1992 book called inside. >> it is a pleasure we had the chance to talk with you about what is a fascinating book what you call the invisible hand of our time but when i was reading it almost seemed more like the background music of ourt daily lives.

and that is this challenge of what you say hi conflict natural conflict but thect type of conflict to resolve into a true us versus them i want to spend time talking with you today typing into the investigative work that you did to bring this book and concept forward. >> but i would ask you to start what got you interested in this particular topic? in some ways what is so fascinating about reading it

, is that what we are living through in the stories in our daily life right now and thought about in a way that most of us never stop to think of them process as these dailies new stories unfold. >> thank you for joining us today i'm glad to be back with you all talking about this as an appropriate back story but four years ago i felt like as a journalist i had to do something differently. it was just easy to make the political conflicts worse even if you didn't intend to but it sound like something like there was an understanding what was going on and it's a

problem so i spent a lot of time with people who studied conflict of all kinds and the study of conflict as a system with intractable conflict put everything into place a lot of forces got us to where we are but as that overlay had everything makes sense and that distorted type of ways so what can we do as a conflict so i followed people a former gang leader in chicago environmental activist in england frustrated democrats and republicans in rural michigan and though whole goal is to see how do they get from as high conflict but that is

the kind of conflict and people did make that journey which is encouraging with patterns of first and second and third so the book is how they did that and how more of us to do the same. host: in the context of those that come to mind are intractable divorces and just to help viewers and listeners understand the framework and the mysterious force that

entices people to lose their minds when the political view are getting then data. was so struck and what we do. >> and with that comes from. psychologist and lawyers of high a conflict as one in which they are pervasive exchanges in a hostile environment. but there is no movement that those american and divorces could be categorized as high conflict and that is 200,000. also high conflict politics, companies, high conflict people.

it's easily to understand a special category of conflict. so there is a distinct difference between good conflict and high conflict so for me and help me get out of the mindset the nero weaning confines of the idea where we have to have bipartisan unity or be at each other's throat those are not the only two choices just like in a marriage. you have to get along all the time or verbally emotionally abuse each other. there is a lot of space in between that. host: and out quotation that i love to help clarify for me is

a lot of what you are talking about coding the president of germany permanent indignation of a social rage. that doesn't seem like what we are wrestling with an politics the names matter. the names change. but theea outrage does not. as we a trace this back and look at the roots of this. when did americana lose its mind? went in american politics tip over from a natural tension over policy into something that is much more to a better

sports revelry? >> most of the research on polarization roughly on the eighties and the aftermath of watergate and that which brought down the trust level and so many reporters still think that there is this adversarial us versus them and then you find there are media outlets like fox news to not target the whole country that mine chat the time to come back that niche has grown and

other outlets have figure that out so a lot of our institutions to incentivize high conflict. they are not a guide we can incentivize them but we have all worked at places a church or synagogue or neighborhood thee culture dealt with conflict differently maybe where people word avoided that doesn't work great usually but also that where conflict is combustible and out-of-control and destructive that it is supposed to be about. and those that have traditions and rituals to make conflict healthier so it is possible to

tap into just as we are hired on —- hardwired to avoid conflict most of human history is about good conflict a week would not have gotten to this point. host: you talk about breaking out of the binary with the idea that you cannot reduce situation that there are only two sides are two possible solutions when you say institutions don't come from god you talk about so what you saw andab learned about naturally setting up that does not reduce two political

parties or political binary so could you just talk about what you saw it could teach us how to do politics better. >> it's funnyun i didn't know anything before i started to work on this but the book was about casting a wide net are there examples to be enshrined in what they do so the high states is interesting. the concept is we are all connected there is no us or them but the idea is we are veryte interdependent so it is particularly appropriate as we see with the pandemic and many other things working at jesus

christ and the prophet mohammed that they come from one virtual source and iran has spread with those in the united states is the largest community in india. global faith no ministers or clerical leaders so essentially one form of politics each of the 17000 locations designed to reduce the odds of high conflict. the thing about the conflict is once you are in it it is tricky to get out. there's a lot of psychological and sociological reasons for that but the idea is to stay out

