Amanda Ripley: Navigating Conflict
“Usually in high conflict, the conflict becomes the whole point. So you make a lot of mistakes and you can miss opportunities that would actually be in the interest you are fighting for. The reason you got into the fight to begin with, whereas good conflict is the kind of conflict where again, you can be angry, you can be yelling, you can have radical visions for the future. You can and must, you know, organize and protest and hold people accountable. But you do it much more skillfully. You make fewer mistakes because you're not essentially being controlled by the conflict. You're not in the trance of high conflict. And it's, you know, it's not easy to stay in good conflict. Everybody is gonna visit high conflict, even if it's for, you know, a few minutes, but you don't wanna live there because you, you and your cause will suffer.” So says Amanda Ripley, investigative journalist, podcast host, New York Times bestselling author and the queen of conflict—good conflict, that is. Amanda’s most recent book—High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out—draws on her years of experience trying to make sense of conflict on a personal and political level—particularly in this heightened time of OUTRAGE.
Not all conflict is bad, Amanda tells us. In bad conflict, what she calls high conflict, the conflict becomes the whole point, an us vs. them mentality that takes on a life of its own and leads participants down a path of perpetual anger without resolution. Good conflict, on the other hand, goes somewhere interesting as genuine curiosity and deep listening leads to better mutual understanding. So how do we make the shift?
In our discussion, Amanda arms us with a mind-opening new way to think about conflict that will transform how we move through the world. We talk about what it means to get curious about what lies beneath the surface of a conflict; how our own unresolved internal conflicts often inform our external conflicts; as well as the importance of engaging in deep listening in order to make others feel truly heard. In a world engineered for misunderstanding, Amanda gives us faith that individuals, and even entire communities, can end the doom loop of outrage and blame if they can learn to really hear each other.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
What would it be like if you got what you wanted?…
Conflict entrepreneurs…
High conflict and the death of curiosity…
Deep listening and making others feel heard…
MORE FROM AMANDA RIPLEY:
High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out
The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way
The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - And Why
Listen to Amanda’s Podcast, How To! on Apple Podcasts and Spotify
Amanda's Website
Follow Amanda on Twitter
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE:
Thanks for joining me and thank you for your book. I thought it was a fascinating way of thinking about conflict, which is obviously permanent and transient and getting, would you say worse you because it's moving so much faster.
AMANDA:
Yes. It's definitely gotten worse. It's gotten worse since I wrote the book. The book only came out, you know, nine months ago.
ELISE
Yeah. When, so you were writing this effectively. I mean, you were writing it before, January 6th, like you were writing it in the midst of the Trump years, but I suppose things have gotten worse.
AMANDA:
Yeah, I finished it right after January 6th, but in some ways things have gotten worse, I wouldn't say in every way, but the nature of a pandemic is to make things worse. As far as connection and relationship and a sense of psychological certainty and a sense of all of that gets really freed right in a pandemic. So that, that has gotten worse.
ELISE
I appreciate, you know, I'm working on a book and one of the themes, it has many themes that one of the themes is anger. And I write about how in conflict, and how so many women, I think white middle class women in particular were conditioned to avoid conflict at all costs, as a detriment to how we engage with the world. We're not well versed. We're not equipped. We tend to balk. So I like that. You very clearly, at the beginning of the book define the difference between what you call high conflict and healthy conflict. And that healthy conflict can be essential when it leads us somewhere.
AMANDA:
Yeah. This I'm glad you brought that up right away. Because this is like one of the, one of the hardest parts about talking about this book is that, you know, if you ask anyone who knows me, well, I am not afraid of conflict.
ELISE:
Right. Well, congratulations.
AMANDA:
My husband would be like, maybe you like conflict too much. You know what I mean? So I mean, part of the reason I became a journalist is because I'm interested, I'm drawn to conflict. I'm interested in it. I wanna go towards the fire, you know, not away. And that can be good and bad. Some of that is probably unhealthy. But it's not like I'm arguing for harmony and peace. I mean, I do think we need healthy conflict and I like to call it good conflict in homage to what the late Congressman John Lewis used to call good trouble because there's very clearly a distinction and you can see it in the data and you can feel it in your, in your own body. Right? There's a distinction between good conflict and high conflict. Good conflict goes somewhere interesting. You don't know how it ends. Questions get asked.
There's plenty of anger. Like anger is not a problem in, in all the research on, on emotion and conflict. Anger can be really good because it suggests you want the other person to be better. It's contempt where you get into trouble. It's disgust where you find that it's really hard to recover. So, so these, these distinctions are, are actually pretty bright lines, but yeah, sometimesI need to remember to make it really clear that, you know, I'm not saying, I'm not saying that you can't yell, you can yell. Yelling is fine.
