Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
Page 66
“The biggest problem in communication,” as the saying goes, “is the illusion that it has taken place.” This illusion comes from two profoundly human mistakes: First, we think we have conveyed our intentions and desires clearly when we haven’t. And second, we don’t really know what our intentions and desires are. In many conflicts, we have only the flimsiest grasp of the understory, both our own understory and the one belonging to the other side.
✏️ This feels important. The whole idea that we think we’ve communicated something when we didn’t, or the other side didn’t communicate when they did.. This eternal misunderstanding and making assumptions sits at the heart of so much we go through. 📖 (Page 66)
Page 66
When we behave badly, we naturally take into account all the details that led us to do what we did, Al the circumstantial evidence… When we consider other people’s behavior, by contrast, we reflexively blame their I inherent moral failings.
✏️ Easiest example.. When you run a red light, likely it was due to a mess of real reasons, like kids or sleepy or lost, etc. But if you see another do it, you automatically assume they’re a reckless asshole. 📖 (Page 66)
Page 71
… “discover” a ball in a pile of things and begin tossing it around. At first, they’d throw the ball between all three people in the waiting room. Then, after one minute of jovial ball play, the undercover researchers would start excluding the subject of the experiment and just throw the hall between the two of them, without explanation. They’d continue playing this way for four minutes, until the official researcher returned to the room. When the ball tossing changed, the excluded student would initially laugh and try to make eye contact with the ball throwers, attempting to reingratiate herself. When that didn’t work, she would typically stop smiling, withdraw, and become quiet. She might suddenly search for something in her backpack. Though the ordeal lasted only four minutes, the atmosphere was intensely uncomfortable for everyone involved. The researchers found it difficult to continue throwing the ball. Other researchers even found it difficult to watch from behind a one-way mirror. The exclusion triggered an almost primal sense of distress in anyone who witnessed it.
✏️ Experiment, the virtual version is called cyberball, shows how much of a social species we are. Even when done online with avatars, we immediately feel this rejection as painful. Scans showed brain activity in the same areas as physical pain. Here we have social pain. 📖 (Page 71)
Page 72
Humans have certain fundamental emotional needs, including the need for a sense of belonging, for self-esteem, for control, and for a meaningful existence. These needs are nearly as important to our survival as food and water. Social rejection threatens these needs.
📖 (Page 72)
Page 72
In study after study, ostracized people typically respond the same way. First, they try to win back the affection of others. They hasten to conform and comply (or try to). If that doesn’t work, they become aggressive… Aggression usually guarantees more social rejection. But it does succeed in one way: it gives us a renewed sense of control over our environment, thus restoring one of our most fundamental needs, if only temporarily. Likewise, if we demonize people who have excluded us, we can help restore our damaged self-esteem: we see good and they are evil. Demonization can give us a sense of purpose, as well. We are fighting evil. What could be more meaningful?
✏️ A really good point about why we go with aggression and drawing lines of us vs them. It gives us our fundamental needs again. It’s ugly and temporary, but effective. 📖 (Page 72)
Page 75
He wasn’t seeing these conflicts the way he did at work: as a system to be investigated by listening to people’s deepest concerns and nudging them out of an adversarial dynamic into one of mutual problem-solving.
✏️ Succinctly capturing what the shift has to be and what we have to do with high conflict 📖 (Page 75)
Page 92
Each spring, everyone in each of the seventeen thousand Bahá’í locations gathers together to elect leaders. It’s very close to a pure democracy, operating in 233 countries and territories. Here’s the twist: everything about these elections is designed to reduce the odds of high conflict. There are no parties in Bahá’í elections. No binary categories are allowed. People are not allowed to campaign for a position or even discuss who might be the best person to serve. They can only discuss which qualities are most needed. After a prayer, every Bahá’í writes down the names of nine people who they think have the experience and character to lead the community. Once the secret ballots are counted and the nine “winners” are announced, there is no celebrating.
✏️ Politics without adversarial ism followup 📖 (Page 92)
Page 93
“Being elected is not a status symbol,” said James Samimi Farr, a Bahá’í spokesperson. “It’s a call to further humility.” This is the opposite of traditional elections, of course, which self-select for people who yearn for recognition.
