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invested billions building infrastructure, upgrading technology, empowering opportunity in communities big and small, charter is connecting us. >> charter can indication with these television companies support c-span2 as a public service. >> a pleasure to talk to 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 almost seems more like the background music of our daily lives and that is this challenge of what you label high conflict, as you define it, distinct from good conflict or natural conflict but the

type of conflict that resolves into a true us versus them, i want to spend a little time talking with you today about that, diving a little bit into some of the markers and investigative work you did to bring this book and this concept forward but thought i would start by asking you to talk a little bit about what got you interested in this particular topic, in some ways what i found sort of fascinating about reading it was that it is in so many ways what we are living through in so many stories in our daily life but thought about in a way that most of us never stopped to think of and process as these daily news stories

unfold. >> thank you to everyone joining us today, i'm glad to be back with you all talking about this. this is an appropriate back story. four years ago, i felt as a journalist i had to do something differently. it was so easy as a journalist to make our political conflicts worse, even if you didn't intend to, some people intend to, most don't and yet here we were and it felt like there was something i wasn't understanding about what was going on in the country and that is a problem. i spent a lot of time with people who study conflict of all kinds, personal, political, professional, at scale, individual and the study of conflict as a system particularly intractable conflict, from he really

clicked everything else into place. a lot of forces got us where we are, but that is a sort of overlay suddenly made everything makes sense in a distorted kind of way. than the question became what can we learn from people who have been through ugly conflict on the got into a better place so i followed a handful of people including a politician in california, former gang leader in chicago, environmental activist in england, regular frustrated democrat in new york city, regular frustrated republicans in rural michigan and the goal was to see how did they get from high conflict which is an unpleasant, toxic, distractive kind of conflict a good conflict. the problem isn't conflict. it can feel that way. the problem is the kind of conflict and all those people did make that journey which is encouraging and there were patterns so the book is really

about how they did that and more of us could do the same. >> you talk a little bit about in the context of defining the realm this sort of most naturally comes to mind which is very intractable divorces and i wonder, just to help viewers and listeners understand the framework, if you could talk about how loose our peers in divorce cases, you talk about higher conflict as the mysterious force that incites people to lose their mind in political feuds or gaming vendettas and i was so struck in the start of the book as you began to talk about this in the context of divorce.

>> that is where the phrase high conflict comes from. there are people who work in the divorce world, psychologists, lawyers and they refer to high conflict divorce as one in which there are pervasive negative exchanges in a hostile environment where the conflict is the destination so to speak, the conflict doesn't go anywhere. there's no movement and about a quarter of american divorces each year could be categorized as high conflict. that's 200,000 divorces so it turns out there are also high conflict politics, high conflict companies, high conflict people. it's a useful way to understand this category of conflict in which there is not progress, you are just stuck and it is

something, there is a distinct difference between good conflict and high conflict. it helped me get out of the mindset of the narrowing confines that we either have to have bipartisan unity your be at each other's throats. those are not the only two choices just like in a marriage you don't have to get along all the time and also don't have too verbally, emotionally or physically abuse each other. there's a lot of space in between. >> you have this quote that i just love and helped clarify for me a lot of what you 're talking about where you quote the president of germany as saying we are experiencing permanent indignation. a kind of social rage and that really does seem like part of

the challenge we are wrestling with in our politics today where the names matter -- the names change, but the outrage doesn't and i am curious, as you traced this back and looked at the roots of this, when did america lose its mind? when did the american politics tip over from a natural tension over policies and philosophies into something that is much more akin today 2 of very bitter sports rival? >> the interesting thing, most of the research on polarization

dates back to roughly the 80s in the aftermath of watergate and vietnam and other things that brought down the trust level and a lot of our institutions and also boosted the adversarial traditions of the news media. many many reporters still think they are breaking watergate every day or trying to so there's this adversarial us versus them mindset things like that and you find there were media outlets that figured out like fox news that they can reliably not target the whole country but fear and grievances and anger, not all the time, but much of the time in order to get a sort of niche audience coming back and back, and other media outlets have figured that out as of social media platform so we designed a lot of our institutions to incentivize high conflict. the important thing about that is we can design -- we designed them. they are not from god.

