Conflicted Read online

  When we meet someone who is deluded, or even just someone with whom we strongly disagree, we want to cure them of the belief. By attempting to do so, we only make their condition worse. Better to create conditions in which the patient heals herself. In fact, perhaps it’s best not to think of yourselves as patient and physician at all, but as two equally benighted and confused people relying on each other to reach better answers. That way, they’re more likely to see things your way and you’re more likely to learn something. Often there is a kernel of truth to a false belief, and you are more likely to spot it once you put aside your desire to be right. Give up on trying to control what the other person is thinking and you free your own mind too.

  7. Give Face

  Disagreements become toxic when they become status battles. The skilful disagreer makes every effort to make their adversary feel good about themselves.

  On 6 May 1993, 15,000 white men marched through the town of Potchefstroom, not far from Johannesburg, South Africa. They were heavily armed and wore brown shirts with swastikas. The men were members of competing factions within the South African far right, who shared a belief in the genetic superiority of white Afrikaners. The Afrikaners, many of whom were ex-military and had fought in the war against Angola, were uniting forces against what they saw as a hostile black takeover of their country.

  Just over three years previously, the South African government had released Nelson Mandela from prison after twenty-seven years, following intense domestic and international pressure. They had also legalised his party, the African National Congress (ANC). Apartheid, the system that enabled the country’s white minority to rule South Africa and exclude its black majority, was on its way out. Mandela, now in a power-sharing arrangement with the white government, was planning democratic elections, in which everyone, black and white, could vote. That would inevitably mean the ANC taking power, with Mandela as president. The white ‘Afrikaner nation’ would be lost forever – unless it was won through force of arms.

  The Potchefstroom march culminated in a fiery speech by Eugene Terreblanche, leader of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, and an admirer of Adolf Hitler. At the climax of the ceremony, Terreblanche singled out a figure from the crowd. Constand Viljoen, a silver-haired man with a martial bearing, was rapturously applauded as he stepped on to the podium.

  General Viljoen was a decorated military veteran, and the commander of the South African Defence Force during the most violent years of confrontation with black activists. He had been a ruthless enforcer of white supremacy, organising assassinations of black leaders and imposing brutal punishments on black communities which threatened disruption. Now, he was called upon to vanquish Mandela, whom white nationalists believed should have been hanged a long time ago. Viljoen was apartheid’s last best hope. To thunderous cheers, he promised the crowd he would lead them to the promised land of a separatist white state: ‘A bloody conflict which will require sacrifices is inevitable, but we will gladly sacrifice because our cause is just.’

  Mandela was understandably alarmed by what unfolded at Potchefstroom. He had received word that Viljoen was organising a force of as many as 100,000 men, many of them trained fighters. Mandela could have had Viljoen arrested for treason or inciting violence. But he calculated that this would make a martyr out of Viljoen, just as his own arrest had done for him, decades before. Mandela was also uncertain whether the South African military would back him in a fight against a man many of them revered.

  More than this, Mandela’s objective wasn’t merely to win power. His overriding goal was to see South Africa become a full democracy, in which all races, and all political factions, felt included. So he decided on a different course, less obvious and in some ways harder. He invited Viljoen to tea.

  In September 1993, Mandela met Viljoen, after contacting him via secret channels. Viljoen showed up to Mandela’s home, in a Johannesburg suburb, accompanied by three other former generals. He knocked on the door and waited for a servant to open it. To his surprise, it was Mandela who greeted them. With a wide smile, the ANC leader shook hands with his visitors, declaring himself delighted to meet them. Ushering them in, Mandela suggested that he and Viljoen talk privately first, before the formal meeting began.

  The two men went into Mandela’s living room. Mandela asked Viljoen if he took tea. Viljoen said yes. Mandela poured him a cup. Mandela asked Viljoen if he took milk. Viljoen said yes. Mandela served him milk. Mandela asked if Viljoen took sugar, and Viljoen said yes, and Mandela added some sugar.

  Thirteen years later, Viljoen recounted every detail of this encounter to the British journalist John Carlin. The elderly Viljoen was stiff and cautious. In telling the story of the tea, he allowed himself a rare expression of amazement. ‘All I had to do was stir it!’

  * * *

  Suppose you are meeting someone for the first time – an employer who is interviewing you for a job, or your new tutor at university. As you start talking, what impression of yourself do you want to convey? The sociologist Erving Goffman called this desired impression your face: the public image a person wants to establish in a social interaction.

  We put effort into establishing the appropriate face for each encounter. The face you want to show a potential boss will be different to the face you want to show someone on a date. Goffman called this effort facework. With people we trust and know well, we don’t worry so much about face. With those we don’t know – especially if those people have some power over us – we put in the facework. When we put in the facework and we still don’t achieve the face we want, it feels bad. If you want to be seen as authoritative and someone treats you with minimal respect, you feel embarrassed and even humiliated.

  Skilful disagreers don’t just think about their own face; they’re highly attuned to the other’s face. One of the most powerful social skills is the ability to give face: to confirm the public image that the other person wishes to project. You don’t need to be selfless to think this is important. In any conversation, when the other person feels their desired face is being accepted and confirmed, they’re going to be a lot easier to deal with, and more likely to listen to what you have to say.