ELISE:
But you know, so often we lack granularity in our language when we're talking about emotions and it's even thinking of the word conflict, because we think obviously of it as war, and that's typically what you're covering. We think of it as workplace. We think of it within the home. Obviously the stakes are different, the relationships are different, and it's hard to define that using only one word.
AMANDA:
Right? Like it should be like snow for the Eskimos, right? Like you have many words to describe conflict and not just one. I think that's where we get a little bit stuck. It's thinking like in politics we often assume you either have to be a centrist bipartisan moderate, or a bomb thrower. And that is just, those are two different dimensions, right? Like those are not the only choices. So yeah, I think we need to get a lot smarter about how we talk about conflict.
ELISE:
And I know you divided of conflict sort of into these buckets, which I'd love for you to quickly take us through just as we set the stage. And then I also want to talk about the way that you wove it between the interpersonal to the political, which I thought was quite deftly done. Since it does show up in our lives, both the people we are fighting with online, and then in our own relationships. So do you mind starting with sort of the overarching conflict types, or the ways that they're established?
AMANDA:
So high conflict is the kind of conflict we're seeing a lot of today. It's what happens when conflict escalates to a point where it really takes on a life of its own. It becomes like a perpetual motion machine, right? And in this state we behave differently. We make a lot of mistakes. We literally lose our peripheral vision, literally and figuratively. And the worst part is in high conflict, whether it's a high conflict divorce or high conflict politics, it's always the same. People end up damaging the thing they care most about. The thing they went into the fight to protect. Often it's kids, right? Kids who suffer the most to different degrees, right? But usually in high conflict, the conflict becomes the whole point. So you make a lot of mistakes, and you can miss opportunities that would actually be in the interest you are fighting for.
The reason you got into the fight to begin with. Whereas good conflict is the kind of conflict where again, you can be angry, you can be yelling, you can have radical visions for the future. You can and must, you know, organize, and protest, and hold people accountable. But you do it much more skillfully. You make fewer mistakes because you're not essentially being controlled by the conflict. You're not in the trance of high conflict. And it's, you know, it's not easy to stay in good con conflict. Everybody is gonna visit high conflict, even if it's for, you know, a few minutes, but you don't wanna live there because you and your cause will suffer.
ELISE
And so I loved Gary in particular who you trace throughout the book, both in his ability to mediate and sort of establishing this idea of mediation in lieu of divorce. And then also what happens to him when he gets involved in local politics, which was both hilarious and sad, right? Like you're talking about a voluntary board in a tiny community that goes completely sideways. But I thought throughout, he asks, you know, as he’s sort of guiding you through his ideology, which very much struck me. Like, I'm sure you read the book Nonviolent Communication. But how wise it is and these questions that he asks, like what would it be like if you got what you wanted here and what do you want your opponent to understand about you and vice versa? Cause I think so often with conflict and what you're alluding to, we forget like theoretically two people who are getting divorced want in theory, right like a fair and respectful exit that puts the children's needs front and center. But then that gets completely sideswept by emotion. And there were so many great examples. Can you talk a little bit more about that and practice and what he would see?
AMANDA:
So Gary is a great example because he is one of the world's foremost experts in conflict and he's helped thousands of people through really, really ugly conflict, right? Everything from nasty divorces to labor walkouts, you know, when the San Francisco symphony orchestra canceled 43 of its concerts and had this really protracted strike, he and his colleagues came in and helped them really understand what was this really about? Because in high conflict you tend to have a lot of the wrong fights with the wrong people. And that means you don't have the fight you really need to have. So trying to figure out what is most important here? What's underneath this conflict because every conflict has the thing it seems to be about whether it's masks or vaccines or you know, how much we're getting paid in the symphony. And then the thing it's really about, which is often about a fear of not belonging, right?
He’s really good at that and really gifted. He trained me in conflict mediation. I have worked with him. I have learned from him. And then, so, you know, it made a certain kind of sense when a few years his neighbors asked him to run for local office in his tiny town in Northern California. And they thought, you know, who better to fix politics than Gary? Right? Gary Friedman knows everything there is to know about conflict. He's very comfortable in conflict. He knows how to keep it on the rails. He knows how to make it constructive. And so he ran for office and he won in a landslide and as he puts it, it took him about an eighth of a second before he got pulled into high conflict. From an outsider's point of view, really small petty things.
So it was dispiriting to watch him and listen to him, just spinning on these feuds he was having with his neighbors. And he really lost as he puts it, he lost two years of his life and peace of mind to this conflict and he's not proud of it. But the other reason to tell Gary's story is because he managed to realize what had happened, right? Which is step one, that he had lost his way, that he had gotten trapped in high conflict. And it is a trap it's very hard to resist even for Gary, even for people who know better. And then he was able to painstakingly shift from high conflict to good conflict. So he didn't surrender his beliefs. He didn't give up, he didn't resign. You know, he thought about all those things, but that's not what he did.