we can design them to incentivize good conflict. you see that in your life. we've worked in places, a church or synagogue or neighborhood where there were cultures that dealt with conflict differently, may be places where people avoid it and that is how the leadership deal -- that doesn't work great but it is very common and other places where conflict is combustible, out-of-control and destructive to what the organization is about other places with traditions, rituals and policies in place to make conflict healthier. it is possible to tap into, just as we are wired for high conflict, humans are hardwired for good conflict and boast of human history is about good conflict or we wouldn't have gotten to this point.

>> host: one of the things you talk about is key to reducing high conflict is breaking out of the binary. the idea that you can't reduce a situation, whether it is political or personal, or professional, to the idea that there are only two sides are two possible solutions. when you say our institutions don't come from god you talk about one thing you saw and learned about in the context of naturally setting up a system that does not reduce things to political parties or to political binaries and i wonder if you could talk about what you saw it being able to teach us about how to do politics better.

>> i didn't know anything about the baha'i faith, are there examples of institutions that do conflict better, institutionally, enshrined in what they do? the baha'i faith is interesting. the concept of it is we are all connected. there's no the us or them. but fundamentally, foundational he the idea is we are interdependent so it is particularly appropriate for this moment in history when we are interdependent as we see with the pandemic and many other things, the idea is the prophet mohammed, believing all major religions come from one spiritual source started in the mid-1800s and spread everywhere, 150,000 adherents in the united states, the largest community in india.

what is interesting is, pretty significant, small but global faith, there are no ministers, no clerical leaders so how do they make decisions? what they do, this is essentially one form of politics. each spring, everyone in each of the locations gathers to elect leaders. it is close to up your democracy operating in 233 countries but here's the twist. everything about these elections is designed to reduce the odds of high conflict. the thing about high conflict is once you are in it is tricky to get out, very magnetic. lots of psychological and sociological reasons for that but the ideal is to stay out of it but don't let it start. these baha'i elections, no parties allowed, no binary categories, people are not allowed to campaign for a position even if they want it,

you can't discuss the best person, you only can discuss which qualities are most needed and then when they do the election it is basically a sober process after a prayer each person writes the names of 9 people they think have the experience and character to lead the community at that moment, there are secret ballots in the 9 winners are announced, there's no celebrating. it is considered a duty, not a victory and then once they have the people in place and have to make decisions for the community deal with conflicts that arise and budgets and that sort of thing they have other traditions in place to keep the ego in check and keep high conflict less likely, one of which is their meetings are called convocations and they do things like if you propose an idea one side proposes it, it's no longer my idea. these little things that sound

small but actually play into how humans work and particularly end conflict, to reduce the odds of the kind of binary dynamic that we know tends to lead to high conflict so it is kind of interesting. >> the pandemic was a subject i wanted to spend some time talking about. you are a writer for the atlantic and i wrote a piece at the start of the pandemic, i have continued to chew over in my mind about whether i got it 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, way back

at the beginning what i saw as this unique spirit in america, this sort of national moment of unity and desire to work together as americans, that i saw as a unique moment in american history, a lot of my own history writing has focused on 9/11 and thinking about the unity the country had after 9/11, never forget, united we stand, feeling like we were in this same moment in the beginning and middle of march last year where you saw individual americans making these choices about the pandemic, closing businesses ahead of when the government told them to, schools closing ahead of the government telling them to.

