former slaveowners demanding they "get over it" because it was a long time ago, and a bunch of conflict avoidant bystanders not wanting to 'take sides.' This does not tell you whether the high conflict was justified and can be used as a weapon to further harm those who are trying to escape abuse or change oppressive practices.
3. Does the conflict seem to have its own momentum? Same.
The fact is that the central question of our time is how to tell when the good-vs-evil narrative is justified and when it's not. I agree with Ripley that it's now being reflexively deployed in all kinds of situations where it does little good and a lot of harm. But some consideration of when and how a real reckoning is necessary, and what bystanders can do besides either inflaming the conflict or refusing to take sides (which only makes it worse) is necessary in this kind of book if it's going to be of real value to creating progress.
Ripley very capably tells the easy parts of the story, roughly captured in the subtitle: why we get trapped and how to get out. But the trickier parts, though often alluded to, are otherwise avoided: what is high conflict, when is it necessary, and how can you tell if your 'good vs. evil' narrative is justified?
I mean, I get it: I deactivated my FB account and almost never post on Twitter because it seems to me that every issue, no matter how minor, is immediately compared by all participants to the Lord of the Rings, and everyone spends their time figuring out who's Sauron, who's the Fellowship, who's the Ring-bearer, how to get them to Mordor, and then goes about slaying all the Orcs absolutely believing that they have the right of it. Sometimes it's justified (slavery, misogyny, etc.) and often it's not, though I rarely feel qualified as an outsider to weigh in (nor do I want to, because that is the shortest possible distance to being labelled Sauron).
I have often been labelled the Sauron by all sides in any particular dispute, which I think is typical for those in environmental or climate careers: on the one side, I've had conservatives criticize me to my face and in the press as an anti-freedom hoax promoter determined to destroy their lives, capitalism and Canadian democracy; and I've had those farther to the left of me criticize me personally and publicly as willing to allow large numbers of people to die unnecessarily, pro-capitalism, and probably (or definitely!) racist. It seems extremely unlikely that both of these portrayals are true, and neither feel helpful. I would love to find a way to create spaces for more constructive conversations, but I don't know if this book helps me get there. I already try to do a lot of the things she writes about, but if someone is determined to see you as a source of evil, in my experience, they will continue to.
I tried to consider her analysis from the vantage point of 'high conflicts' I've been involved in, willingly or not (mostly not), in the course of my life and career, and rarely found much that could or would nudge someone involved to consider whether or not it was a good use of their time or energy. For example, my years working in wind energy: I worked for a small family consulting company hired by small also mostly family businesses building wind projects, but we were routinely demonized in the press and to our faces as corporate overlords making huge salaries by destroying rural communities (I took a pay cut for that job).
For the public consultation sessions I managed, my staff were often assaulted; people would stand on their chairs with bullhorns and yell into them, "This is a police state!" Most of those projects were five or ten turbines. Wind energy is a necessary part of the energy transmission; these were communities where there had never been energy projects before, so one could not argue they had been asked to contribute too much to the common good. As I listened (audiobook version), I asked if there were anything here to nudge a wind opponent into considering whether the good-vs-evil narrative was true, or a good use of their time and energy, but I don't think there was.
I've just re-listened to Appendix 1 which is "How to Identify High Conflict in the World." One of her questions is about "language that is disproportionate to the conflict," and it seems pretty clear to me that comparisons to a police state (or getting worked up enough to punch a young man in the face who had been hired to help with the logistics of the public meeting) were disproportionate. But I can't see any of the meeting attendees agreeing. To them this really was an apocalyptic scenario.
On the other hand, if I think about communities or people who have genuinely been abused, where true evil has been involved, it often happens that they are told they're being "overly sensitive" or misremembering or otherwise being disproportionate in their response, when say they want not to spend time with their abusers or want them to have legal consequences for their actions. I remember during the Ghomeshi trial when two of the complainants said in texts or emails to each other that they wanted Ghomeshi to lose. "I want so badly for that piece of shit to pay for what he's done," one of the complainants wrote to another. But is that really disproportionate, under the circumstances? The judge ruled yes, and the case was dismissed.
So what gets counted as "disproportionate language" depends entirely on perspective and context, and bring you right back to the question you started with: whether or not the language was disproportionate depends on whether or not the high conflict was merited. It's a circular argument.
I don't blame Ripley for not having the first idea how to resolve this, but it should have been more thoroughly addressed and acknowledged in the text. For many political "high conflicts," there is a kernel underneath of justified grievance where some participants may be involved in a legitimately good-vs-evil confrontation, and where that's true, I can't see the value of the "contact" Ripley proposes as a method for leaving the conflict. Almost all of the examples in her book are ones where the people involved in peacemaking were observers (eg. liberal Jewish New Yorkers meeting conservative Christian rural Michiganers for a cultural exchange; none of those involved in the debates about gun control, say, had lost loved ones to gun violence). One wonders what would have happened if the cultural exchange involved, say, Black Americans descended from slaves and Klu Klux Klan members. What kind of burden would that place on the Black participants? Would it be fair or humane? Isn't this a true good-vs-evil situation, where high conflict is understandable and possibly even required, and where any potential peacemakers would need to be sensitive to the emotional and psychological toll this would have on those most affected?
(There have been such exchanges. One here in Canada that I really appreciated was a reality TV show where anti-indigenous racist White Canadians went to live in homes in various Canadian indigenous communities, and learned more about the cultures and communities that they assumed they already understood perfectly well. There were significant transformations that, though not universal or perfect, were really lovely to watch. https://www.aptn.ca/firstcontact/ Still, I think it is impossible to discuss such projects ethically without acknowledging the burden this places on those who have been harmed, historically.)
Isn't that conflict, in fact, and more like it, at the heart of the political polarization happening in America today? No matter how it's metastasized, no matter how many of the sub-arguments and platforms have grown into unjustified High Conflicts of their own, it's hard to see how the polarization in America can be addressed without some truth and reconciliation process (another term that Ripley does not mention in this book, though I kept waiting for it) around the slavery, genocide, and misogyny at the foundation of the American experiment. Indeed, I would expect any long-lasting peace from any conflict resolution process would need to include relevant and appropriate apologies, but that too was never mentioned. Trust can only grow where any previous harm has been acknowledged, and a process for amends has begun.
What else she does mention:
1. Low Trust. Again, one would expect in genuine good-vs-evil situations where high conflict is justified, that trust would be very low. Low trust in a particular conflict doesn't tell you on its own that a conflict is too high, because the question is self-referential.
