The Bestselling Author of “High Conflict” Explains What it Takes for Someone to Break With Their Political Tribe
Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony was a dramatic example, but even small deviations from the party line are harder than they seem
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I’m going to keep this intro short, because the Q&A below is a longer post than normal:
Watching the January 6 hearings, my mind went to an absolutely fascinating book I read last year: High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped, and How We Get Out, by Amanda Ripley. I think Amanda is one of the best reporters at work. (*Bonus: Because her publisher thinks the book is timely and important, they are giving the audio and e-book versions away for free this month.*)
“High conflict” isn’t normal, healthy tension. It’s when disagreements devolve into “us versus them,” zero-sum combat (i.e. politics right now). It is possible to get out of high conflict, but it takes individuals who are willing to break with their identity group.
Amanda’s reporting on conflict spanned astronauts (stuck together in a small space!) to gang leaders. She’s also a trained conflict mediator. I invited her to Range Widely to talk about what enables some people to step outside of a high conflict. Below is our discussion:
David Epstein: If you watched any of Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony in the January 6 hearings, I would love to hear a bit about what was going through your head. You’ve written about how incredibly difficult it is for people to stray from their group. Before I ask you specifics about why it’s so hard, I’d just like to hear your impression — not about details in the testimony, but about the fact that it happened at all, and in such a dramatic fashion.
Amanda Ripley: It’s very painful — as in, physically excruciating — to break with your tribe the way she did. To do that as a woman, as a young person, as someone without a full-time job at the moment, is just stunning. I am very curious to know more about her and her support system, which I hope is robust…
One thing that struck me was how her voice slowed down here, when she talked about how she felt on Jan. 6. “As an American,” she said, “I was disgusted. It was unpatriotic. It was un-American.” When people use strong words like that, they are usually revealing a deep well of emotion.
Notice that she’s referencing traditionally conservative values: sanctity, patriotism, loyalty. I can only speculate, but I wonder if Jan. 6 was what’s known as a “saturation point” for her — a time when the costs of the conflict, to her core beliefs and values, became too great to bear. That’s usually when people leave high conflict, if they ever do.
DE: It’s interesting that British prime minister Boris Johnson just announced his resignation; he’d been pressured for a long time, but it was mass resignation by ministers and cabinet officials that finally did it. They seem to have reached their saturation point, but it seems like it took a group movement to provide the psychological safety for those resignations. But just to be clear, by “leave high conflict,” do you mean when — despite feeling like they have heretofore been firmly on one side of a “good-versus-evil” battle — someone decides to step outside of their team’s position?
AR: It does seem like there was safety in numbers, and that the sheer volume of resignations created a kind of tipping point. It’s funny how all the headlines yesterday read, “No sign of Boris Johnson ever leaving. Ever!” And now, a day later, all the headlines read “Boris Johnson Will Resign.” It’s a reminder how these dynamics can shift all of a sudden.
When I say that people tend to “leave high conflict” after reaching a saturation point, I mean that they step out of the dance. They don’t surrender their core beliefs or suddenly defect to the opposite side. Instead, they do something much more interesting: they interrupt the conflict’s perpetual motion machine. They pick the third door, so to speak, the less obvious way. Which can have ripple effects on the whole conflict system.
Sometimes they do this by an unexpected, symbolic gesture, like when Egyptian President Anwar Sadat went to Jerusalem in 1977, the first Arab leader to do so. He visited the Holocaust memorial and called for peace, paving the way for peace negotiations at Camp David a year later. Other times, people do it by publicly breaking with their group, the way Cassidy Hutchinson has done. Notice how all these people are still fighting for their core beliefs, but they are doing it much more effectively.
When people get bewitched by high conflict, they can literally lose their peripheral vision. They have a hard time seeing the full range of options open to them. Then along comes some kind of shock or opening that disrupts the conflict and makes a previously hidden door temporarily visible. Does that make sense?