He continued fight for what he most believed in, but he was able to do it much more effectively. Like in the two years after that, when he was in good conflict, way more got done in his town. So that was not an easy process to shift, but I saw it happen, you know, in front of me. So it gives me a lot of hope that it is possible. Now the reality is politics in the United States, just like social media, and a lot of journalism, is really designed to incite high conflict right now. So you're going against the cultural grain and we need to fix those things and make it incite good conflict, which you can also do pretty easily with humans. But in the meantime that individual or group shift is possible. And it really does start internally, which is, which is hard for people to hear. Like I think we want the problem, the other side to start behaving better. We want the system to get fixed. And all of that is true. And also you're gonna be much more effective in that external fight if you work internally.
ELISE:
Yeah. I love that metaphor that Gary has about the La Brea Tar Pits and how, as an example of what it is to get stuck. And the reason that those tar pits are full of the bones of prehistoric animals, who sort of piled in on top of each other. It's a really, really amazing metaphor for how and this has happened I'm sure to everyone listening, it certainly happened to me where I'm like, what, what am I even defending? Like, you know, you talked about that fear of belonging being maybe that under one of the core underlying things, you know, it's really about needs right. And needs not being addressed, but so often our needs aren't communicated. And so much of this, as you said, this inner work requires that, like what what's happening inside of my body right now, what am I wanting out of this? And what am I fighting about that I absolutely, I think it was crockpots or tea kettles or the stuff that becomes representative in divorces, for example, where you're like, what the hell? Like, why is this is irrelevant to me. Why am, you know, an equivalent would be, hopefully my husband and I stayed married forever, but if I were like, I need your Air Jordans, or I want your record collection, you know.
AMANDA:
I love that. Yeah. I'm sure that's happened by the way. I'm 100% sure. There's probably a family law attorney listening who has a story just like that. Every divorce lawyer has a story of a possession that a couple goes to war over. And it's really not about the possession in the book. I talk about Legos. This one couple just went to war over who got the Legos, right? And once you, you, if you can, if you can create enough of a pause in the conflict to ask different questions, and this reminds me of your point about the questions Gary learned to ask, and I've now worked with, you know, hundreds of journalists to try to create a list of better questions to ask people in conflict. And this can be with your mother-in-law, it can be anyone, but when you ask different questions, then you can to figure out what are the Legos really about in this case, both parents were really terrified of losing the affection of their child.
For different reasons. So the Legos, even though they weren't even articulating it at first, the Legos represented the child's affection quite naturally. So you have to kind of get to that and then you can let go of other things. But not until you get to the under story to unearth it. And so one question that you mentioned that I love that actually comes from from family therapy is just ask people that you disagree with profoundly, just try asking them. And you have to think is you have to actually get really curious about the answer. That’s the inner work. And then you say, what would it be like if you woke up tomorrow and this problem was solved, like you won, like walk me through that day. And first of, how would you know? Like what would be the indication that you won and then walk me through that day. And it's a really nice way of getting people out of the trenches because they rarely reflect on this, you know? And it's a beautiful thing to watch. Like you can literally see people's expression change as they start imagining what that would be like and why. And they start talking about deeper things, you know, about why the world would be a better place in their view, And you kind of get out of that talk track, which is like groundhogs day over and over, right.
ELISE:
It's interesting too, to think, just back up for a minute too, to something you said about journalism media, someone I've never been a journalist in, in the sense that you have, and I've certainly never covered conflict. But this idea, I think we all tend towards, I'm curious to hear what exactly you think it is and the way that we report and write stories. Is it catering to the negativity bias and this click baity world? Is it that understanding people or situations is binary or inherently adversarial as like the hook that we understand, like there has to be a good guy and a bad guy. There has to be two sides. I’m curious about how you think that, that, because I think you write too about how actually complexity is what changes us and complexity is something that we are very attuned to, but that it's kind of been abandoned.
AMANDA:
Right. In high conflict, complexity becomes really scarce. There's a real sense of false simplicity.
ELISE:
Yeah. So, and you know, it's interesting, I don't wanna pound on the media because I mean, again, here we go in this situation where you're like, I don't wanna exacerbate these existing conflicts and make this, I obviously adore the media and journalists, but it is interesting. I was talking to Bryan Stevenson actually years ago. And for those who don't know, Bryan, he's an incredible lawyer human rights advocate who has Equal Justice Initiative. So he focuses on getting black men off of death road. Many of whom have been, some of whom have been falsely accused or who are innocent, but many who are just comp completely over sentence. And we were talking about the media because there was a, a critical 60 Minutes segment on him that was very helpful in, in one of the cases he was working on. And so I asked him, I was like, do you use the media as allies here? And he said, no, I avoid the media because I thought this was interesting and sad. He said that the need to always tell both sides of the story in systems and in situations of gross inequity serves no one, like sometimes there aren't two sides of the story. And I thought that was really accurate and sad, but it's how journalists are trained.