2. Do other people withdraw from the conflict, leading to two binary extremes? Again, this is a self-referential question. In situations of abuse, even extreme abuse, bystanders often "withdraw" from the conflict, leaving the abused person feeling abandoned and alone. "Two binary extremes" can be a predator protesting their innocence and a victim determined to get out of the situation and a bunch of mushy bystanders not wanting to 'take sides.' "Two binary extremes" can look like the descendants of former slaves demanding compensation for the economic benefits of the infrastructure and economy their ancestors were forced to build for free, and the descendants of former slaveowners demanding they "get over it" because it was a long time ago, and a bunch of conflict avoidant bystanders not wanting to 'take sides.' This does not tell you whether the high conflict was justified and can be used as a weapon to further harm those who are trying to escape abuse or change oppressive practices.
3. Does the conflict seem to have its own momentum? Same.
The fact is that the central question of our time is how to tell when the good-vs-evil narrative is justified and when it's not. I agree with Ripley that it's now being reflexively deployed in all kinds of situations where it does little good and a lot of harm. But some consideration of when and how a real reckoning is necessary, and what bystanders can do besides either inflaming the conflict or refusing to take sides (which only makes it worse) is necessary in this kind of book if it's going to be of real value to creating progress.
June 18, 2021
It’s good… I think it’s a really decent model for talking about conflict, but I don’t think it has enough nuance to really make an impact. Essentially drawing the line into positive conflict and negative conflict is a positive step into a better level of sophistication around conflict. But it’s way too simplified. I think this model is probably helpful for talking with other people about conflict to an extent.
But the huge but here is that I don’t see someone reading this book and fundamentally changing the way that they interact with conflict.
First, enough with the jargon, the author mentions the word “understory“ nearly every chapter. Fire bringer, and other such nonsense words are popular and annoying. Sprinkled in the book like rat turds that you can discover while reading. The jargon detracts from the book and essentially creates its own little world where the author can solve the problems related to that but they don’t seem too heavily tied to the world I live in.
Second, The author picks her examples in a really weird way. We end up spending a lot of time with this guy who is a lawyer and runs for city Council and does a terrible job. But when she’s talking about global or larger conflicts we seem to skim over the details. Pointing to a few notable similarities and ignoring the details.
I think at the core of this book is a plea to treat other people with more humanity. Listening to them, seeing them for the complex humans if they really are. However the book falls short of really helping one to bridge that gap beyond consistently telling you to listen better
But the huge but here is that I don’t see someone reading this book and fundamentally changing the way that they interact with conflict.
First, enough with the jargon, the author mentions the word “understory“ nearly every chapter. Fire bringer, and other such nonsense words are popular and annoying. Sprinkled in the book like rat turds that you can discover while reading. The jargon detracts from the book and essentially creates its own little world where the author can solve the problems related to that but they don’t seem too heavily tied to the world I live in.
Second, The author picks her examples in a really weird way. We end up spending a lot of time with this guy who is a lawyer and runs for city Council and does a terrible job. But when she’s talking about global or larger conflicts we seem to skim over the details. Pointing to a few notable similarities and ignoring the details.
I think at the core of this book is a plea to treat other people with more humanity. Listening to them, seeing them for the complex humans if they really are. However the book falls short of really helping one to bridge that gap beyond consistently telling you to listen better
November 8, 2023
Grasping what someone really means requires both curiosity and double checking.
I loved this book and would highly recommend it to most people. The writing is clear, curious, and practical and I cruised through it because it was so compelling. And so personal.
I was most interested in the idea of complicating the narrative. How can we add complexity to the other side?
"In high conflict there is almost always false simplicity lingering somewhere in the narrative" by slowing down, buying time, and getting space, we are able to move to a place of curiosity and get to the real issue. I loved some of the questions that appeared throughout:
What would it be like if you got what you wanted here?
What do you want your opponent to know or understand about you?
What do you want to understand about them?
"We think we have conveyed our intentions clearly, when we havent. And we don't really know what our intentions and desires are" most of the time.
Okay, the other part I loved was about parties:
There's the 5 to 1 ratio, where you're aiming to have 5 positive interactions for every negative interaction (which are bound to come along.) When you're looking to build a solid team, marriage, family, group cohesion is part of the mission. It's central, even. So do the group bonding things. "Exploit special days". Birthday parties, forts, singing, group exercise, MEALS.
It reminds me of Dallas Willard who says we connect with people who feed us, who face us, and with whom we have fun. "Parties are investments in our future sanity. Creating bonds. A way to build up the positive exchanges to weigh out the negative ones that are sure to come." These positive vibes are what's gonna lay the foundational levels of trust to let curiosity even have a chance. It's super hard to feel curious when you feel threatened, fearful, or unheard.
And look, listening doesn't mean agreeing. It means being present enough to actually try and grasp what the other person or group is trying to get at.
Ack. There was so much in this book that I recognized in my life as places to grow. A mark of a great book. Read it!
I loved this book and would highly recommend it to most people. The writing is clear, curious, and practical and I cruised through it because it was so compelling. And so personal.
I was most interested in the idea of complicating the narrative. How can we add complexity to the other side?
"In high conflict there is almost always false simplicity lingering somewhere in the narrative" by slowing down, buying time, and getting space, we are able to move to a place of curiosity and get to the real issue. I loved some of the questions that appeared throughout:
What would it be like if you got what you wanted here?
What do you want your opponent to know or understand about you?
What do you want to understand about them?
"We think we have conveyed our intentions clearly, when we havent. And we don't really know what our intentions and desires are" most of the time.
Okay, the other part I loved was about parties:
There's the 5 to 1 ratio, where you're aiming to have 5 positive interactions for every negative interaction (which are bound to come along.) When you're looking to build a solid team, marriage, family, group cohesion is part of the mission. It's central, even. So do the group bonding things. "Exploit special days". Birthday parties, forts, singing, group exercise, MEALS.
It reminds me of Dallas Willard who says we connect with people who feed us, who face us, and with whom we have fun. "Parties are investments in our future sanity. Creating bonds. A way to build up the positive exchanges to weigh out the negative ones that are sure to come." These positive vibes are what's gonna lay the foundational levels of trust to let curiosity even have a chance. It's super hard to feel curious when you feel threatened, fearful, or unheard.
And look, listening doesn't mean agreeing. It means being present enough to actually try and grasp what the other person or group is trying to get at.
Ack. There was so much in this book that I recognized in my life as places to grow. A mark of a great book. Read it!
October 20, 2021
As a mediator and facilitator of resolving workplace conflict, I slowly consumed this work via audiobook. It felt bouncy and unfocused at times but it all comes together in theme and narrative. I highly recommend it for anyone wanting to increase their conflict resolution skills, especially those in the international or inner city arenas. The appendices at the end are useful and serve as a good summary of practical tips.
March 31, 2022
I must be the only person who did not like this book.
I read it for a book club and I thought it would be useful for my career as it is a recommended read for my industry.
Personally I found it had way too many stories and not enough content. The book could have been 100 pages total.
I read it for a book club and I thought it would be useful for my career as it is a recommended read for my industry.
Personally I found it had way too many stories and not enough content. The book could have been 100 pages total.