DE: It does. And I want to ask about someone else who strayed from the party line, albeit in a far less dramatic fashion: Mike Pence. According to testimony in these hearings, on January 6 he refused to get in a Secret Service vehicle, the implication being that he was concerned he’d be whisked away and unable to certify the electoral votes. You might say, well, that’s just him doing his job. True, but his boss had asked him not to.
And then just a few months ago, he gave a speech in which he said:
“I heard this week, President Trump said I had the right to overturn the election. President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election.”
That seems like a pretty milquetoast statement. But you wrote, based on the reporting you did for High Conflict: “What Pence did is one of the hardest things a person can do, regardless of his motivations.” What makes you say that about a few bland sentences?
AR: Yes, it’s not something I would have said 10 years ago, before I got obsessed with human behavior in conflict. It sounds very small, doesn’t it? But there’s a lot of research showing that this is actually extremely rare and difficult, evolutionarily speaking. Publicly disagreeing with your group goes against every survival instinct in conflict. It is literally like walking through fire, and the experience registers in our brains the same way. That’s why high conflicts tend to go on and on, because…well, how many of us want to walk through fire?
DE: Wow. It registers in the brain like walking through fire. Yeah, that doesn’t sound like it would comport with our instinct for self-preservation.
AR: The people I’ve interviewed who have done this all describe it as a kind of torture. Whether they were activists, gang leaders, guerilla members, or politicians, they all felt alone, vulnerable, and filled with doubt and despair. Old friends suddenly stopped speaking to them. They were threatened with violence, in a lot of cases. And conflict entrepreneurs everywhere rejoiced in their suffering. (Hours after Pence’s speech, former Trump advisor and current conflict entrepreneur Steve Bannon called Pence a “stone-cold coward,” and Hutchinson has reportedly had to take security precautions.)
DE: I want to ask you another question about Pence, but can you briefly explain “conflict entrepreneur”?
AR: Absolutely! A conflict entrepreneur is a person (or platform) who exploits and inflames conflict for their own gain. Sometimes it’s for something obvious like power or profit, but often it’s for attention or a sense of belonging. We all know people like this, right? People who seem to delight in every twist and turn the conflict takes.
It’s really important to notice who the conflict entrepreneurs are in your life–or in your news feed. Everyone I’ve ever met who has escaped the thrall of high conflict has started by distancing themselves from the conflict entrepreneurs in their orbit, one way or another. Then there are times when you can’t distance yourself from them, and then you have to get more creative, but it’s still critical to recognize the behavior.
And, I should point out, we can all be conflict entrepreneurs! Especially now, when we are rewarded for doing so — in journalism, on social media, in politics. So I just wake up every day and try not to be a conflict entrepreneur. It’s really tempting sometimes.
DE: It’s clearly very lucrative for some people. It sort of reminds me of Darth Vader being tempted by the faster path to power. But back to Pence. You yourself sent out a tweet of praise for Pence after he said “I had no right to overturn the election,” and you suggested that others do the same, or leave positive comments on his Facebook page. Why did you suggest that, even for people who have spent years hating him?
AR: Well, one thing I know for sure is that humans need groups to survive. Everyone I’ve interviewed who has broken with their group in high conflict has had someone welcome them home — maybe a pastor or a family member, someone. If you don’t have that, you go back to your old conflict identity. That happens a lot.
So I think our best option is to welcome Pence — and any other defectors, left and right — into a new group. That group is the exhausted majority of Americans. The ones who can see that we are destroying ourselves from the inside out; who understand that we must find a way to co-exist, as we continue to disagree. And that is the group Pence spoke to, for a moment, in his speech. “Frankly,” he said, “there is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.” Notice he used the same word that Hutchinson used–”un-American.”
DE: Given how emotional all this is, did you get any feedback on your suggestion to “send Mike Pence a valentine,” as you playfully put it in your newsletter?