and at that moment, i was celebrating, the spirit of 2020 that america is coming together, and then every week since then it has felt less like a united nation in the face of the pandemic and i keep coming back to being in the frame of high conflict. this question, americans got the response to the pandemic, politics messed it up. how do you think about, in your own high conflict frame of the america you lived through in this last year? >> guest: i think you were right then, and there was an

opportunity for that period to last longer than it did. we know all over the world not just in america there was a real coming together. like you i covered lots of disasters and terrorist attacks. it is always true that there is a golden our after terrible catastrophe or during when there's a very strong human pool to come together, to help one another, you can really feel it and it is an amazing experience and one of our great powers as society, but it has to be harnessed, it has to be sustained. we saw in late march that 90% of americans believe we are all in it together in the fall of 2018, hard to remember but the u.s. senate passed that massive first federal stimulus bill by

90620. you are quantitatively, we are also wired to expand our definition of us under certain conditions. big shocks, like a pandemic, can make us encompass the whole world overnight. there's a huge opportunity in conflict to use those shocks. peter coleman writes about this, shocks that because high conflict is a system of interlocking diabolical parts that are self-perpetuating leica motion machine. when you have a big shock to the system, could be a weather event, a death, violence, a new common enemy like a virus. when you have a shot, it can append temporarily some of those interlocking systems but you have to seize that opportunity, which is usually left to leadership at the

national, or local level. on the one hand, i would say that opportunity was not seized particularly at the national level, lots of variants around the world and the country. it was in some places in some towns. it is also true the duration of this particular kind of cataclysm is important, hard for humans to sustain that feeling. when it goes on and on and there's no chance to recover, this is why looking forward to the future pandemic is so important from a psychological and sociological point of view and biological point of view starts strong and clear with clear messaging tested to try to frontload the reaction so you can make it shorter.

it is too much to ask for humans who are social creatures who need socializing, ritual and interaction especially children the way they need food and water it is too much to ask for it to go on this long. both are true. it was a huge opportunity, there was a moment, but we had a preexisting condition for this pandemic which is extreme polarization and high conflict. that doesn't go away when this happens. last thing i will say about this is in hyper polarized society is one of the things we start to see is the news 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. even when the caseload went down, vaccines started to look like they were going to work, you didn't see a huge change in

the tone and emphasis of the headlines. there's a study about comparing the negativity of major us news during the pandemic to international news accounts of the pandemic, us coverage was much more negative, more negative in science journals. the bottom line is when you have this bottom level of high conflict, to seize those opportunities. >> you talk about it as the rogue cousin problem, in conflict scenarios beholden to the most combustible people in the group or loyalty circle,

competing identities. i wonder if you could talk about, you call them fire starters, what are the things that cause people to be the source of high conflict? >> guest: that comes from the hatfield and mccoy's feud which many people have heard of but very quickly in 1878, randolph mccoy visited hatfield's farm, in the sandy river, side-by-side for generations, farming the land, randolph mccoy thought he recognized one of the pigs on hatfield's farm and must've been stolen, no one could convince him to drop it.

mccoy complained to the authorities, organized the trial, mccoy lost the trial and wasn't a great experience for him but he let it roll off and everything moved on. it was a group conflict because the hatfield and mccoy's and many relatives in the area, a year and 1/2 after the trial, a few of mccoy's nephews got enough fight, a witness testified against mccoy in the pig trial and beat the man to death, this is the moment the feud became combusted, a high conflict small dispute morphed into an intractable one and in the next decade there was a stabbing, supreme court case, women were beaten, 80 people drawn into the feud across the region. i explain this to say one of the conditions that leads to high conflict are powerful group identities that are made

salient by leaders. this is because when we experience collective emotion, it compounds the conflict because you don't personally have to be attacked or insulted or humiliated but if someone in your group is insulted or humiliated it feels, we humans process of this in the same parts of the brain that process pain, feels like it is happening to you in the reverse is true. when someone in your group does something amazing and powerful you feel pride like sports fans, great studies, sports fans after their team wins, they feel like they are likely to do amazing things personally like games or contests. it acts true. it is our perception so the powerful group identities when there are two.

something about the binary, where our particular, system where there are two parties is really designed for high conflict, human behavior and conflict. this powerful opposition groups doesn't bring out our best conflict. >> host: one of the things i was curious to talk about is what does america do with the lessons, we are locked into this intractable high conflict in our politics and most of us don't want to be there.