March 17, 2024
"It's also true that we all suffer from the illusion of communication. We overestimate how well we have conveyed out intentions and ideas.
We think people can read out minds because we know our own minds so well." (65)
"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 listener occupies a different reality, hearing only a series of dull, barren taps, one after another. It sounds like nothing at all.
'The biggest problem in communication,' as the saying goes, is the illusion that is 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 understory, both our own understory and the one belonging to the other side." (66)
"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. Which may help explain why the United States is more polarized than most countries in the world today." (96)
"Binary thinking washes out the details and contradictions so we can draw a crystalline partition between good and evil, right and wrong. It takes more cognitive work to keep that illusion going in other systems....That's how binary systems work. They cultivate grudges." (97)
"Knowing what I know about human behavior in groups, I try to be more aware of the power of the binary. I avoid casually using the word them about other people. 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. ...
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." (99)
"Conflicts, like wildfires, do not all spread the same way. Some fizzle out. Some go dormant for decades. What makes the difference? Confirmation bias is powerful, but it doesn't, by itself, lead to war. Why do some conflicts erupt, spreading like contagion, holding entire communities hostage for years? While others simmer? The Hatfield and McCoy conflict started as an interpersonal one between a small number of people--not unlike the conflict between Gary and the Old Guard. In both cases, the neighbors involved had various allies in their corners and ways of categorizing one another, binary stories they told themselves.
...These are accelerants to watch out for in any conflict:
--Group identities
--Conflict entepreneurs
--Humiliation
--Corruption
(102)
"One of the burdens of high conflict is that it doesn't allow for delight, for these little moments of joy. Curiosity is a prerequisite for delight. It's impossible to feel curious in the Tar Pits." (204)
"It turned out that the different articles mattered. In the difficult conversations that followed, people who had read the more simplistic, adversarial article tended to get more entrenched in negativity. They asked fewer questions and left less satisfied. But those who had read the more complex articles asked more questions, came up with higher quality, and left more satisfied.
Complexity is contagious, in other words. This is a big deal. People can be primed to see the world as a less binary place. When that happens, they become more curious and more open to new information. They listen, in other words.
One fundamental lesson for anyone who wants to cultivate healthy conflict is to complicate 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.
In politics, this might mean voting for leaders who reject adversarial, us-versus-them language. Who repeatedly expand us to include them." (246)
"Twenty years ago, an editor told me that all great stories required conflict. I repeated this mantra for decades, never really questioning it. But journalists' definition of conflict has narrowed to a sliver. There are, in real life, many kinds of tension, including the internal kind. Often, the better story comes from looking for a complication, not a conflict.
Still, the word "complicate" makes people nervous, I've learned. After all, some things are not complicated. They are simple. Sometimes there is a villain and a victim, justice and injustice, good and evil. That's true. Complexity should not be used to obfuscate, to reject accountability. Not all conflicts are complicated.
But all people are complicated. And in high conflict, there is almost always false simplicity lingering somewhere in the narrative. And in that simplicity, no one hears what they don't want to hear. In those cases, complicating the narrative can spark curiosity, where there was none. And curiosity leads to growth.
The idea is not to mask the truth. It's to tell the truth, in full." (248)
On liberal Jewish New Yorkers meeting up with conservative prison workers in Michigan for a cultural exchange, three ground rules:
"We're going to take seriously the things everyone holds dear"
"We're not going to convince each other we're wrong
We're going to be curious" (259)
"But despite everything, in defiance of the entire conflict-industrial complex, they wanted to make sense of each other. It reminded me of the first paradox of conflict all over again. Humans have the capacity to simplify and demonize, but we also crave harmony. We are animated by conflict, and we're haunted by it. We want out, and we want in." (264-5)
We think people can read out minds because we know our own minds so well." (65)
"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 listener occupies a different reality, hearing only a series of dull, barren taps, one after another. It sounds like nothing at all.
'The biggest problem in communication,' as the saying goes, is the illusion that is 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 understory, both our own understory and the one belonging to the other side." (66)
"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. Which may help explain why the United States is more polarized than most countries in the world today." (96)
"Binary thinking washes out the details and contradictions so we can draw a crystalline partition between good and evil, right and wrong. It takes more cognitive work to keep that illusion going in other systems....That's how binary systems work. They cultivate grudges." (97)
"Knowing what I know about human behavior in groups, I try to be more aware of the power of the binary. I avoid casually using the word them about other people. 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. ...
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." (99)
"Conflicts, like wildfires, do not all spread the same way. Some fizzle out. Some go dormant for decades. What makes the difference? Confirmation bias is powerful, but it doesn't, by itself, lead to war. Why do some conflicts erupt, spreading like contagion, holding entire communities hostage for years? While others simmer? The Hatfield and McCoy conflict started as an interpersonal one between a small number of people--not unlike the conflict between Gary and the Old Guard. In both cases, the neighbors involved had various allies in their corners and ways of categorizing one another, binary stories they told themselves.
...These are accelerants to watch out for in any conflict:
--Group identities
--Conflict entepreneurs
--Humiliation
--Corruption
(102)
"One of the burdens of high conflict is that it doesn't allow for delight, for these little moments of joy. Curiosity is a prerequisite for delight. It's impossible to feel curious in the Tar Pits." (204)
"It turned out that the different articles mattered. In the difficult conversations that followed, people who had read the more simplistic, adversarial article tended to get more entrenched in negativity. They asked fewer questions and left less satisfied. But those who had read the more complex articles asked more questions, came up with higher quality, and left more satisfied.
Complexity is contagious, in other words. This is a big deal. People can be primed to see the world as a less binary place. When that happens, they become more curious and more open to new information. They listen, in other words.
One fundamental lesson for anyone who wants to cultivate healthy conflict is to complicate 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.
In politics, this might mean voting for leaders who reject adversarial, us-versus-them language. Who repeatedly expand us to include them." (246)
"Twenty years ago, an editor told me that all great stories required conflict. I repeated this mantra for decades, never really questioning it. But journalists' definition of conflict has narrowed to a sliver. There are, in real life, many kinds of tension, including the internal kind. Often, the better story comes from looking for a complication, not a conflict.
Still, the word "complicate" makes people nervous, I've learned. After all, some things are not complicated. They are simple. Sometimes there is a villain and a victim, justice and injustice, good and evil. That's true. Complexity should not be used to obfuscate, to reject accountability. Not all conflicts are complicated.
But all people are complicated. And in high conflict, there is almost always false simplicity lingering somewhere in the narrative. And in that simplicity, no one hears what they don't want to hear. In those cases, complicating the narrative can spark curiosity, where there was none. And curiosity leads to growth.