AR: You know, I was surprised how positive the response was! I don’t remember getting any pushback. A bunch of people told me they were inspired to send their own “attaboy” to Pence, even though they disagree with him on just about everything else. So that is kind of cool. I wish more people would do this the next time they see someone defy their own group in high conflict. I don’t have enough followers to make much of a difference but I suspect there are millions of Americans out there who would do this — if they understood the reasons why.
DE: You’ve reminded me of an incredible film I saw years ago, called Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. Honestly, I probably watched it because I thought it was about running. It’s actually about a tiny Inuit community in the remote Canadian Arctic. In a very small nutshell, there’s a ton of interpersonal conflict — which includes, at times, trying to kill one another — but the denouement is a ceremony in which the families get together and perform a ritual to banish the bad vibes they’ve been having, and forgive each other. As an elder puts it: “We must forgive those of our family who’ve done things no one should ever do.”
They still exile two people (even though they’re forgiven), but what stuck with me was the idea that they had to ritualize forgiving the unforgivable. They were so dependent on one another for survival, that the only choice other than forgiveness was the destruction of their community. I’m wondering if you think we, as a society, are essentially at the point of choosing between forgiveness and destruction. If so, how do we choose, ya know, not-destruction? Do we have, or do we need, some sort of forgiveness rituals?
AR: Wow! What a movie! I do think we need more rituals. Not just for forgiveness but for lots of things – including fighting! We have to get smarter about how we fight. That means noticing the tripwires that lead to malignant conflict — like humiliation, conflict entrepreneurs, and binary group identities. Once you see those things, you can’t un-see them, in my experience. It changes how you deal with people in any kind of conflict, on social media or at the supermarket.
DE: That’s fascinating. I’ve implemented a no fighting on Twitter policy because I realize it just turns up the temperature in the social media ecosystem. Are there any particular tripwires you notice, or that you like to point out to others that might change their behavior?
AR: Yeah, Twitter beefs don’t convince anyone, and they don’t really feel very good either, over time. But that doesn’t mean you can’t disagree. You just have to do it with care. My best advice is to never embarrass anyone on social media. It just makes them stronger and poisons the conflict further. So one way to reduce the odds of embarrassment is to remove the audience. The first thing I do if I want to engage with a critic on Twitter is to DM them. That way, it’s just us. Then I do the opposite of my intuition. I listen to them. I ask them questions and then try to distill what they tell me into the most elegant language I can find — and check if I got it right. This is called “looping,” and it’s easier to do it in person, but you can totally do it online. It disarms people right away. And you learn things you didn’t know.
But before we move on from your Inuit conflict movie, I just want to add that I really like this idea of gathering everyone together to banish the “bad vibes.” It reminds me of the way that Abraham Lincoln called for national days of thanksgiving and reflection. The first time he did this was in 1861, right after the Union had lost a big battle–ending any hopes for a short war. He did not normally deploy a lot of religious sentiment, but in this case, he called on everyone to “bow in humble submission to [God’s] chastisements; to confess and deplore their sins and transgressions in the full conviction that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”
Interestingly, Lincoln didn’t ask Americans to forgive their enemy; he asked them to beg forgiveness for their own sins.
Now, granted, the war went on for another four years, so that particular ritual was of questionable value. But it’s a little late, once you’re at war, right? You really want to be bringing people together sooner! Like now, for example.
I think it would be great if we had a national day of reflection this fall, a day to mourn all that we have lost — in the pandemic and in politics. We have suffered a lot, some more than others, and a lot of that pain has been self-induced. So maybe a national day of humility would be a good start.
DE: I love that idea. Maybe you and I can time day-of-reflection posts in the fall. I’d be up for discussing that if you are. …
AR: Absolutely!
DE: Going back to the pain (and rarity) of defying a group, you’ve talked to people — like activists and gang members — who have “defected” from the party line, so to speak. Can you share one such story from a domain other than politics?
AR: Sure! Let’s take Curtis Toler, one of my all-time favorite conflict experts. He was a fairly high-ranking gang leader in Chicago for many years. He’d joined a gang at age 9, in order to belong and to get protection. He’d grown up idolizing a local high school basketball star whom he’d see playing at his local park. When that young man was shot and killed, out of nowhere, for no reason, Curtis got convinced that a rival gang was to blame. So he spent years pursuing a vendetta against the Gangster Disciples. He did this because he wanted someone to blame for what he’d lost. He wanted life to make sense.