AMANDA:
Right. Right. I think there's a bunch of things going on that and some of which you've you've named. The way I got obsessed with conflict, it to begin with is this like about six years ago, I started realizing that journalism was broken. You know, it just wasn't functioning the way it was supposed to function that the places I was writing for, weren't believed to be telling the truth by half the country. So it didn't really matter how many facts you unearth and how pretty you made them look, because they weren't persuasive. And so it felt like to just keep doing the same thing was either going to have no impact or make things worse in some cases. Make the conflict worse. So, what I've learned is that, you know, like a lot of, of our traditions and institutions, journalism needs to evolve for a world in which we are saturated with information, we are constantly alerted to threats that are far outside of our immediate realm.
Our attention and our fear is exploited for profit, right. That's just the way many of these business models work. And so in that context, I think journalism needs to do different things and especially in high conflict. So just practicing traditional, both sides, journalism is malpractice in high conflict, right. It’s just not helpful. It doesn't illuminate it doesn't help lead to understanding. Now that doesn't mean that just become not here again, we get a false dichotomy, right. That doesn't mean that everybody just needs to get more strident and partisan because that also doesn't illuminate and lead to understanding. So I think that's sometimes the mistake that's made in a sort of reaction. So in times of high conflict, I think the number one priority of journalism is to a prevent violence or at least not incite violence.
And number two to incite, curiosity, to revive curiosity. Because it dies in high conflict. I don't know about you, but I'll sometimes I'll scroll through the headlines on my phone. And I feel like not only do I feel deeply depressed and hopeless, but I feel like I don't need to read the stories because I know what they're gonna say, or I think I know what they're gonna say. Because high conflict is very predictable. It's very rigid. There's not a lot of surprise. There's not a lot of curiosity. And in fact, the world is really complicated. Now not everything is complicated. There are villains, right? There are things that are simple, absolutely true. And yet every human is complicated and there is no understanding that comes from this kind of predictable high conflict reporting. There's just more fear and anxiety.
And what most people do is start avoiding the news. So the U.S. has one of the highest news avoidance rates in the world. And it's gone up and up and up people who are actively avoiding the news because it makes them feel so hopeless sense. So in any other industry, if you were killing yourself to create something that people were actively avoiding, that doctors were prescribing, that you stopped looking at, right, for your health and safety, you would start to reflect, you know, what, what can we be doing different here? And I think, think a lot of journalists are doing that to be fair, especially at the local level, but it's a slow process. And, and some of it is negativity bias like you mentioned. Some of it's confirmation bias, some of it's click-bait like the financial incentives.
A lot of it is just old traditions die hard. You know, I did story about Scripps, which is a broadcast company that has a bunch of local TV news stations around the country. And they are trying to really do things differently. And one of the things they run up against a lot are the sort of legacy conventions and assumptions in the newsroom, right? Change is hard. Culture change is hard. You know, telling news, you don't have to cover every vacant house fire if it's irrelevant, you know. It's just scaring people and making them feel disconnected from each other. That is one thing to tell them and they can all agree, but they're so used to doing it. And it's an easy way to turn around content really quickly that, that sometimes that's the barrier. So that's a sort of long-winded way to say that. I think there's a bunch of different factors. A lot like there is in politics, right? I mean, you know, it's not just one thing, but it is, it is the kind of thing that is clearly past its prime. Like we need to find a new way to help people navigate the world without collapsing into high conflict.
ELISE:
No, absolutely. I mean, and part of it is adding complexity, having more than two parts I mean, it's wild actually, aren't we, the only democracy with two parties?
AMANDA:
Right, right. Like the research shows that countries that have more than two parties and also have proportional representation so that if your first choice doesn't win, your second or third choice gets your vote. You know, that kind of thing. Those countries tend to have less political polarization and divisiveness and distrust. So, you know, that's a kind of thing that's really pretty basic. Now, it's not basic to implement that change, but we do know a bunch of places in the U.S. have started doing rank choice voting like New York city for mayor, for example, Maine, Alaska, other places have started doing this. Lee Rutman wrote a book about this, that I, that I recommend about getting outside of the doom loop of, of American politics. So there are, are, there are policies that could dramatically improve this kind of all or nothing, zero sum thinking that we've got going in politics, which is really, it's like a trance, you know, you get into this trance of thinking, you can't let the other side win on anything. Even in your own head, you can't give them an inch or they'll take a mile. And it ends up sabotaging your own interests and your own community.