The idea is not to mask the truth. It's to tell the truth, in full." (248)
On liberal Jewish New Yorkers meeting up with conservative prison workers in Michigan for a cultural exchange, three ground rules:
"We're going to take seriously the things everyone holds dear"
"We're not going to convince each other we're wrong
We're going to be curious" (259)
"But despite everything, in defiance of the entire conflict-industrial complex, they wanted to make sense of each other. It reminded me of the first paradox of conflict all over again. Humans have the capacity to simplify and demonize, but we also crave harmony. We are animated by conflict, and we're haunted by it. We want out, and we want in." (264-5)
January 10, 2023
I read this in one weekend, it was so gripping, relateable, and human. Ripley addresses complex issues and breaks them down into manageable, actionable concepts. Actionable--not easy. Logical--not simple.
The strength of this book is the real-life stories of hard-won understanding and camaraderie even when disagreements remained. Some of the stories made my jaw drop. It was almost like they'd been acting out of reading the Sermon on the Mount. The other strong point of the writing is that Ripley uses concrete words as code to refer to abstract concepts that tend to get nebulous, and she carries them throughout the whole book so that at the end, she's still referring to crockpots and balconies, and we know what she's talking about because she explained it clearly in stories at the beginning.
If for no other reason, read this for the stories alone. This is fine journalism combined with motivational writing, and we need more of it.
The strength of this book is the real-life stories of hard-won understanding and camaraderie even when disagreements remained. Some of the stories made my jaw drop. It was almost like they'd been acting out of reading the Sermon on the Mount. The other strong point of the writing is that Ripley uses concrete words as code to refer to abstract concepts that tend to get nebulous, and she carries them throughout the whole book so that at the end, she's still referring to crockpots and balconies, and we know what she's talking about because she explained it clearly in stories at the beginning.
If for no other reason, read this for the stories alone. This is fine journalism combined with motivational writing, and we need more of it.
November 29, 2023
“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.” (13)
Ripley shows that there is another, better way than attacking, withdrawing, or acquiescing when we find ourselves in high conflict in our personal or communal lives. This is a potentially paradigm-shifter of a book, and a wonderful guide for those that want to escape the tired, entrenched tropes about why we should divide ourselves from one another. 4.5/5
“When people feel heard, magical things happen. They make more coherent and intriguing points. They acknowledge their own inconsistencies willingly. They become more flexible… Once we feel understood, we see options we couldn’t see before.” (43)
“Curiosity is a prerequisite to change. Like sunshine and water, it doesn’t guarantee growth, but you can’t have meaningful internal change without it.” (244)
Ripley shows that there is another, better way than attacking, withdrawing, or acquiescing when we find ourselves in high conflict in our personal or communal lives. This is a potentially paradigm-shifter of a book, and a wonderful guide for those that want to escape the tired, entrenched tropes about why we should divide ourselves from one another. 4.5/5
“When people feel heard, magical things happen. They make more coherent and intriguing points. They acknowledge their own inconsistencies willingly. They become more flexible… Once we feel understood, we see options we couldn’t see before.” (43)
“Curiosity is a prerequisite to change. Like sunshine and water, it doesn’t guarantee growth, but you can’t have meaningful internal change without it.” (244)
August 7, 2021
so this is a pretty great book that majorly helped give framing and words to some feelings ive been having lately - like, for example, the all or nothing radicalism of the right is obviously terrible, but so is the all or nothing radicalism of the left, because neither will ever be genuinely productive.
anyway i dont wanna talk politics, but basically this is a really great discussion on the big differences between productive, messy, good conflict which promotes curiosity, learning, frustration, and change, as oppose to the other kind of conflict, which i will leave to the book to explain. really good stuff in today's absolutely polarising climate!
anyway i dont wanna talk politics, but basically this is a really great discussion on the big differences between productive, messy, good conflict which promotes curiosity, learning, frustration, and change, as oppose to the other kind of conflict, which i will leave to the book to explain. really good stuff in today's absolutely polarising climate!
November 29, 2021
This book started off so strong. I wanted to love it because the topic is so relevant to all of our lives, but… talk about a book that really needed a stronger-handed editor and some better organization. It was a slough to get through. Rather than using her well-researched stories to highlight the pain of high conflict and energize the reader, they were dragged out until no longer interesting. I wanted to love this book. Unfortunately it didn’t deliver.
May 6, 2021
I’ll take any advice on how to turn high conflict into healthy conflict and how to make space and respect different opinions without dehumanizing “them”.
December 27, 2022
The #1 book I read this year that I have and will recommend others read - truly so good and helpful.
January 3, 2022
I liked the premise, but the structure had me stumbling over what was trying to be proved while reading. Got confusing jumping between stories and then some were not the best to support points.
August 23, 2022
11/10 best nonfiction book I’ve read this year. Should be required reading!
April 8, 2022
Summary:
Amanda Ripley’s High Conflict examines how individuals and groups get stuck in self-perpetuating and mutually-destructive conflicts, as well as how we can pull ourselves out of them. Ripley defines “high conflict” as “what happens when conflict clarifies into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them” (4). Ripley claims that high conflict is “the invisible hand of our time,” a “force that, like gravity, exerts its pull on everything else” (9). This may seem a bit grandiose at first glance, but readers will have a hard time disagreeing after engaging with Ripley’s arguments, case studies, and numerous examples from various places and moments in history. High Conflict is an important and useful book that the modern world truly needs.
Key Concepts and Notes:
––I really appreciated how the book opens with a glossary and list of principal characters. It demonstrates Ripley’s commitment to conceptual clarity in the service of her reader’s understanding.
––Exploring the causation patterns of high conflict, Ripley demonstrates that it gets ramped up by four main forces: (1) group identities, (2) fire starters/conflict entrepreneurs, (3) humiliation/social pain/shame, and (4) corruption. Given how powerful these factors become in the heat of high conflict, Ripley emphasizes that the best move in most cases is to do everything on we can avoid high conflict before it arises. She suggests building a ”conflict infrastructure” to preemptively avoid the conditions that create high conflict and actively cultivate “good conflict,” which “does not collapse into dehumanization” and requires the ability to “understand and disagree at the same time” (xi, 58).
––When it comes to extracting oneself from high conflict, Ripley encourages readers to seek a “fourth way,” a path “that’s more satisfying than running away, fighting, or staying silent” (xi). She also provides the following advice: (1) Investigate the understory/root cause(s) of conflict, (2) Reduce binary thinking/tribalism, (3) Marginalize fire starters/conflict entrepreneurs , (4) Buy time and make space, and (5) Complicate the narrative, seeking complexity and nuance. She goes deep into the lives of a few different people who worked very hard to get out of high conflict, showing that it’s possible but also extremely difficult.
––Ripley’s observations about the benefits and drawbacks of group identity are particularly potent, showing how commitments to various group identities are instrumental in dragging us into high conflict and also in pulling us out.
––Also inspiring is Ripley's emphasis on cultivating curiosity in the midst of conflict as a means of keeping an open mind and refusing to dehumanize one's opponents.
