>> it's a pleasure to have the chance to talk with you about what is a fascinating book exploring what i think you call the invisible hand of our time but when i was reading it, it almost seemed more like the background music of our daily lives. that is this challenge of what you labeled high conflict as you do find it distinct from the type of conflict that resolves into a true us versus them.

so i want to spend a little bit of time talking with you today about that, diving a little bit into some of the markers and the investigative work that you did to bring this book and this concept forward. but i thought i would start by asking you to talk a little bit about what got you interested in this particular topic. what i thought was so fascinating about reading it was it is in so many ways what we are living through in a so many stories in our daily life right now. but thought about in a way most of us never stopped to actually think of and process out these daily news stories to unfold. >> thank you. i am so glad to be back with you

all talking about this. it feels like an appropriate story. for years ago i just felt like as a journalist i had to do something differently. i feltel like it was so easy asa journalist to make the political conflicts worse even if you didn't intend to. some people intend to but most don't and here we were. it felt like there was something i wasn't understanding about what was going on and that's a problem. people study conflict of all times, personal, political, professional,ed and scale, individual and the study of conflict as a system, particularly in intractable conflict for me really clicked everything else into place. there's a lot off forces that gt us where we are. but that as a sort of overlay

suddenly made everything makes sense in a distorted kind of way so then the question became what can we learn from people that have been through and have gotten to h a better place. so i followed a handful of people including a politician in california and a former gang leader in chicago and environmental activist in england. foral those in rural michigan ad the whole goal is to see how do they get from high conflict which is this really unpleasant and toxic destructive kind of conflict to good conflict because the problem is it is conflict and it can feel that way that the problem is the kind. all those people did make that journey, which is incredibly encouraging and there were patterns for what happened in the second and third so it is about how they did that and how more of us could do the same if

we wanted to. >> if you talk a little bit about in the context of defining this sort of realm, this sort of what comes to mind is very intractable divorces and id wonder if, just to help viewers and listeners understand this framework, if you talk about how this appears in divorce cases and it's the mysterious force for people to lose their mind in political views or vendettas. so i was so struck in the start of the book as you begin to talk about it in the context of divorce. >> that is actually where the phrase high conflict comes from.

there are people who work in the divorce world and psychologists, lawyers and they refer to a high conflict divorce as one in which they are pervasive negative exchanges in a hostile environment, where the conflict is thet destination so to speak. the conflict doesn't go anywhere. there's no movement. and in about a quarter of the divorces each year could be categorized as high conflict so that is like 200,000. it turns out that there are also high conflict politics, high conflict companies, i conflict people. so i think that it is a useful way to understand with a special category of conflict in which there is not progress where you are just kind of stuck. it is something there is a distinct difference between good conflict in high conflict. i think it helps. for me it helped me get out of

the mind is concept of the idea that we either have to have bipartisan unity or be at each other's throats. those are not the only two choices there's a lot of space in between that. >> one of the things you have in this quote that i loved and it helped clarify for me a lot of what you are talking about where you will quote the president of germany as saying we are experiencing permanenten indignation, a kind of social rage and that does seem like part of the challenge if you

look at the roots of this when did american politics tip over for a natural tension over policy and philosophies into something that is much more akin to day to a sports rivalry. much of the research on polarization into the aftermath of watergatete and things that brought down the trust level and

also i would say boosted the adversarial traditions of the news media. n many reporters still think that they are breaking watergate every day or trying to. so there is this kind of adversarial adverse of the mindset that gets distilled from things like that and then of course you find that there are media outlets that figured out that they could reliably not targets the whole country but ue the grievances and anger but to come back and that niche would grow and grow and other media outlets have obviously figured that out. so, we design a lot of our institutions to incentivize high conflict a church or synagogue

agor neighborhood where there we cultures that dealt with conflict differently. maybe some d places people avoid it ands that sort of top-down hw the leadership deals with others and that doesn't work great usually. but also it's very common. and other places were conflict is combustible, like it is out of control and destructive to the things the organization is supposed to be about and other places that have traditions and rituals and policies in place. so it is possible to tap into just as we are high-powered for conflict, humans are hardwired and human history is about good conflict or we could have gotten to this point. >> one of the things you talk about is the b key to reducing high conflict is breaking out of the binary.