ELISE:
Yeah. And you end up theoretically, ideologically at odds with people, with whom you actually share so many core values. I mean, I always use this example. I'm from Montana originally and I go home all the time, him and there's a dear friend of mine now who is not really, he's like a half a generation older. And we both grew up in the same culture. Our overlap is quite intense in terms of when we break it down and talk issue by issues. Some things he has no, you know, he thinks the BLM as the Bureau of Land Management. But in terms of we have completely different exists, he's in rural Montana and I'm in Los Angeles, but politically we would look completely at odds. However, we actually started to see politics that reflected issues and people needed to pay attention, and it behooved them to pay attention, and to really understand and rank their needs and desires, the whole system would dramatically change. We would probably vote for many of the same people. But yeah, we're just not there. And would you classify, you know, you talk about conflict entrepreneurs, which was such an interesting framing for me, people who really get off, who benefit greatly from conflic. Is that the media? Like who, who qualifies in your mind?
AMANDA:
So conflict entrepreneurs are people or platforms or companies that inflame conflict for their own ends. So the first important thing to do is to identify who in your orbit or in your newsfeed, might fit this description. So it's somebody who seems to really delight in every twist and turn the conflict takes, somebody who uses kind of grandiose language to describe the conflict. So it's about destroying the other side. It's about crushing and killing. So it's described like a war when it's not a war. And they often will frame things as a humiliation, right. Even things that are not because, that’s one of the triggers of high conflict is humiliation. And another one is the presence of conflict entrepreneurs and they interact. Right. So just to take it back to the small scale analogy, every high conflict divorce, as any attorney will tell you, there's always people on the outside who are not the couple, right, but maybe a sister or a mother-in-law or a father-in-law or a friend or a business partner, or a girlfriend, those people are sort of inflaming the conflict.
So every time the couple takes a step towards an agreement that would work for their kids and, and kind of let them move forward. These people are kind of whispering in their ear. And so it's important to, first of all, recognize when that's happening. And yeah, certainly there are many, many pundits in the media who are conflict entrepreneurs, right? And many politicians and many regular people on Twitter who are conflict entrepreneurs. You know, we know that 97% of political tweets are done by 10% of users. So this is a very small number of people. And the problem is in high conflict, conflict entrepreneurs get louder and louder and everybody else goes silent and flees the scene because they don't wanna be part of this. So two thirds of Americans now say they have political views they are afraid to share.
ELISE:
No, it's true.
AMANDA:
That's a big problem, right? Those views don't go away. They go underground, you know, and it's like, you know, cede the arena to conflict entrepreneur. So this is, this is something that, you know, we could talk a lot about, but to answer your question. Absolutely. I mean, I think as a journalist, my every day, I'm trying not to be a conflict entrepreneur, you know?
ELISE:
As you said, we all know those people in our lives are, you know, you talk about sort what was happening in between gangs and in those sorts of situations, it's like people are keeping these running lists right. Of every grievance, every moment of disrespect, whether it is that sister-in-law during a divorce or it is like just revisiting and revisiting so that there's no, no wound healing, no ability to be like, oh, I kind of forgot about that. That's not a big deal.
AMANDA:
The ember must always be kept burning. I think if I'm being honest, I can catch myself doing that in my own head sometimes. Right. Where I'll be annoyed, I'll be bothered by something someone did. And then I'll find myself tending the flame in my own, like keeping it going, and then I'll notice it. And I'll be like, what am I doing? You know, like, what is that about? And so on a small level, I think that's what it feels like to be a conflict entrepreneur. And one of the interesting things is, so you mentioned gang violence. So in the book I follow, Curtis Toller, who was a pretty high ranking gang leader in Chicago for many years. And he was, by his own admission, a conflict entrepreneur for many years. Right. And a lot of violence came out of that.
And there were a lot of gang rivalries that he was a part of. He eventually got to a place where he was able to shift out of that high conflict, into good conflict and realize that he'd been having a lot of the wrong fights with the wrong people. And now he does incredible work, preventing gang violence in Chicago for Chicago Cred. But when you ask him, as I have like, look, thinking back on the parts of your life, when you were acting as a conflict entrepreneur, what was that about? Like, what was motivating you? And he said that for him, it was all the internal conflict that he'd never dealt with, and all the violence he had witnessed, all the sense of terror that he had never been able to deal with. It was only once he was able to get trauma counseling and start to surface some of that, that the external conflict could stop.