––I benefitted greatly from learning about “looping for understanding” (AKA “looping”), which is “an iterative, active listening technique in which the person listening reflects back what the person talking seems to have said––and checks to see if the summary was right” (xii). Looping was created by Gary Friedman, one of Ripley’s subjects. I agree with Ripley that looping has a wide range of applications and “is probably the single best way to keep conflict healthy, all through life” (245). Most importantly, looping helps our interlocutors feel heard and understood, even when we don’t agree with them.
––I didn’t find the book’s final chapter very satisfying, but then noticed that there were three appendices summarizing Ripley’s findings and recommendations. I wish these had been reformatted into a final chapter rather than presented as appendices, which some readers will be more likely to overlook.
Favorite Quotes:
Lots of forces got us to this place, most of which you know 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.
But there is another invisible force that, like gravity, exerts its pull on everything else. 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. (9)
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.
High conflict is not always violent, but it is extremely flammable. It can easily tip into violence, which leads the opposition to respond with more violence, in an ever-escalating spiral of harm. Very quickly, the most helpful people flee the scene, and the extremists take over.
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. (13)
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. The more we flail about, braying for help, the worse the situation gets. More and more of us get pulled into the muck, without even realizing how much worse we are making our own lives.
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. (15)
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. It takes a lot of practice but it has helped me experience what it’s like to understand and disagree at the same time. It turns out that is possible. You can do both. You can and you must. (58)
There are lots of ways to rehumanize people, but one way is through great storytelling. It can be more powerful than any peace treaty. (232)
We can’t avoid conflict. We need it in order to defend ourselves and to be challenged. In order to be better people. As Mahatma Gandhi said, “Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.” But it’s so easy to slip into dishonest disagreement, into high conflict, given the right conditions.
The secret, then, is to avoid those conditions. To build guardrails in our towns, our houses of worship, our families and schools, the kind that lead us into worthwhile conflict but protect us from slipping into high. This means setting up a conflict infrastructure, the kind that preempts high conflict before it starts by helping us investigate the understory, reduce the binary, and marginalize the fire starters in our world. It means cultivating curiosity in conflict, on purpose.
Building this infrastructure creates conflict resilience, an ability to not just absorb conflict but get stronger from it. But conflict infrastructure requires serious time and dedication. (242-3)
Curiosity is a prerequisite to change. Like sunshine and water, it doesn’t guarantee growth, but you can’t get meaningful, internal change without it. (244)
This review was originally published on my blog, words&dirt.
Amanda Ripley’s High Conflict examines how individuals and groups get stuck in self-perpetuating and mutually-destructive conflicts, as well as how we can pull ourselves out of them. Ripley defines “high conflict” as “what happens when conflict clarifies into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them” (4). Ripley claims that high conflict is “the invisible hand of our time,” a “force that, like gravity, exerts its pull on everything else” (9). This may seem a bit grandiose at first glance, but readers will have a hard time disagreeing after engaging with Ripley’s arguments, case studies, and numerous examples from various places and moments in history. High Conflict is an important and useful book that the modern world truly needs.
Key Concepts and Notes:
––I really appreciated how the book opens with a glossary and list of principal characters. It demonstrates Ripley’s commitment to conceptual clarity in the service of her reader’s understanding.
––Exploring the causation patterns of high conflict, Ripley demonstrates that it gets ramped up by four main forces: (1) group identities, (2) fire starters/conflict entrepreneurs, (3) humiliation/social pain/shame, and (4) corruption. Given how powerful these factors become in the heat of high conflict, Ripley emphasizes that the best move in most cases is to do everything on we can avoid high conflict before it arises. She suggests building a ”conflict infrastructure” to preemptively avoid the conditions that create high conflict and actively cultivate “good conflict,” which “does not collapse into dehumanization” and requires the ability to “understand and disagree at the same time” (xi, 58).
––When it comes to extracting oneself from high conflict, Ripley encourages readers to seek a “fourth way,” a path “that’s more satisfying than running away, fighting, or staying silent” (xi). She also provides the following advice: (1) Investigate the understory/root cause(s) of conflict, (2) Reduce binary thinking/tribalism, (3) Marginalize fire starters/conflict entrepreneurs , (4) Buy time and make space, and (5) Complicate the narrative, seeking complexity and nuance. She goes deep into the lives of a few different people who worked very hard to get out of high conflict, showing that it’s possible but also extremely difficult.
––Ripley’s observations about the benefits and drawbacks of group identity are particularly potent, showing how commitments to various group identities are instrumental in dragging us into high conflict and also in pulling us out.
––Also inspiring is Ripley's emphasis on cultivating curiosity in the midst of conflict as a means of keeping an open mind and refusing to dehumanize one's opponents.
––I benefitted greatly from learning about “looping for understanding” (AKA “looping”), which is “an iterative, active listening technique in which the person listening reflects back what the person talking seems to have said––and checks to see if the summary was right” (xii). Looping was created by Gary Friedman, one of Ripley’s subjects. I agree with Ripley that looping has a wide range of applications and “is probably the single best way to keep conflict healthy, all through life” (245). Most importantly, looping helps our interlocutors feel heard and understood, even when we don’t agree with them.
––I didn’t find the book’s final chapter very satisfying, but then noticed that there were three appendices summarizing Ripley’s findings and recommendations. I wish these had been reformatted into a final chapter rather than presented as appendices, which some readers will be more likely to overlook.
Favorite Quotes:
Lots of forces got us to this place, most of which you know 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.
But there is another invisible force that, like gravity, exerts its pull on everything else. 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. (9)
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.
High conflict is not always violent, but it is extremely flammable. It can easily tip into violence, which leads the opposition to respond with more violence, in an ever-escalating spiral of harm. Very quickly, the most helpful people flee the scene, and the extremists take over.
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. (13)
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. The more we flail about, braying for help, the worse the situation gets. More and more of us get pulled into the muck, without even realizing how much worse we are making our own lives.
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. (15)
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. It takes a lot of practice but it has helped me experience what it’s like to understand and disagree at the same time. It turns out that is possible. You can do both. You can and you must. (58)
There are lots of ways to rehumanize people, but one way is through great storytelling. It can be more powerful than any peace treaty. (232)
We can’t avoid conflict. We need it in order to defend ourselves and to be challenged. In order to be better people. As Mahatma Gandhi said, “Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.” But it’s so easy to slip into dishonest disagreement, into high conflict, given the right conditions.
The secret, then, is to avoid those conditions. To build guardrails in our towns, our houses of worship, our families and schools, the kind that lead us into worthwhile conflict but protect us from slipping into high. This means setting up a conflict infrastructure, the kind that preempts high conflict before it starts by helping us investigate the understory, reduce the binary, and marginalize the fire starters in our world. It means cultivating curiosity in conflict, on purpose.