of it like don't let it start. so they are no parties allowed. people are not allowed to campaign for a position even if they wanted. you can only discuss which qualities are most needed and then it's a pretty sober process after prayer each person writes down the name of people they think have the experience and character to lead to the the communityat that moment ande winners are announced. there is no celebrating. it's considered a duty, not a victory. and then once that they have the people in place and have to make the decisions for the community to deal with the conflicts that arise and all that they have other traditions in place to keep the ego in checked and conflict less likely one of

which the meetings are called consultations and they do things like if i bring to the table and idea, once i propose that it is no longer my idea so these little things sound small but actually play into how humans work and how to reduce the binary dynamic that we know tends to lead to the conflict so it's interesting. >> you also mentioned in the pandemic i wrote a piece at the start for the atlantic last year that i've continued to chew over in my mind about whether i got

it inherently wrong and i was thinking a lot about it in the context of your book and writing on the conflict in the pandemic way back at the beginning, what i saw as this unique spirit in america was a sort of national moment of unity and desire to work together as a unique moment in american history. a lot of my own history writing was focused on 9/11 and thinking about the unity that the country had after 9/11. never forget united we stand.

we thought the individuals making these choices about the pandemic and closing their businesses that had a win and the government told them to close. at that moment i was sort of celebrating the spirit of 2020 that america is coming together. i keep coming back to the high conflict this question it seems like americans got the response to the pandemic right and then the politics misted up.

how do you think about this conflict frame of the america that you've lived through in this last year? >> there was an opportunity for that period to last longer than it did. i know all over the world not just in america there was a real coming together. like you i cover lots of disasters and terrorist attacks and this is always true that there is a sort of golden hour after a catastrophe or during when there is a very strong pull to come together to help one another and it is an amazing experience and i think one of our great powers but it has to be harnessed and sustained. we saw in late march of 2020

that 90% of americans that they believed were in it together, 63% in the fall. it's hard to remember but the senate passed the stimulus bill by a vote of 96-0. so quantitatively. and we are wired to expand under certain conditions and big shocks like a pandemic can make us encompass the whole world overnight. there is a huge opportunity in conflict to use those shocks. in the interlocking diabolical parts of the machine when you have a big shock to the system it could be weather events, it could be a new common enemy.

when you have a shock it can upend temporarily some of those interlocking systems but you have to seize that opportunity for both levels. that opportunity wasn't ceased. it's also true that the duration of this particular kind of cataclysm is important and hard for humans to distain that feeling. this is why looking forward for future pandemics it's important

probably. you can make it shorter. it is fundamentally too much to ask for humans that are social creatures who need socializing interaction especially the way they need food and water is too much to ask. i think both are true it was a huge opportunity. there was a moment that we had a pretty sustained condition which was the extreme polarization and conflict so that doesn't go away. i would say in hyper polarized societies one of the things you start to see is the news media become 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 change in the tone and emphasis. there was a study done on this by the way about comparing the negativity of major u.s. news accounts during the pandemic to international news accounts of the pandemics and it was covered even more negative than the science journal. a lot of different things happening but the bottom line is when you have this level of conflict, it is very hard to cease those opportunities. >> you talked a lot about it and i will sort of talk about this rogue problem that we are in some ways sort of all in

conflict scenarios beholden to the most combustible people in the group or loyalty circle. can you talk about the competing groups and identities, and i wonder if you can talk about the way you end up calling it virus starters. what are the things that cause people to be the source of high conflict? >> it comes from the story of the hatfield and mccoy feud which many people may have heard of but very quickly, you know, in 1878 along with the big sandy river with farming the land and

randolph mccoy thought that he recognized one of the pigs on hatfield's farm and stole it from his. no one could convince him to drop it so they complained to the authorities, organized the trial, he lost the trial and that wasn't a great experience for him, but he let it roll off and everyone moved on. it was a group conflict because they had many relatives all over the area and in the first year and a half after the trial, they got in a fight with a witness who testified and they beat the man to death so this is when the feud became sort of combusted and morphed over the course of the next decade it was a vigilante shooting.