✏️ Humility vs narcissism as the quality you want in a leader. 📖 (Page 93)
Page 95
the big lesson is that humans can be nudged to demonize - or to cooperate. The traditions and systems matter far more than we think. “If we took the same population of people and assigned them to one social world, we could make them really generous to one another,” sociologist Nicholas Christakis wrote in Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, “and if we put them in another sort of world, we could make them really mean or indifferent to one another.” This insight hints at how to fix social media and the Internet generally. Platforms like YouTube and Facebook were designed to drain our attention and divide us, but they could be redesigned to reward cooperation and decency
📖 (Page 95)
Page 97
First, give people more than two choices. It doesn’t fix everything, but it reduces the power of the binary. Complexity doesn’t collapse into us and them quite so easily. Ranked-choice voting is one way to do this. Voters choose not just their No. 1 choice but their No. 2 and No. 3 choices, in case their No. 1 does not get enough votes. That way, our loyalties get distributed. And more people feel heard, even if their first choice loses. It’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. Another way to reduce the binary is to shift to proportional representation, where seats in Congress get allocated in proportion to the votes won by each party. This way, smaller parties can still win seats, even if they don’t win a plurality of votes. People still have a voice, even in the minority.
✏️ How to reduce binary thinking in politics. More parties and more voices means more people being heard. We just want to be heard. Also, it’s just harder to keep up the illusion of us vs them and good vs evil when there are more parties. 📖 (Page 97)
Page 102
These are the accelerants to watch out for, in any conflict:
- Group identities
- Conflict entrepreneurs
- Humiliation
- Corruption These four fire starters speed conflict up and spread it around.
📖 (Page 102)
Page 110
when people watch a loved one receive a mild electric shock, the part of their own brain that assesses the meaning of pain gets activated. Their brain responds as if the shock were happening to them, in other words. For those neurons, there is no apparent difference between literal, first-person pain and collective, group pain. We viscerally feel each other’s pain. And each other’s pride and joy. Basketball fans act differently after they watch their team win. They feel better about themselves, compared to fans who have just watched their team lose. They even predict they will perform better on puzzles and games. This is, in this context, a charming quirk of the human condition. We live by proxy. We overestimate our own abili ties, riding high on a victory we had nothing to do with.
📖 (Page 110)
Page 118
Fire starter leaders seize the opportunities embedded in conflict and turn them to their advantage. Assad’s regime needed Syrians and other global leaders to feel even more terrified of his opposition than of him, and so the regime intentionally helped the more radical elements among his opponents. They released extremist prisoners and even funneled weapons to protesters. It sounds crazy. Why would a dictator like Assad help the people trying to overthrow him? Because he understood fear. He knew that fear hardens group identities. He needed to make the conflict about fighting terrorists, rather than about his own crimes against his own people.
✏️ Same with Netanyahu and helping hamas 📖 (Page 118)
Page 123
Humiliation poses an existential threat that jeopardizes the deepest part of ourselves, our sense that we matter, that we are worth something. It is “the enforced lowering of a person or group,” Lindner writes, “a process of subjugation that damages or strips away their pride, honor and dignity.” People need to matter. It’s a fundamental requirement for life, like oxygen. Our need to matter lies underneath all kinds of group conflict.
✏️ Feelings of humiliation drive acts of humiliation. Hurt people hurt people etc. 📖 (Page 123)
Page 127
And yet, a century of research has not been able to identify a universal physical pathway for emotion. There is no identifiable, consistent, and objective measure of anger, for example. Emotional experiences vary wildly from culture to culture-in how and when they are understood and expressed. Emotions, in other words, are socially informed. We help create them. In this way, crushing humiliation is not like a loss of oxygen. It is partly a product of our mind and our experiences. Emotions are real in the same way that national identities are real. But they are not objective facts.