Building this infrastructure creates conflict resilience, an ability to not just absorb conflict but get stronger from it. But conflict infrastructure requires serious time and dedication. (242-3)
Curiosity is a prerequisite to change. Like sunshine and water, it doesn’t guarantee growth, but you can’t get meaningful, internal change without it. (244)
This review was originally published on my blog, words&dirt.
October 26, 2022
Initial quick review: that was WAY better than I thought it would be. I can see why the publisher decided to make it free for a month so anyone/everyone could get a copy of it. Which is why I got it at all.
Full review: Ripley takes us through many different examples not only of high conflict, but also how they grew, how they peaked, and how they eventually exited being high conflict. She chose a diverse range of examples, from gangs in inner-city Chicago to a village board in a rich coastal haven, and followed through on them. In the audio, we even had the opportunity to hear some of her sources speak for themselves, bringing an even more intimate touch to her topic.
While there are many notable quotes (a few cited below), if you want the quick version of how to approach conflict and work towards understanding and resolution, here it is:
"We're going to take seriously the things everyone holds dear," [Simon Greer] said. "We're not going to try to convince each other we're wrong. And finally, we're going to be curious." - Track 14/18, 45:51 (ground rules for conflict discussion)
Clearly I have not found a way to gauge if a non-fiction book is going to be worthwhile or not, because at times like this, I find myself thoroughly impressed with the content of this book. There is a clear path followed through the book, even with some jumping back and forth between examples/case studies (Gary's Muir Beach story especially seemed to be addressed over a very long period of time), and it fulfills its subtitle of telling us how we get trapped in high conflict and also how we get out. I can think of more than a few people I would recommend this to with a pointed recommendation, but in general, it is worth the read for pretty much everyone who has ever been in a conflict in your life. Which, let’s be real, is everyone.
Quotes:
[...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. - Track 5/18, 14:00
Both men loathed the idea of political parties. Adams called them "the greatest political evil imaginable." Jefferson thought party loyalty represented the last degradation of a free and moral agent. They understood the danger of collapsing civilization into two sides. - Track 6/18, 1:00 - And look at where we are at today: a division of the country largely into Democratic and Republican, and if you vote for anything other than those two, odds are it won't even manage to get your third party elected and instead result in the one you don't want to win, winning.
In his farewell address, George Washington warned that [political parties] "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 usurp for themselves the reins of government." - Track 7/18, 17:20 - Now if this doesn't sound EXACTLY like what a certain Trump did, I don't know what does.
Ba'hai religion: non-adversarial - the little introduction we get to Ba'hai, in the contect of non-adversarial choosing of leaders, seems quite interesting. I'd be curious to see how its principles could be applied to a greater swath of our adversarial encounters such as politics.
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. - Track 9/18, 15:26 - Which includes oversimplifying emotions, parties, stances into such categories as "un-American" or "antifa" - even as those very labels are thoroughly misleading to anyone putting more than a few brain cells into analyzing what they say and mean.
If you understand the moral understory, you can make what you say hearable. So for example, if liberals want to convince American conservatives to take action on climate change, they'd get more traction talking about the need to protect the purity of nature, as social psychologist Rob Willer and Matthew Feinberg have found. But liberal politicians almost always talk about caring for the planet. Like everyone, they automatically default to their own world language, rendering much of what they say unhearable to large swaths of the country. It's very hard to get outside of our own heads and speak the other side's moral language - it's counterintuitive. It requires discipline, humility, education, and empathy. - Track 12/18, 17:21
Is it manipulative to speak French while visiting France? Maybe it's just how you communicate if you really want to be understood. - Track 12/18, 19:13 - And this is why when I engage some people in heated topics, they might think I'm being manipulative, when I'm really just trying to understand and be understood.
A politician can support dramatic change and reject "us versus them" binary language. Or, it could mean passing reforms to create space for more than two political parties, since most people don't fit into two categories. There are many ways to create conflict guardrails in politics, and we practice almost none of them at the national level in the United States today. - Track 14/18, 20:09
Sometimes it's not just that other people don't understand us, it's that we don't understand ourselves. If your house of worship refuses to marry your child and the person she loves, that rejection induces a wave of social pain, whether you admit it to yourself or not. Often the more social pain there is, the deeper the understory gets buried. - Track 14/18, 28:08
"We're going to take seriously the things everyone holds dear," [Simon Greer] said. "We're not going to try to convince each other we're wrong. And finally, we're going to be curious." - Track 14/18, 45:51 (ground rules for conflict discussion)
Full review: Ripley takes us through many different examples not only of high conflict, but also how they grew, how they peaked, and how they eventually exited being high conflict. She chose a diverse range of examples, from gangs in inner-city Chicago to a village board in a rich coastal haven, and followed through on them. In the audio, we even had the opportunity to hear some of her sources speak for themselves, bringing an even more intimate touch to her topic.
While there are many notable quotes (a few cited below), if you want the quick version of how to approach conflict and work towards understanding and resolution, here it is:
"We're going to take seriously the things everyone holds dear," [Simon Greer] said. "We're not going to try to convince each other we're wrong. And finally, we're going to be curious." - Track 14/18, 45:51 (ground rules for conflict discussion)
Clearly I have not found a way to gauge if a non-fiction book is going to be worthwhile or not, because at times like this, I find myself thoroughly impressed with the content of this book. There is a clear path followed through the book, even with some jumping back and forth between examples/case studies (Gary's Muir Beach story especially seemed to be addressed over a very long period of time), and it fulfills its subtitle of telling us how we get trapped in high conflict and also how we get out. I can think of more than a few people I would recommend this to with a pointed recommendation, but in general, it is worth the read for pretty much everyone who has ever been in a conflict in your life. Which, let’s be real, is everyone.
Quotes:
[...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. - Track 5/18, 14:00
Both men loathed the idea of political parties. Adams called them "the greatest political evil imaginable." Jefferson thought party loyalty represented the last degradation of a free and moral agent. They understood the danger of collapsing civilization into two sides. - Track 6/18, 1:00 - And look at where we are at today: a division of the country largely into Democratic and Republican, and if you vote for anything other than those two, odds are it won't even manage to get your third party elected and instead result in the one you don't want to win, winning.
In his farewell address, George Washington warned that [political parties] "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 usurp for themselves the reins of government." - Track 7/18, 17:20 - Now if this doesn't sound EXACTLY like what a certain Trump did, I don't know what does.
Ba'hai religion: non-adversarial - the little introduction we get to Ba'hai, in the contect of non-adversarial choosing of leaders, seems quite interesting. I'd be curious to see how its principles could be applied to a greater swath of our adversarial encounters such as politics.
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. - Track 9/18, 15:26 - Which includes oversimplifying emotions, parties, stances into such categories as "un-American" or "antifa" - even as those very labels are thoroughly misleading to anyone putting more than a few brain cells into analyzing what they say and mean.