this is another part of your book, talking about how conflict hollows out the middle, consisted in war zones and, what advice do you have to the country as we wrestle with where we are right now? >> guest: at the macro level, one thing that goes to what we are talking about about the binary is to make significant reforms to the electoral system, to make third parties possible. the founding fathers did not want there to be parties let alone just two. no reason we have to stick with this formula. we know from the research about polarization, countries that have multiple parties, ranked choice voting and representation tends to be less

polarized and have more trust, the system is more fair, changes everything, lowers the volume and grievance and injustice, some states moved in this direction. others try actively, every session there is a bill introduced in congress to make this happen. that the kind of thing you can get behind that makes a lot of sense. the other thing that is important is how much of this is also operating on an individual level and also operating on elites. the people in power need to change what they are doing and captured by high conflict. i want to talk about the individual things people do, not just elites but everyone, things i have done in my life.

another precondition of conflict is the presence of conflict entrepreneurs, people, companies, platforms, pundits who intentionally exploit conflict for their own end. it could be for profit but often for attention, since of meeting and colorado and power. becoming aware of who those people are in your own life or social media feed or news diet, trying to put some distance between you and them if you want to stay out of high conflict. that's very effective. people i followed for the book including a politician who was caught in a vortex of high conflict, one of the first things he did was start relying on different people, the political organizer advising

him who saw the world as black and white, good and evil, those words start classic conflict entrepreneur rhetoric and someone else who saw more nuance, the people we disagreed with and to take a more extreme is apple, the former gang leader i spent a lot of time with in chicago moved across town to get out of the conflict he was in, many years long vendetta. and was brutally murdered, couldn't react the way he normally would and retaliate. everything you can do to slow down conflict, at the individual level but also the collective level.

>> host: you started by saying this grew out of where you saw yourself in journalism and wondering where they came from and why they are so challenging. i wonder how this book, change the way you talk to your families, the way you try to listen different way around the dinner table but when you're doing your job how do you report differently or right differently or explain differently now that you understand the backdrop? >> guest: don't apply the same way, they will often backfire. i had to develop a new set of rules, it is hard.

i'm still trying to figure it out. i am working a lot with the solutions journalism network, the nonprofit the trains newsrooms to help them do this too. how do you cover controversy in ways that illuminate rather than exacerbate the conflict and one of the overarching ideas is you have to complicate the narrative your audience has going into a polarizing issue and that requires knowing what the narrative is, different for different audiences and figuring out, where is the narrative not actually true but very limited and using either history or different locations or broader lens, wider lens on the problem to see what is happening, to help your audience have a richer, fuller view of either the conflict, the other side or ourselves. that's not how i try to measure success. is this story going to

illuminate anything about this conflict? if not, i'm not going to do it. easier said than done but i think many newsrooms and editors, not all but particularly at the national level have fundamentally underestimated their audience's desire and ability to handle complexity right now and i think most americans want to be different from the news they are getting. there is a huge opportunity to do journalism different particularly in conflict and to be useful to people at this moment when we are not being as useful as we think. >> host: switching to questions from the audience. this one is from richard. did you change your mind on any principles or theories as this book unfolded? what surprised you about your

research? >> guest: many things. one thing i changed my mind about is bucket different conflicts and different categories and i thought polarization was a thing, don't think that's very helpful. everything i have seen human behavior in different kinds of conflict whether it is gang conflict, war or political conflict, behavior on a fundamental level is not that different. i'm trying to be left siloed in how i look at the research and storytelling. the other thing i would say is i have become more suspicious about my own righteousness when it flares up. it is something like you can't

be angry or have radical ideas, how we talk about these things, you can have really radical movement for social change without being in high conflict. some of the differences with good conflict and high conflict are telltale signs. there is still some curiosity, might be moments of surprise and range of emotion. everything was really clear, much clearer than it probably is and you generalize about millions of people you don't know and will never meet. that lack of humility, lack of complexity is quite dangerous not just for the country but