Anyway, long story short, Curtis eventually hit a Saturation Point — when he realized that the conflict he’d been part of for decades was not actually defensible. He was fighting the wrong enemy. So, for a variety of reasons, he broke with his tribe.
It took a long time, and it was really lonely. But Curtis managed to distance himself from the fire starters in his life — moving across town, giving up his role in the gang and in narcotics, and building up a new identity as a conflict interrupter.
And then one day, the craziest thing happened. By chance, he met the man who had killed his childhood hero — the basketball star. It was a surreal experience, but the two men talked, and Curtis realized how many things he’d gotten wrong. That’s something you hear a lot from people who have been trapped by high conflict — they have, at some point, this dizzying realization that things are not what they seem. It’s like an earthquake, to realize all the mistakes you’ve made, enchanted by high conflict. A lot of people can’t handle it, and they return to the conflict. But not Curtis.
DE: Wow, what an amazing story. And that phrase, “enchanted by high conflict,” will definitely stick with me. So given the enormous disincentives for straying from the pack, what enables some very small portion of people to do it and survive?
AR: Yeah, that is the question! It’s pretty incredible that anyone does it, right? Usually, it’s because they have some other, latent identity that gets lit up. We all carry multiple identities around in our heads. And it’s usually easier to revive an old identity than to create a new one. In the research, family roles seem to be the most powerful way to lure people out of high conflict. That’s what helped Curtis escape high conflict — his identity as a father.
But here’s the thing: you gotta have somewhere to go. Curtis had a few people, including a local priest, who reached out to him when he was trying to leave high conflict. And for the priest in this scenario, that can feel dangerous. It can be dangerous. But there’s no way around it: communities have to welcome former combatants home. Otherwise, they will go where they feel like they belong, which is usually back to the conflict.
DE: It sounds almost like breaking an addiction, and you need support and a new environment to change.
AR: Yes! It is like breaking an addiction. In fact, a bunch of people wrote to me after the book came out to tell me how much these stories reminded them of their own experiences in recovery. Really fascinating. I’d love to write more about that parallel one day.
DE: While I’ve got you, can you just share a general tip or bit of research about escaping high conflict in our own lives? For example, I thought that research you wrote about in which couples did a little exercise that halted their happiness decline was fascinating.
AR: I’m so glad you remember that one! I love that study. It’s an example of how important it is to create some space, in your own head, in the midst of conflict.
OK, so here’s what happened: social psychologist Eli Finkel and his colleagues had a group of 60 married couples spend seven minutes writing about their most recent fight from a different perspective. Specifically, “from the perspective of a neutral third party who wants the best for all involved.”
Then they were asked to think about that person’s perspective during their next fight. Every four months, for a year, they repeated this writing exercise. So it was a total of 21 minutes of writing.
It turns out that the couples who did this marriage hack, describing their conflicts from an imaginary third party’s point of view, reported feeling less upset about their disputes than couples who hadn’t done it. And they maintained a higher level of overall satisfaction in their marriage. These couples still had conflict! Which is as it should be. We need conflict to get better, to defend ourselves. But we need healthy conflict, and that requires rituals–like this little hack.
Maybe we should do this as a country, on our national day of humility. In my fantasy, that day would definitely involve some journaling of some kind, for sure. Also, barbecue. Lots of barbecue.
DE: Everything’s better with barbecue. Thanks so much for your time, Amanda.
I highly, highly recommend Amanda's book, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped, and How We Get Out. Again, the audio and e-book versions are free in July. You can also check out her free newsletter, or this really interesting column she just wrote on why she stopped reading the news.
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Until next time…
David
Photo Credit (Pence): SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty Images
Photo Credit (Hutchinson): Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc. / Getty Images