If you understand the moral understory, you can make what you say hearable. So for example, if liberals want to convince American conservatives to take action on climate change, they'd get more traction talking about the need to protect the purity of nature, as social psychologist Rob Willer and Matthew Feinberg have found. But liberal politicians almost always talk about caring for the planet. Like everyone, they automatically default to their own world language, rendering much of what they say unhearable to large swaths of the country. It's very hard to get outside of our own heads and speak the other side's moral language - it's counterintuitive. It requires discipline, humility, education, and empathy. - Track 12/18, 17:21
Is it manipulative to speak French while visiting France? Maybe it's just how you communicate if you really want to be understood. - Track 12/18, 19:13 - And this is why when I engage some people in heated topics, they might think I'm being manipulative, when I'm really just trying to understand and be understood.
A politician can support dramatic change and reject "us versus them" binary language. Or, it could mean passing reforms to create space for more than two political parties, since most people don't fit into two categories. There are many ways to create conflict guardrails in politics, and we practice almost none of them at the national level in the United States today. - Track 14/18, 20:09
Sometimes it's not just that other people don't understand us, it's that we don't understand ourselves. If your house of worship refuses to marry your child and the person she loves, that rejection induces a wave of social pain, whether you admit it to yourself or not. Often the more social pain there is, the deeper the understory gets buried. - Track 14/18, 28:08
"We're going to take seriously the things everyone holds dear," [Simon Greer] said. "We're not going to try to convince each other we're wrong. And finally, we're going to be curious." - Track 14/18, 45:51 (ground rules for conflict discussion)
March 7, 2023
I needed this book. Thoughtful storytelling and thorough research illuminate how we get stuck in high conflict and how we can get out of it—sometimes. Her prescriptions don’t claim to be one-size-fits-all and they aren’t. But there’s a lot of insight here about how to turn down the temperature in these perilous times.
December 3, 2023
A wonderful explanation of binary conflict and how we find ourselves in it, followed by some hopeful ways to recognize when we're in this kind of conflict and how we can get out.
March 15, 2024
Great (audio) book. A lot of narrative with people of very different background, but also clearly structured.
February 27, 2023
Truly incredible book. Intellectually interesting, heartwarming, and a really solid foundation for what we can do to create a world with less high conflict. 10/10 recommend
June 26, 2021
After reading this book, I am looking at conflicts with a brand new perspective. Amanda Ripley weaves together so many great stories to help us understand the structure of good conflict and high conflict. She also provide us the tools for how to recognize and exit high conflict.
The stories were powerful; some are incredibly moving, and some are hilarious. All in all, the book gives me hope that our humanity will triumph over high conflict, and our curiosity will help us connect and unit.
I’m so glad this book exists, especially now.
The stories were powerful; some are incredibly moving, and some are hilarious. All in all, the book gives me hope that our humanity will triumph over high conflict, and our curiosity will help us connect and unit.
I’m so glad this book exists, especially now.
May 13, 2021
I’m not 100% sure what I was expecting from this book, but I’m torn on how much I personally enjoyed it. With that being said, any criticism I have is merely my own subjective taste in books because Amanda Ripley is an incredible writer and storyteller. After having hundreds of thousands of strangers on the internet come after me in 2019, I’ve been really interested in learning about good vs bad conflict and some of the psychology behind it, so that’s mainly why I grabbed this book. Amanda Ripley starts the book by telling the story of the lawyer who basically came up with the concept of divorce mediation through this new way of resolving conflict. It was really interesting learning about that story, why mediation works for conflict resolution, and Ripley does an awesome job explaining how we readers can use some of the strategies for practical application in our daily lives.
While I was absolutely obsessed with the first half of the book, part 2 was where I became less interested. Again, it’s just my personal preference, but the second half was stories that helped solidify what the author discusses in the first half of the book. These were great stories of conflict resolution, perseverance, and hope. They were great, uplifting stories that we can all learn from, but I just personally enjoy more science/research-based books rather than stories.
So, would I recommend this book? 1000% yes. I’m a weirdo who isn’t a huge fan of stories, which is why I stick to non-fiction, but I know that many people really enjoy that type of book. This book has a blend of scientific research as well as stories, so I think the majority of people would benefit a ton from this book and learning about good vs bad conflict.
While I was absolutely obsessed with the first half of the book, part 2 was where I became less interested. Again, it’s just my personal preference, but the second half was stories that helped solidify what the author discusses in the first half of the book. These were great stories of conflict resolution, perseverance, and hope. They were great, uplifting stories that we can all learn from, but I just personally enjoy more science/research-based books rather than stories.
So, would I recommend this book? 1000% yes. I’m a weirdo who isn’t a huge fan of stories, which is why I stick to non-fiction, but I know that many people really enjoy that type of book. This book has a blend of scientific research as well as stories, so I think the majority of people would benefit a ton from this book and learning about good vs bad conflict.
August 19, 2021
This very engaging book tackles head on one of world's greatest problems how to avoid high conflict at the macro & micro level. As the book explains some level of managed conflict is a good thing as it leads to growth. Debate or argument is essentially that. But when conflict goes beyond that then things have a horrible habit of getting out of hand with often terrible consequences.
Amanda Ripley is an excellent writer & communicator who gets the ideas over in this book in an engaging way. She does by telling the stories of real people seeking to deal or get of high conflict situations which are often life threatening. So if you want to understand how to reduce or avoid conflict in your life then spend some time with this book.
Highly recommended.
Amanda Ripley is an excellent writer & communicator who gets the ideas over in this book in an engaging way. She does by telling the stories of real people seeking to deal or get of high conflict situations which are often life threatening. So if you want to understand how to reduce or avoid conflict in your life then spend some time with this book.
Highly recommended.
December 29, 2022
An interesting and relevant nonfiction read. Ripley identifies the signs of "highconflict", which is that all consuming kind of conflict we've all been a part of that leads to compulsive engagement and villainizing the other. It certainly made me reflect on the times I've been drawn into high conflict, whether that's the inability to stop consuming the news, or a near addiction to the drama of *certain* workplaces. The anecdotal examples Riply used, while interesting, felt somewhat limited, and I came away feeling the message was incomplete. I enjoyed the audiobook, which contains clips from Ripley's actual interviews.
July 18, 2021
I enjoyed High Conflict and Amanda's stories and examples. I recommend this read!
I like how the book uses the metaphor of the La Brea Tar Pits off Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile district of Los Angeles. This prehistoric death trap symbolizes high conflict!
High conflict is defined as a conflict that becomes self-perpetuating and all-consuming, in which almost everyone ends up worse. Typically an us-versus-them conflict. Some people are more susceptible to high conflict than others. These people are quick to blame, certain that they are right, and always on guard. High conflict is about stagnation. High conflict involves certainty, rigidity, righteousness, rumination, assumption, advocacy, feelings of happiness when bad things happen to the other side, zero-sum thinking, and where violence is more likely. To recognize high conflict, look for sweeping, grandiose, or violent language to describe the conflict, and notice if rumors, myths, or conspiracy theories are present.