also the most chilling part of high conflict is every story i follow, everyone involved in high conflict eventually begins to mimic the behavior of their adversaries. you eventually do the things, consciously or not you went into the fight to stop lose the politician who goes into politics to makes it less toxic and more inclusive made it more toxic and less inclusive. there's a million examples like this. this is the warning about high conflict, you want to change the world this is important. make sure you cultivate good conflict. otherwise you will end up risking the thing you hold most dear. >> host: are there any national political leaders or even 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 well on the bigger national level? >> guest: i'm working on a project of 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 and who are the conflict interrupters and most interesting, who used to be a conflict entrepreneur and is not anymore? this is hard because our system incentivizes especially the national level conflict entrepreneurs like twitter does and so you set up every incentive for this and no disincentive at this point and that is all changeable and

should be fixed and changed but we are asking people to be something different than they have been rewarded for being for many years and it is a great question and i'm working on it but i have theories, and intuition. >> host: i have no shortage of examples i would cite of conflict entrepreneurs in modern society, the flipside of it would be an interesting project. the question from lauren, what is the role of technology in encouraging high conflict? how much is the tools that we are using to live in the digital age versus something that is actually new to our society?

>> guest: any attention economy is going to play too high conflict. whether it is news media or social media, anything that makes money off of seizing your attention, the cheapest, literally cheapest way to do that is through fear and indignation. that is sort of the race to the bottom we've seen in many industries. that is definitely accelerated it. that said, we focus a lot on social media which is important to focus on and reform but this started before social media and some of the most, some of the people who are most kind of capture to buy high conflict in

their rhetoric and the way estranged family members in their research are not on facebook and twitter. if you look back, where you see a lot of this starting from a technology point of view is talk radio and cable news. it is important to cast a broad net, the way technology has incentivized high conflict. that's true and it is not just social media. >> host: another question 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? i will personalize it by saying how do you parent differently

now that you understand high conflict? >> guest: it is tricky because i have a teenage son and he's living in the world, it is 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 be the person whose like let's look at the full picture, but i also found if i try to connect it to his own life or our family, that can be helpful, how you resolve conflict among your friends or in a soccer game or in our family and think about how we overlay that. it sounds too simplistic but quite complex to make that connection and the thing i do which i mentioned and i do this in all my interviews, this is the thing that has changed most

for me personally and professionally is i do this technique called looping which i described in the book and other forms of it out there but when someone is telling me something they are bringing any level of emotion to, low level of emotion but if somebody is upset, my kid is upset about something happening in the world or his life the first thing people want is to be heard. there's a ton of interesting research on this. that is what people want and they almost never get it. once people feel heard and you do this by showing them, proving beyond a doubt that you heard them not by just nodding and smiling but saying it sounds like what you are saying is it is fundamentally unjust that you can't go back to school in person even though your teacher is vaccinated, you first acknowledge that you heard them and then you have to ask if you got it right. did i get that right?

like it is genuine curiosity, you have to be genuine and when you do this it is amazing. it is amazing what it unlocks. even people who are very different from the have different political opinions than i do and life experiences than i do, once they feel heard which they don't mistake for agreement, they don't think i agree once they feel you are trying to get them they open up and the research shows this, they say less extreme things afterward, they acknowledge more ambivalence and complexity which all of us carry which get stifled in high conflict and they are more open to information they don't want to hear. often in parenting once you've done it the issue is over, you don't have to do anything else. you have to fix it and don't argue it or make your case, you just make sure they are heard and everyone can move on and it is in cobleskill that we should be teaching kids to answer the

question. >> host: thank you for joining us and putting together relevant and timely book. if you are listening or watching you can pick up amanda's book anywhere that you buy books. through our partners on politics and prose here in washington and use the code special 10, check out for an extra discount. i went to thank the aspen institute and the ambassador for sponsoring this series, amanda, thank you for putting such an interesting book together about the backdrop and background music of our modern times. >> guest: thanks for having me. i enjoyed the conversation.

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