the idea that you can sort of reduce a situation that is political or personal or professional to the idea that there are only two slides or that they are only two possible solutions. and when you say institutions don't come from god, you actually do talk about one faith that you saw and learned about in the context of naturally setting up a system that doesn't reduce things to political parties or to political binaries and i wonder if you can just talk about what you saw it being able to teach us about how to do politics better. >> it's funny because i didn't know really anything about this before he started working on it, but the book is about casting a wide net and seeing are there examples of institutions that do

conflict better. institutionally enshrined in what they do and it's really interesting the concept of it is that we are all connected. there is no us versus them. but foundation only the idea is that we are very interdependent so it is for this moment when we are so interdependent as we are seeing in the pandemic and many otherma things. so the idea is that the prophet mohammed and believing all major religions come from onene spiritual source started in the mid-1800s and iran has spread to just about everywhere 150,000 adherence is in the united states with the largest community in india. so, anyway, what is interesting is it is pretty significant. small global and there are no ministers, no clerical leaders

to run things so how do they make decisions? what they do, and this is essentially one form of politics. each spring every one of the 17,000 at the locations gathers together to elect leaders. so it's close to the democracy operating in some 232 countries. but here's the twist. everything about the election is designed to reduce the odds of high conflict. the thing about high conflict is once you are in it it is very tricky to get out. it's very magnetic. a lot of psychological and sociological reasons for that. but the idea is to stay out of it. like don't let it start.

it's a pretty sober process after each person writes down the names of nine people they think of the t t experience and character to lead the community at that moment. it's considered a duty and not a victory. and then once they have the people in place and the budgets and all that sort of thing they have some other traditions to keep the ego in check and high conflict less likely. one of which the meetings are called consultations, and they do things like if you propose an idea, once i propose that it is no longer my idea. so little things that sound small but actually play into how humans work and particularly in conflict to help reduce the odds

of the kind of binary us versus them dynamic that we know tends to lead the high conflict. so it's kind of interesting. >> you also mentioned there's a pandemic, and that was a subject that i wanted to spend some time talking with you about. i wrote a piece at the start of the pandemic where the atlantic last year that i continued to chew over in my mind about whether i got terribly wrong. and i was thinking a lot about it in the context of your book and your writing on high conflict. i wrote about in the first year of the pandemic at the beginning as a unique spirit in america.

the desire to work together as americans that i saw as a unique moment in american history. a lot l of my own history writig was done thinking about the unity thatat the country had afr 9/11. never forget united we stand, and sort of feeling like we were in the same moment in the beginning and the middle of march of last year where you saw individual americans making these choices about the pandemic closing the business is ahead of when the government told them schools closing ahead of the government telling them.

celebrating the spirit of 2020 and then of course you know, every week since then, it has felt less like a united nation in the face of the pandemic. i'm going to keep coming back to the conflict. this question of sort of how it seems like americans got the response to the pandemic right and then politics misted up and how you think about in your own conflict with the america that you have lived through in this last year. >> i think you were right then, and there was an opportunity for that to last longer than it did. all over the world not just in america there was a real coming

together. there's are very strong pull to come together to help one another. you can feel it and it's an amazing experience and it is i think one of ourou great powersn society, but it has to be harnessed and sustained. we saw in 2020 that 90% of americans said they believed we were all in it together from 63% in the fall of 2018. it's hard to remember that the senate passed that massive federal stimulus bill by a vote of 96-0. so, quantitatively absolutely you were correct.