Good conflict is friction that can be serious and intense but leads somewhere useful. Does not collapse into dehumanization and is also known as healthy conflict. In healthy conflict, there is movement. Questions get asked. Curiosity exists. In good conflict there is humility, fluidity, many different emotions, complexity, novelty, and passion.
Contact theory is the idea that people from different groups will, under certain conditions, tend to become less prejudiced towards one another after spending time together. “The effectiveness of contact theory has been illustrated in more than 500 experiments, all over the world.” When we get to know people, we can’t reduce them to just one thing. Usually, relationships make it harder to dismiss and dehumanize other people.
Fourth Way is a way to go through conflict that’s more satisfying than running away, fighting, or staying silent, the three usual paths. It’s leaning into conflict. Humans have certain fundamental emotional needs including a sense of belonging, for self-esteem, for control, and for a meaningful existence. Contempt, on the other hand, is the strongest predictor of divorce according to psychologist John Gottman.
Questions to manage one’s ego:
Does it need to be said?
Does it need to be said by me?
Does it need to be said by me right now?
To create a culture that is conflict resilient or to prevent high conflict:
1. Investigate the understory - The understory is the thing the conflict is really about, underneath the usual talking points.
“Blame almost always masks vulnerability.”
2. Reduce the binary - don’t let complexity collapse into competition. In a political system you can use ranked-choice voting and third parties. Most democracies use proportional representation and have more than two parties. The United States is the exception. The United States is more polarized than most countries in the world today because of this. Avoid referendums.
3. Marginalize the fire starters - try to rely on people and news sources who are unafraid of complexity, ones who are more curious than righteous, most of the time. Ripley uses the classic example of the Hatfield and McCoy families as well as Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
4. Buy time and make space - Rutger Bregman’s wonderful book Humankind contradicts the classic novel Lord of the Flies. The boys who were stranded on a remote island created space and time as well as rituals to combat conflict. Looping for understanding is an iterative, active listening technique in which the person listening reflects back what the person talking seems to have said. It involves listening 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.” “Once we feel understood, we see options we couldn’t see before. We feel some ownership over the search for solutions.” The magic ratio is when the number of every day positive interactions between people significantly outweighs the number of negative, creating a buffer that helps keep conflict healthy.
5. Complicate the narrative - feel curious when you feel threatened. Notice and amplify contradictions that you see in the real world. Incite curiosity by asking questions. “One of the burdens of high conflict is that it doesn’t allow for delight, for these little moments of joy. Curiosity is a prerequisite for delight.”
Other examples in the book that stood out to me were: The mid-1970s Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and their commando unit called Black September; the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative; the Baha’i faith in that we are all connected where there is no us or them. [Baha’i teachings revere Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad, believing that all major religions come from one spiritual source.]; Curtis Toler - the violence interrupter, actor, and a former leader in the Black P Stone gang - his life story is amazing as well as the history and psychology around gangs in Chicago is very interesting; The Adams and Jefferson story was super cool!
I like how the book uses the metaphor of the La Brea Tar Pits off Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile district of Los Angeles. This prehistoric death trap symbolizes high conflict!
High conflict is defined as a conflict that becomes self-perpetuating and all-consuming, in which almost everyone ends up worse. Typically an us-versus-them conflict. Some people are more susceptible to high conflict than others. These people are quick to blame, certain that they are right, and always on guard. High conflict is about stagnation. High conflict involves certainty, rigidity, righteousness, rumination, assumption, advocacy, feelings of happiness when bad things happen to the other side, zero-sum thinking, and where violence is more likely. To recognize high conflict, look for sweeping, grandiose, or violent language to describe the conflict, and notice if rumors, myths, or conspiracy theories are present.
Good conflict is friction that can be serious and intense but leads somewhere useful. Does not collapse into dehumanization and is also known as healthy conflict. In healthy conflict, there is movement. Questions get asked. Curiosity exists. In good conflict there is humility, fluidity, many different emotions, complexity, novelty, and passion.
Contact theory is the idea that people from different groups will, under certain conditions, tend to become less prejudiced towards one another after spending time together. “The effectiveness of contact theory has been illustrated in more than 500 experiments, all over the world.” When we get to know people, we can’t reduce them to just one thing. Usually, relationships make it harder to dismiss and dehumanize other people.
Fourth Way is a way to go through conflict that’s more satisfying than running away, fighting, or staying silent, the three usual paths. It’s leaning into conflict. Humans have certain fundamental emotional needs including a sense of belonging, for self-esteem, for control, and for a meaningful existence. Contempt, on the other hand, is the strongest predictor of divorce according to psychologist John Gottman.
Questions to manage one’s ego:
Does it need to be said?
Does it need to be said by me?
Does it need to be said by me right now?
To create a culture that is conflict resilient or to prevent high conflict:
1. Investigate the understory - The understory is the thing the conflict is really about, underneath the usual talking points.
“Blame almost always masks vulnerability.”
2. Reduce the binary - don’t let complexity collapse into competition. In a political system you can use ranked-choice voting and third parties. Most democracies use proportional representation and have more than two parties. The United States is the exception. The United States is more polarized than most countries in the world today because of this. Avoid referendums.
3. Marginalize the fire starters - try to rely on people and news sources who are unafraid of complexity, ones who are more curious than righteous, most of the time. Ripley uses the classic example of the Hatfield and McCoy families as well as Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
4. Buy time and make space - Rutger Bregman’s wonderful book Humankind contradicts the classic novel Lord of the Flies. The boys who were stranded on a remote island created space and time as well as rituals to combat conflict. Looping for understanding is an iterative, active listening technique in which the person listening reflects back what the person talking seems to have said. It involves listening 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.” “Once we feel understood, we see options we couldn’t see before. We feel some ownership over the search for solutions.” The magic ratio is when the number of every day positive interactions between people significantly outweighs the number of negative, creating a buffer that helps keep conflict healthy.
5. Complicate the narrative - feel curious when you feel threatened. Notice and amplify contradictions that you see in the real world. Incite curiosity by asking questions. “One of the burdens of high conflict is that it doesn’t allow for delight, for these little moments of joy. Curiosity is a prerequisite for delight.”
Other examples in the book that stood out to me were: The mid-1970s Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and their commando unit called Black September; the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative; the Baha’i faith in that we are all connected where there is no us or them. [Baha’i teachings revere Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad, believing that all major religions come from one spiritual source.]; Curtis Toler - the violence interrupter, actor, and a former leader in the Black P Stone gang - his life story is amazing as well as the history and psychology around gangs in Chicago is very interesting; The Adams and Jefferson story was super cool!
December 13, 2021
I don’t know if a more important topic for America to be tackling. Amanda Ripley unpacks this so succinctly and clearly. It challenged me in so many ways. In any attempts I’ve made at good conflict, I am so prone to “high conflict”. This was an eye opener.
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