women were beaten, people were drawn in across the region. i explained this to say one of the conditions that leads to high conflict in every case i look at our powerful group identities. when we experience collective emotion, geometrically it compounds the conflict. if someone is attacked or humiliated the way humans process this literally in the same parts of the brain that process pain it feels like it's happening to you and the reverse is true if somebody does something amazing and powerful you feel pride just like sports fans after their team wins. they feel like they are more

likely to do amazing things which is clearly not true. but it is our perceptions of this powerful group identity particularly when there's something about this binary this is where our particular political system of a when is designed for high conflict based on what we know about human behavior and conflict. those powerful oppositional groups it doesn't bring out the best i think it is fair to say. >> one of the things i was fascinated were curious to talk about was what does america do with the lessons that you have laid out in this book?

we are locked into this conflict in our politics and most of us don't want to be there and i think that is sort of another part of your book is talking about how the conflict hollows out the middle. that's something that's consisted in politics and war zones. what advice do you have to the country as we wrestle with where we are right now? >> with the collective level one thing that goes to what we were talking about is to make significant reform to the systems and make third parties possible. there's no reason we have to speak to this formula.

we know from the research others have done about polarization that countries that have multiple parties and things like representation tend to be less polarized and have less trust. it feels more fair and it is more fair which changes everything and lowers the volume. some states have already moved in this direction and others are trying actively. it's operating at an individual level and. it's operating at an individual level and. they need to change what they are doing and it's also been

captured they 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 for a sense of meaning and come artery in the social media or news it puts distance between you and them if you want to stay out of high conflict. that's something we know is very effective and the people i follow for the book including this politician who found

themselves caught in this cortex one of the things he did is to start relying on different people, he moved away from the sort of black-and-white, good and evil and move to somebody else the saw a lot more nuanced humanity among the people he disagreed with and we have to take a more current example. he moved across town to help him get out of the conflict. when things went bad as they always do, and his cousin he was very close to who was brutally murdered, he didn't know how he had done it. he couldn't react the way that he normally would because of the distance that he had created so everything you can do to slow

down conflict is very important. at the individual level and also 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 your self in journalism and the stories you were covering and wondering where they came from and why. i wonder how this book changed the way that you do your journalism. i know it changed the way that you talk to your family because you talk about the way that you try to listen differently around the dinner table. but when you are out doing your job, how do you write differently and explain differently now that you understand this background? >> the rules of engagement for

journalism and anything don't apply the same way. they just will not work and often backfire. for me i had to develop a new set of rules and engagements. it's hard. i'm still figuring it out and working with the solutions journalism network that the trainsthe newsroom to help themo this. you have to complicate the narrative that the audience has going into a polarizing issue and that requires knowing what that narrative is and it will be different for different audiences. figuring out if it is true and using history or different locations or a broad lens to see

what is happening to help your audience have a full more useful view of either of the conflict, the other side or themselves so that is how i now try to measure success. is the story going to help illuminate anything about this conflict and if not, i am not going to do it. it's easier said than done but i think many newsrooms and editors particularly at the national level have fundamentally underestimated the desire and ability to handle complexity and i think most americans want something different than what they are getting. there is an opportunity to do journalism differently particularly in the conflict and to be useful when we are not being as useful as we think.