people are wired and then we are also wired to expand our definition of us under certain conditions. and a big shock like a pandemic can make us encompass the whole world overnight. so there is a huge opportunity in conflict to use those shocks. peter coleman at columbia university studies about this a lot. there is a shock because high conflict is a system with interlocking and diabolical parts that are self-perpetuating like a motion machine. when you have a big shock to the system it could be a weather event or violence or a new common enemy like a virus. when you have a shock it can upend temporarily some of those interlocking systems but you have to see is that opportunity which is usually left to leadership at the national or local or both level. so on the one hand i would say that opportunity wasn't seized

particularly at the national level. a lot of variances around the world and the country on that. it was certainly seen in some places and some towns. and it's also true that the duration of this particular kind of cataclysm is important and it's hard for humans to sustain that feeling when it goes on and on and there is no chance to recover so you see this in other things. and this is why looking forward for future pandemics it's so important from a psychological as well as biological point of view to start strong and united with clear consistent messaging that's been tested to try to frontload the reactions so that you can make it shorter. it's just fundamentally too much to ask for humans that are social creatures who need

socializing and ritual and interaction just the way they need food and water it's too much to ask for it to go on this long. it was a huge opportunity. thereer was a moment. but we had these conditions for the pandemic which was extreme polarization and high conflict, so that doesn't go away when this kind of thing happens. one of the things we start to see is the media becomes relentlessly negative on all sides of the spectrum. there's a lot of reasons for that, but i also think that doesn't help us because even when the caseload went down when the vaccines started to look like they were not going to work you didn't see a huge change in theto tone and emphasis of a lot of the headlines. there was a nice study done on this comparing to the

negativity. even the science of journal coverage of the pandemic. so, a lot of different things happening but the bottom line is when you have this high level of conflict, it is very hard to seize those opportunities. >> and you talked a lot about -- and i will shorthand it as the rogue cousin problem that we are all sort of in conflict scenarios beholden to the most combustible people in the group or the loyalty circle and you talk a lot about the competing groups and loyalties. i wonder if you could talk about the way that you end up calling

it fire starters. what are the things that cause people to be the source of high conflict? >> it comes from the hatfield and mccoy feud, which many people may have heard of. but very quickly, you know, in 1878, randolph mccoy along with the big sandy river between kentucky and west virginia, these families had lived peacefully side-by-side for generations farming the land. randolph mccoy thought that he recognized one on roy hatfield's farm and it must have f been his farm and no one could convince him to drop it so they organized a trial, mccoy lost the trial.

so he let it roll off and everyone moved on. the problem was it was a group conflict because they had many relatives all over the area and in the year and a half after the trial, they got in a fight with the witness who had testified against mccoy and the trial and they beat the man to death so this is the moment that the feud became sort of combusted, a high conflict dispute and over the course of the next decade there was a vigilante shooting. women were beaten, people were drawn into the feud across the region. i just explained this to say that one of the conditions that reliably seized every case that i looked at are powerful group identities that are made salient by the leaders so this is when we experience collective

emotions and geometrically compounds the conflict. you don't personally have to be attacked or insulted or humiliated but if someone in your group is attacked or humiliated, it feels and we process this literally in the same part of the brain that process pain it feels like it is happening to you, and the reverse is true. after their team wins basketball games they feel they are more likely to do amazing things personally like in games or contests but it's that collective emotion and so those powerful group identities particularly when there are two, again there's something about the binary.