And this is what he tells young men and women in Chicago today. Look, until you deal with this internal conflict, the external conflict's just gonna to go on and on. So I say that because it can be helpful to try to have compassion for conflict entrepreneurs, even as you hold them accountable and distance yourself from them. Because often they have undealt with pathology, depression, narcissism, things in their, their own past that, that they have not dealt with. So that's driving a lot of the behavior and that doesn't mean they'll never change by the way. As we can see with Curtis,
ELISE:
No, it's very human. I mean, just thinking about what you had said too, and, and I've certainly done that. There's still things that I steep myself in and get myself reworked up about, how I've been wronged, et cetera, in a way that I'm like, what does this do for me? And why do I not even, why do I care? I understand why I care, but also it's like. Do you have a sense from, from doing your mediation training? What that is? I'm sure it's highly personal, but there's an, probably something to it?
AMANDA:
I think the closest truest explanation I have read about this and there's a lot out there. There's a book called Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright that talks about the ways in which Buddhism and cognitive psychology overlap. And one of the basic arguments he makes is that evolutionary science has shown us that we are, our brains are really designed to, by natural selection to try to do one thing, which is move our genes forward, right. Our genetics forward. And there's a lot of ways in which that doesn't work anymore in the modern world. And one of them is always being very vigilant for threats. Threats to our status, or to mattering, or to our kids, right. So these are really primal, basic ancient needs that make a lot of sense evolutionarily, right?
You need to be alert to threats to your group, but in the modern world, sometimes we can mistake small things for, for deep, profound threats, right. Or we can react in a way that is not helpful to us. And so that's how you get kind of, you know, as, as Buddhist would say, sort of enslaved to your emotions, right. To your feelings. And it doesn't mean that you're not gonna respond to that threat, or that slight, or that attack. You're gonna respond, but you're gonna keep your wits about you as opposed to being in the trance of the conflict. Right. Probably the biggest lesson I've learned is that any intuitive thing you do in high conflict will make things worse. So you just can not trust your first instinct. And so you have to have ways to kind of step out of that and take a look at it and then take your second instinct.
ELISE:
Well, I'm glad you went there because I was gonna. I mean, you talk a lot in the book about deep listening and what Gary calls looping, which is which I wanna talk about. And then you also talk about exactly that—these moments of slowing down the conversation, so people feel heard, but also so that you have time to respond and really think about what you're doing. And, you know, you go on, I think in that section to talk about the speed of social media and how it leaves us unable to process, or diffuse, or manage our emotions. And you say in that sense, it's like an automatic weapon. If you never have to stop to reload, there's no way your loved ones can tackle you and bring you to your senses. And so you get, you see this happening, these people just rapid firing back at each other for the rest of the world to absorb. I mean, it's so unhealthy.
AMANDA:
It's kind of heartbreaking, because I do think when we do that, when people post on social media, they think they're doing one thing. And it’s perceived very differently. So there was a really nice study on face of Facebook where they found that when people would make a political post on Facebook, they, the person who posted it felt like they were doing a public service. By shining a light on this truth and letting all of their followers know the truth. And in fact, their followers did not see it that way, did not feel like it was a public service. They felt like it was an opinion and not one they necessarily wanted from that particular person at that particular time. So there's this total breakdown in communication that happens a lot in like normal communication, but in asynchronous social media communication happens like times a thousand.
So yeah, it's really kind of tragic because I, I really, you know, there's this researcher I've been following, I follow a lot of researchers on Twitter and that is a good way, right, to know what they're doing and get a sense of what they're learning from their work. And a lot of research on conflict and polarization, which is so important. And one of them has gotten more and more captured by the political conflict. And so I can see it happening and all of his posts now are about retweeting, what terrible things some Republican has done and, and like doom and gloom and prophecies of the apocalypse. And it makes me so sad because I don't think that is how he can best serve his country right now and his interest. But it's like, it all gets lost in the conflict. And so the reason I started following him was learn, you know, and to get smarter about conflict and what I'm watching is his descent into the vortex of conflict. And again, it's understandable, but it's a tragedy right. In its own small way.
ELISE:
Well, it happens to all of us. So can you tell us about looping or really, really intense empathic listening.
AMANDA:
So this is funny because, you know, I'd been interviewing people for 20 years as a reporter and I thought I was pretty good at it. I thought, you know, I was like always nodding at the right times and furrowing my brow and laughing when appropriate. And I thought I was charming. What I learned pretty quickly, you know, I've gotten a lot of mediation training, including from Gary who we talked about. And what I learned pretty quickly is that actually, I wasn't very good at it. Nodding and furrowing your brow, and chuckling at the right moments is a performance of listening, but it's not proving that you've heard the person, and people can tell the difference. So there's been a lot of research on this and it is wild. I mean, basically first of all, people almost never feel heard, which is at least half of our problem. Because in conflict, that's, that's about, you know, 75% of what people need is to be heard and they almost never get it. And so then they say more and more extreme things. And in the research, if people feel heard, then right after that, they will reveal more ambivalence, and uncertainty, and nuance, and all these good things that make conflict much more useful and interesting.