✏️ Emotions are universal… But how we deal with them, how we view them and react to them, that’s shaped entirely by our culture. For some, to be angry is to be strong. For others, it wasn’t allowed and was seen to be childish. 📖 (Page 127)
Page 138
The pursuit of revenge can bond us together, in our own groups, entrepreneurs delivering a sense of exhilaration and mission. Conflict understand this, and so they talk about conflict like it is a religion unto itself, a way to make sense of the world and our place in it, a sacred flame that must never be extinguished. Revenge can stanch the pain of humiliation, but it exacts a punishing cost. It requires total devotion, the kind that eventually becomes a sort of prison
📖 (Page 138)
Page 140
The most vexing problem, particularly for democracies, seems to be a complicit state, as foreign policy scholar Rachel Kleinfeld found. In Pakistan, for example, the intelligence service has given money, and sometimes weaponry, to radical Islamist groups to use against various political opponents. The government does this while simultaneously pointing to the threat of radical Islamists to justify its own budget. The corruption metastasizes. Regular people learn that they cannot rely on the government, and so they seek justice in other ways. Violence becomes normalized. Societies become decivilized.
✏️ Corruption and complicit governments where people lose faith and trust 📖 (Page 140)
Page 166
Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the PLO, needed to disband Black September. How could he convince these trained assassins, who’d devoted their lives to this high conflict, to move on? After months of debate, Arafat’s deputies came up with an unusual solution, as described by counterterrorism expert Bruce Hoffman. They introduced the members of Black September to a group of about a hundred Palestinian women, whom they’d recruited from all over the Middle East. They encouraged the commandos to get to know the women. If any of the men and women decided to get married, they were told, they’d get 5,000. It was like a giant singles cruise, with very high stakes. The scheme was designed to create new identities for the commandos, ones that crowded out their old ideas of themselves. To the surprise of everyone involved, the matchmaking worked. All the members of Black September got married, one of Arafat’s generals later told Hoffman. Whenever these men were asked to travel to another country on nonviolent business on behalf of the Palestinian government, they declined. They did not want to risk being arrested or killed. Like Curtis, they had new roles, as fathers and husbands. Their conflict identity lost much of its grip in the process.
✏️ Swapping out a narrow identity for a broader one, finding a new purpose that crowded out the high conflict one. A form of Contact Theory. 📖 (Page 166)
Page 181
Contact theory seems to require a few conditions. First, everyone involved in an encounter should ideally have roughly equal status, if not in the world then at least in the room and subculture in which an encounter takes place. This was rarely the case for Catholics in Northern Ireland, who were marginalized in politics, housing, and the workforce, and it remains rare among Whites and people of color in many parts of the United States. Second, it seems to help if some kind of respected authority sup ports the get-together. Maybe it’s a mosque or a church. Maybe it’s the United Nations or another country’s leader. Whatever the case, some official show of support seems to legitimize the encounter and induce some minimal level of trust in the process. Third, it’s ideal if people don’t just talk but actually work together on some kind of common problem. This triggers our instincts for cooperation, rather than competition. It activates our desire to collaborate, rather than win. For Mark, he and the climate scientists shared the goal of saving the planet from global warming. This shared mission helped create a new, shared identity, which is much easier than trying to shed an old identity. Finally, everyone involved should want to be there, in pursuit of some shared goal, whatever that is. This is as true in a divorce mediation as it is in a racial dialogue encounter. Motivation matters.
✏️ Requirements for Contact Theory 📖 (Page 181)
Page 183
… people want to leave high conflict when they have reached a saturation point-or when they’ve developed other, competing identities. That’s when contact theory can work well. But even then, contact theory is grassroots by definition. It cannot, on its own, transform institutions. Real change requires putting sustained pressure on people and institutions that benefit from the current system. People with power don’t generally give it up just because they become less prejudiced. They need to feel pressure, the kind that comes from organized political, legal, economic, and social action. But here’s the thing: pressure isn’t enough, either. Lasting change requires shifts that happen up high and down low, in bank accounts and zoning laws, but also in people’s hearts and homes. Otherwise, people will find ways to get around new laws.
✏️ Contact Theory is not enough on its own.. Also need to pressure the systems and shift hearts. 📖 (Page 183)