>> did you change your mind as the book unfolded and the research unfolded? what surprised you about your research? >> many things. i think one thing i had different conflicts in different categories. i thought polarization was a thing. i don't think that's very helpful. everything i've seen human behavior in different kinds of conflict whether it is the war or political at a fundamental level is not that different so i am trying to be less sideload and how i look at the research and storytelling.

i've become much more suspicious of my own righteousness when it flares up. i want to be careful because sometimes people say it sounds like i'm saying you can't be passionate or have radical ideas and i think that we need to get more nuanced and how we think about these things because you can have really radical visions and movements for social change without being in high conflict. so, some of the differences between good conflict and high conflict are telltale signs and you can see them all around you. one is there's still curiosity. there might be moments of surprise. you experience a range of emotions. in high conflict everything feels clear more than it probably is and you begin to

generalize. that lack of humility and complex that he is quite dangerous. but the most chilling part in every story that i followed is everyone involved in high conflict eventually begins to mimic the behavior of their adversary. eventually you run into the fight to stop. the politician that goes into politics to make it less inclusive made it less toxic and inclusive and there's a million examples like this. this is the warning about high conflict. if you want to change the world, this is important.

are there any national political leaders or state-level political leaders that you see as the embodiment of the good type of conflict that we want to be encouraging? who does this on this level that you seem? >> it's funny that you should say that because i'm trying to work on right now a project of actually ranking or quantifying members of congress and other high-profile leaders not just in politics, but the news media and other places to figure out who are the conflict entrepreneurs and may be most interesting who is not anymore.

the system incentivizes especially at the national level it incentivizes just like twitter so we have set up every incentive and again it's all fixable and changeable but we are asking people to be something different. i have some theories but i want to use some data. the example i would cite in our modern society the flip side of it would be a question here from lawrence. what is the role of technology and encouraging high conflict and sort of how much of this is

basically the tool that we are using to live in the digital age versus something that is new to our society? >> any attention economy is going to plague to the high conflict. so, whether it's news media or social media. anything that makes money off of seizing your attention. the cheapest way to do that is to fear and indignation. so, that is sort of the way to the bottom that we have seen in many different industries. so i think that is definitely accelerated. that said, we focus a lot on the social media which is important to focus on and reform, but this

started way before social media and some of the most, some of the people that are most captured by high conflict in their rhetoric and the sort of estranged family members in the research are not on facebook and twitter. so, if you look back where do you see a lot of this starting from the technology point of view it's from cable news. so to cast a broad net when we talk about the way technology has incentivized the conflict i think that is true and it is not just social media. >> another question here from elizabeth but i will play with a little bit. her question is how do we help

kids develop the muscle to avoid conflict and i will personalize it a little bit also by saying how do you parent differently now that you understand high conflict? >> it's tricky because i have a teenage son and he's living in the world and reading the news and very easy for him to slip into sort of sweeping generalizations about good people and bad people, and i get that and i don't want to just be the person like let's look at the full picture but i've also found that if i try to connect to his own life or family that can be helpful how do you and think about how would we overlay

that. it sounds complicit but i think that it's quite complex to try to make that connection. i do this and all my interviews now, this is what has changed most for me personally and professionally i do this technique and there's other forms of it out there but when someone is telling me something that they are bringing any level of emotion to the first thing people want is to be heard and they almost never get it. it sounds like what you're saying you can't go back to

school in person even though your teacher is vaccinated, i'm making this up, but you first acknowledge that you heard them and then you have to ask if you got it right, like it's a genuine curiosity. you have to be genuine. when you do this, it is amazing what it unlocks in people, even people that are different from me with political venues and life experiences once they feel heard and they don't mistake for the agreement by the way, they don't think i agree, once they feel like you are really trying to get them, they open up and the research shows they acknowledge more ambivalence and complexity but it gets stifled in the high conflict and they are more open to information they may be 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, you don't have to fix it, argue it or make the case. you just make sure and everybody can move on. it is an incredible skill that we should absolutely be teaching kids to finally answer the question. >> thank you for such a relevant and timely book. if you are listening and watching, you can pick up a man does book anywhere that you buy books but particularly through our partners at politics and prose here in washington and use the code special ten and check out for an extra discount. i want to thank the aspen institute for sponsoring the book series and most of all

amanda thank you for putting such an interesting book together about backdrop and

>> tonight we are thrilled to have t14 his book breaking the social media prism. professor of sociology and public policy at duke university when he directs the polarization lab a leader in the emerging field computational social science with the fundamental question of social psychology political polarization and technology using large-scale experiments of social media platforms. in-depth interviews and the late