But if they don't feel heard, they'll just say more and more extreme things. Right. So the implications for journalism are pretty intense. Right. That like, yeah. So, so, okay. So what does it mean to feel heard? Well, it's actually not that hard, but it is a totally different way of interacting. So with Gary's looping process, there's basically three steps. You're listening to the other person. And then you take what they've said and distill it into the most elegant language you can muster and play it back to them. So you're not parroting word for word what they said, right, like a robot. You're you're trying to take it one step further, almost like the two of you are analyzing a puzzle. And you say, so it sounds like you feel like the mayor's mask mandate is yet another infringement on your rights and your ability to make a profit as a small business, is that right?
And this is the thing you have to check if you got it right. And two things happen after you do this first, you realize how often didn't get it quite right. Partly because you make assumptions. We all do. And secondly, because people don't articulate their deepest beliefs perfectly the first time around like it's an iterative process. And then people will, the second thing that happens is like the people's entire body language changes because they can tell that you're trying to understand them, which is what they're most wanting. So even though they realize you disagree once they feel like you're trying to get them, everything changes and they will continue to try to explain themselves. They will even open up to information they don't wanna hear. So it doesn't fix everything, but it's like the prerequisite for conflict, it's like the skeleton key to conflict. And so I, I strongly recommend that people, if they get a chance to take any training for active listening, they do it.
ELISE:
Yeah. No, it's so interesting thinking about that too, in the context of journalism, because so often, I mean you're, you're, you're taking exact quotes and putting them on the page and this iterative, this distillation process of helping people to actually articulate what they really mean is a massive service. It's a massive service on both sides, and yet so much of journalism, it’s like oh we can't clarify that quote to actually reflect what you really mean, because this is what you said in this moment. In a way that's actually could stand to be evolved because people need, I mean, it’s obviously there are moments when you wanna report exactly what was heard, but there need to be difference.
AMANDA:
Like who you're dealing with, you know, if I'm dealing with the president, okay. That's one set of rules. But if I'm dealing with someone who's never been interviewed by the media before, that's a different situation, you know? But there is something that feels vaguely subversive about it as, as a reporter, I always feel like I'm doing something a little naughty because right. That's not how I'm supposed to be. I'm supposed to try to catch people saying, you know, outrageous things that will make a great quote. And I just find that that's not that interesting right now. Like it's much more interesting to get underneath the conflict and get beyond their points from whatever news outlet they've absorbed and get to what they really care about. And so to do that, particularly because the news media is so distrusted, you have to prove you're really, you're giving people the, you know, the dignity of listening to them. And to your point mean it actually does feel like a service in a good way because so often, you know, interviewing people is really extractive.
Like you'll, you'll spend all this time with them, not you luckily, but like I will spend a lot of time with people and only use like a tiny piece of what they said or nothing that they said just it, you know, I couldn't make it fit. And that's a terrible thing, you know? And so I feel like when I'm interviewing people, the least I could do is try to understand them. And then no matter what, that's something. You know, it's not a lot, but it's something that most people don't get. So I now do it in every interview, you know, even if it's not emotional or there's no conflict. I do it with my kid a lot. I do it with my friends, with my husband, anyone who brings me any emotion of any kind, I find that's a really good way to practice it, because you're not gonna be able to use it in real conflict until you've practiced it like a thousand times in small stakes situations.
ELISE:
No, but being heard, I think is as you said, one of the most powerful human experiences and you know, in everyone's relationship, I'm sure everyone who is listening is like, oh yeah. I mean, even last night I was venting to my husband and I was like, you're not listening. Are you? And he was like, no, I'm not. I can't focus on that right now. He was talk about it later. I know I appreciate his honesty, but when someone professes that they are, and you know that they're not, it is like that head against wall where you're like, let me get louder, let me get more persistent, because I need someone to hold this trash basket for my pain. But I think I sort of think that's why, too, podcasts have become so such an important way for people to get information because you get to hear the tone, the inflection, like you get to feel the person, and then you get to make up your own mind. And obviously there's longer answers and more clarity. I know a lot of celebrities who really only want to do podcasts because they can't be edited and taken out of context. And it is interesting how we have sort of we're we're engineered for that, like gotcha, or wanting to misunderstand people rather than actually feeling like they have completely and perfectly articulated themselves, and now we can interpret what they say.