it's really designed for high conflict based on what we know about the behavior and conflict. so the oppositional groups it doesn't bring out our best conflict instincts as humans i think it is fair to say. >> one of the things that i was fascinated or curious to talk with you about is what does america do with the lessons you have laid out in this book? we are locked into this intractable high conflict politic. most of us don't want to be there. you talked about how the conflict hollows out the middle

and that's something in the war zones and what advice did you have to the country as we wrestle with where we are right now? >> at the collective level and the sort of macro level, one thing is to make significant reforms to the electoral system to make the third parties possible. the founding fathers did not want there to be parties, let alone just to. we know from the research others have done about the polarization countrieses that have multiple parties and things like rent a choice ofhi voting and representation tend to be less polarized and have more trust. the system is more fair. it feels more fair and it is more fair which changes everything and lowers the volume and the sense of good and

justice. some states have already moved in this direction. others are trying to actively. the other thing is also operating in an individual level and it's also operating on elites. the people in power need to change what they are doing and they has also been captured by high conflict. so, i want to talk quickly about some of the individual things people can do not just elites, but everyone. so another precondition is the presence of conflict entrepreneurs who are people,

companies, platforms who intentionally exploit conflict for their own end. it could be for profit but often i find it's for attention and for income -- come artery so if it is in your social media feed or your news diet and trying to put a distance between you and them if you want to sort of stay out of the high conflict. the people i followed for the book including a politician that found himself caught in this vortex of high conflict, one of the first things he did is to start relying on different people for political advice. he moved away from the sort of seasoned veteran political organizers that had been advising him in whatever fight for the entrepreneur or to

somebody else that saw a lot more nuance and humanity among the people he disagreed with. and to take a more extreme example, the former leader that i spent a lot of time with in chicago he literally moved across town to help him get out of that conflict. when the things went bad as they always do and his cousin he was very close to was brutally murdered he didn't know who hadd done it. he couldn't react to the way he normally would because of thatf distance that he had created so everything you can do to slow down conflict is very important. at the individual level but also at the collective level. >> last question before i open up to the audience. you started by saying that this book grew out of basically where you saw yourself in journalism and the stories you are

recovering and wondering where they came from and why they were so challenging. b how has this book changed the way that you do your journalism? i know that it changed the way that you talk to your family because you talk about the ways you try to listen differently over the dinner table. how do you report differently and explain differently now that you understand this backdrop? >> the rules of engagement for journalism and anything don't apply the same way and high conflict. they will not work and they will often backfire. so, for me i had to develop a whole new set of engagement. i'm interested in suggestions and i'm working a lot with of the solutions journalism network that is a nonprofit that trains

newsrooms to help them do this. how do you cover controversy in ways that illuminates rather than just exacerbate the conflict and one of the sort of overarching ideas from the research is you have to complement the narrative that your audience has going into a polarizing issue and that requires knowing what that narrative is. it will be different for different audiences and figuring out what are the places it is true or limited and using either history or different locations to see what is hell buttoning, to help your audience have a useful view of either the conflict on the other side or themselves. so that is now how i sort of try to measure success and is the story going to help illuminate anything in this and if not, i am not going to do it.

it'sn easier said than done, but i think that many newsrooms and editors right now have fundamentally underestimated the audience's desire and ability to handle complexity right now and i think most americans want something very different from the news than what they are getting so i think that there's a huge opportunity to do journalism differently particularly in conflict and to be useful to people at this moment when we are not being as useful as we think. >> questions from the audience here. this one is from richard. did you change your mind on any principles or theories as the book unfolded in the research? what a surprise to you about your research? >> many things. i think one thing i changed my

mind about is i have sort of different conflicts and different categories and i thought polarization was a thing like political polarization. i don't think that is very helpful. everything i've seen, human behavior in different kinds of conflict the behavior at a fundamental level isar and that different i'm trying to be less look at the how i research and storytelling. the other thing i would say is i have become much more suspicious of my own righteousness when it flares up. and i want to be careful here because sometimes people say it sounds like i'm saying you can't be passionate or angry or have radical ideas.