AMANDA:
Right. Like, like everyone's like a Demi-God walking around just issuing statements. Somewhere along the line, I don't know. Maybe it was always like this, but it feels like somewhere along the line, you know, reporters decided that every story was Watergate. I mean, there are stories in which you are, you, it is a gotcha situation. There is a villain and there is a conspiracy and, but it's like 1% of the time in real life, like most malfeasance is a function of incompetence, and miscommunication, and turfism, and ego, and all these that are actually really powerful, but they're, they're not just like straight up, you know, corruption and like conspiracy theories. So treating every story like it's Watergate is going to slowly erode trust and meaning from journalism.
ELISE:
It certainly has, and it makes it really hard. I thought this was a fascinating, stat that you quoted, how it's sort of difficult. It is when we become entrenched sort of in the, this in group out group or two different sides and how we won't. This is fascinating. If you don't mind, if I read this to you. You wrote, “it's very hard to get outside of our own heads and speak the other side's moral language. It is counterintuitive. It requires discipline, humility, education and empathy. In their research, Willer and Feinberg found that about 20% of liberals would not reframe their arguments to persuade conservatives, even if it would work better. This is a symptom of high conflict. When any concession, no matter how small feels too threatening to contemplate, even when it would be in our own interest.” That's wild. I mean, that's just, that's not wanting to hear, right. That's a refusal to have your mind changed?
AMANDA:
Right. No, that's wanting to be in the conflict. I just got off the phone with a politician who is really struggling to just get things done. And she has strong opinions. She's very progressive, but she's like, you know, every time she gets close, there are people in her party who they don't, they just don't want the other side to be able to take, get any points for anything. So that's, you know, that's in service to the conflict. That's just, that's letting yourself be enchanted by high conflict. And so, you know, they end up losing on things that would help kids and veterans in their district because they don't want the other side to win.
ELISE:
Yeah. Which is absurd, you know, absurd and just said it perfectly. We are living in a world that's in service to the conflict. It has just taken over anything that would be good for any of us in a way that is so sad. I really hope we can walk our way back to this point of like I recognize I'm not gonna get my agenda, my whole agenda. Hopefully I'll get part of my agenda. And like, this is how politics is supposed to work, and needs are supposed to be heard. What are you doing next? What's what's happening in Amanda Ripley's brain? Like, are you working on another book?
AMANDA:
So I am still obsessed with conflict because it hasn't been fixed, as we've discussed. But I have like a huge amount of confidence in the exhausted majority of Americans who want something else. They want something else from their politicians, from their journalists, from their technology. And there's a huge demand there for something different. So I think that keeps me going. I started hosting my own podcast, Following Your Footsteps. That is a podcast where it's not the journalist who decides what we're gonna talk about. It's the listeners. So they bring us problems and we match them up with an expert who knows a lot about that, and the three of us workshop the problem together. And I love it. It's like just totally refreshing, and just very different from anything I've done before. And that's called How To and that's on Slate.
So that's been really fun. And then I actually started a small company with a fellow journalist called Good Conflict. And we do two things. We sort of have a test kitchen to try out different kinds of journalism, like different ways of covering conflict, that are more useful and interesting. And then we also train and support companies and newsrooms who are trying to create a culture of good conflict, because the goal is not no conflict. Like the goal is the kind of conflict that may so stronger, and I've now seen enough places create that culture that I'm a hundred percent convinced it can be done, and I'm a pretty skeptical person. So that's been really fun to kind of try to be of service in a time when, you know, a lot of people are just, just kind of drowning in dysfunctional conflict.
ELISE:
Yeah. No, certainly. Well thank you for your book. I thought it was really well done. And thank you for your ongoing work, and I am an optimist like you, and I'm also in that exhausted majority. And here's to more complexity. I love the complexity. Life is in the complexity. It's what keeps things interesting.
AMANDA:
Absolutely. Absolutely. It's what me curious. Right? Like curiosity is the reason to wake up each day.
ELISE:
I learned so much from Amanda and also from her book, High Conflict, which I can’t recommend enough. Specifically her conversations with Gary, the mediator, which is probably the most applicable to all our daily lives. One, I’ve been really trying to practice this idea of Looping, which means to listen to people in a way they can actually see, where you’re repeating back to them what you hear to ensure that you accurately understand what they’re trying to say. And I also love the questions he asks: 1. What would it be like if you got what you wanted here? 2. What do you want your opponent to understand about you, and what do you want to understand about them? I think if we could really answer those questions before we engaged with conflict, we’d have more productive conflict and less high-conflict, Tar Pit conflict. The other concept I think that’s really important to pull forward is this idea of conflict entrepreneurs. Are there people in your life who can’t or won’t rest until you are in conflict? They are likely not conscious of this, but it’s worth it for all of us to be aware if we have a best friend, sister, sister-in-law, who feels like they are always trying to stoke our discontent. Just something to be aware of so we can theoretically guard against it, or be conscious about the underlying instinct.