you can have really radical visions and movements for social change. we need those things without being in high conflict. so, some of the differences between good conflict and high conflict are really telltale signs and you can see them all around you. one is in good conflict there's still some curiosity. there might be moments of surprise. you experience a range of motions,ns not just to. it's much more everything feels really clear like much clearer than it possibly is and you begin to generalize about many millions of people you don't know and will never meet and so that lack of humility and complexity we've come to see as quite dangerous not just for the country but also the most chilling part about high conflict in every story that it followed was that everyone involved in high conflict begins

to mimic the behavior of their adversaries. you eventually do the things consciously or not that you went into the fight to stop. so the politician who goes into politics to make it less toxic and more inclusive, you made it more toxic and less inclusive. and there's a million examples like this. so, this is the warning about high conflict if you want to change the world, this is important. make sure you cultivate good conflict because otherwise, you will end up risking the thing you hold most dear. >> are there any fashionable leaders or state level political leaders that you see as the embodiment of the good type of conflict that we want to be

encouraging? like who does this well on the state or national level that you've seen? >> i am trying to work on a project of actually ranking or quantifying members of congress and other high-profile leaders not just in politics, but in the news media and other places to figure out who are the conflict entrepreneurs in ways we can measure and if they are the conflict interrupters this is hard because our system incentivizes especially at the national level it incentivizes the entrepreneurs like twitter so we have set up every incentive for this and no disincentive at this point and again that is all fixable, changeable but we are asking people to be something different than what is worded for others.

i have some data and intuition. >> i have no shortage of the examples that i would say the conflict entrepreneurs in our modern society but the flip side of it would be a really testing project and i look forward to reading it. the question here what is the role of technology in encouraging high conflict? and sort of how much of this is the tool that we are using to live in the digital age versus something that is actually new to our society? >> i think any attention economy is going to play into high

conflict as to whether it is the news media or social media. anything that makes money off of your attention, the cheapest way to do that is through fear and indignation. so that is the race to the bottom we have seen in many industries. on the social media which is definitely important to focus on and reform this started before social media and some of the most, some of the people that are most captured by high conflict in their rhetoric and in the way they've sort of a strained family members and the researchre are not on facebook d

twitter. so where we see this string in the technology point of view is with talk radio and cable news. it's important to really cast a broad net when we talk about the way that technology has incentivized high conflict. that's true and it isn't just social media. >> another question here from elizabeth that i will play with a little bit. her question is how do we help kids develop the muscles to handle complexity and avoid high conflict and i will personalize it a little bit by saying how do we parent differently now that you understand high conflict? >> it's tricky because there is just like i have a teenage son

and he is living in the world into reading the news and it is very easy for him to slip into sweeping generalizations about good people and bad people and i get that and i don't just want to be the person that's like let's look at the full picture. but i also have found if i try to connect to his own life or our own family, that can be helpful. like how do you resolve conflict among your friends or in the soccer game or our family and think about how do we overlay that. it sounds too simplistic but i think it is quite complex to make that connection it can be a

low level of emotion but the first thing is to be heard so once people feel heard and you do this by showing them like proving beyond a doubt that you've heard them it sounds like what you are saying is it is fundamentally unjust you first acknowledge that you heard them and then you forget you have to ask if you got it right. did i get that right, with genuine curiosity, you have too be genuine. and when you do this it is amazing. it is amazing what it unlocks to people.

even people who are very different with political opinions and different life experiences. once they feel heard they don't mistake for agreement. they don't think i can agree. once they feel t like we are trying to get them they are more open to information and they maybe don't want to hear. often with parenting, once you've done it, the issue is over. if you don't have to do anything else, it's amazing. you don't have to argue it or make your case. you just make sure you feel heard and everybody can move on so it is an incredible skill. thanks for putting together such a wonderful and relevant and

timelyd book. if you are listening or watching you can pick up the book anywhere that you buy books our partners at politics and prose in washington for an extra discount. i want to thank the ambassador and most of all, amanda, thank you for putting such an interesting book together about the backdrop and background to these modern times. >> thank you for having me. i enjoyed the conversation.

>> we are thrilled to have with us the newest book breaking the social media prism. chris is a professor at the public policy at the university where he directs the polarization lab. a leader in the emerging field of computational social science. the research examines