  Nelson Mandela was a genius of facework, particularly when it came to the art of giving face. His elaborate show of courtesy towards Viljoen was strategic. He knew that difficult conversations lay ahead between him and the former general, and a less sophisticated operator would have got straight into them. Mandela knew he had some work to do first.

  * * *

  At the 1972 Olympic Games in West Germany, a group of Palestinian terrorists seized eleven Israeli athletes. The terrorists made their demands, the authorities refused them. The Munich police resorted to firepower. Twenty-two people were killed, including all the hostages. In the wake of what became known as the Munich Massacre, law-enforcement agencies around the world realised they had an urgent problem. Officers communicating with hostage-takers in order to avoid or minimise violence had no protocol to follow. Police departments realised that they needed to learn negotiation skills. Hostage negotiators, who may be specialists or trained officers with other responsibilities, are now deployed in a wide range of situations. The best ones are not just expert in tactics, but in the subtle art of giving face.

  In ‘instrumental’ crises, the interaction tends to be relatively rational in character. The hostage-taker sets out clear demands, and a bargaining process ensues. In ‘expressive’ crises, the hostage-takers want to say something – to people at home, to the world. They are usually people who have acted impulsively: a father who has kidnapped his daughter after losing custody, a man who has tied up his girlfriend and is threatening to kill her. Most often, negotiators are dealing with individuals who have taken themselves hostage: people who have climbed to the top of a tall building and are threatening to jump. The hostage-taker in an ‘expressive’ scenario is usually on an emotional edge – angry, desperate, deeply insecure, and liable to act in unpredictable ways.

  N
egotiators are taught to soothe and reassure the hostage-taker before getting to the negotiation. William Donohue, a professor of communication at the University of Michigan, has spent decades studying conflict-ridden conversations – some successful, some failed – involving terrorists, Somalian pirates, and people on the brink of suicide. He talked to me about a key component of face: how powerful a person feels. Hostage-takers in expressive situations want their importance to be recognised in some way – to have their status acknowledged.

  Donohue and his collaborator Paul Taylor, of Lancaster University in the UK, coined the term ‘one-down’ to describe the party, in any kind of negotiation, who feels most insecure about their relative status. One-down parties are more likely to act aggressively and competitively, at the expense of finding common ground or coming up with solutions. In 1974, Spain and the United States opened negotiations over the status of certain US military bases on Spanish soil. The political scientist Daniel Druckman looked at when American and Spanish negotiators adopted ‘hard tactics’ or ‘soft tactics’. He found that the Spanish team used threats and accusations three times as often as the American team. The Spanish, one-down, were aggressively asserting their autonomy.

  When a hostage-taker feels dominated, he is more likely to resort to violence. ‘That’s when words fail,’ Donohue told me. ‘In effect, the hostage-taker says, “You haven’t acknowledged respect for me, so I have to gain it by controlling you physically.”’ People will go to great, even self-destructive lengths to avoid the perception that they are being walked over. One-down parties often play dirty, attacking their adversary from unexpected, hard-to-defend angles. Instead of looking for solutions that might work for everyone, they treat every negotiation as a zero-sum game in which someone must win and the other must lose. Instead of engaging with the content, they attack the person as a way of asserting their status.

  By contrast, there are those who enter a negotiation expecting to succeed because they are, or perceive themselves to be, in the stronger position. They may well therefore adopt a more relaxed and expansive approach, focusing on the substance of the disagreement and looking for win–win solutions. They may also take more risks with their face, making moves that might otherwise be seen as weak, offering a more friendly and conciliatory dialogue. Since they don’t fear losing face, they can reach out a hand.

  This is why giving face is so important. It is in a negotiator’s interest for their counterpart to feel as secure as possible. Skilled negotiators are always trying to create the adversary they want. They know that when they’re one-up, the smart thing to do is to narrow the gap. Mandela’s tea service was a way of charming Viljoen but it wasn’t just that; it was a way of lowering himself in order to make Viljoen feel he was not one-down.

  Donohue analysed the transcripts of twenty mediated disputes between husbands and wives in California, over custody and visitation rights. Donohue found that husbands used much more aggressive tactics, while wives focused on the facts. Husbands were more likely to bring up issues relating to the relationship, to complain about the lack of consideration for their rights, to question the trustworthiness of their spouse. These tactics tended to raise the emotional temperature of the conversation, harden the positions of both parties and turn the dispute into a pure power struggle, making progress towards an agreement difficult or impossible. Why did the husbands behave like this? Because they felt one-down: the courts tend to award custody rights to wives.

  If this is a reversal of the stereotypical marital dispute, in which the woman is more emotionally driven than the man, the difference is instructive. As Alan Sillars found, there is some truth to the stereotype: women tend to be more tuned in to the relationship level of marital conversations, while men focus more on content. But as you’ll recall, this is a function of motivation – when men want to tune in to emotions, they can. The question of who is acting emotionally, then, isn’t so much to do with gender as it is to which partner is on the wrong side of a power relationship.

  In any conversation where there is an unequal power balance, the more powerful party is more likely to be focused on the top line – on the content or matter at hand – while the one-down party focuses on the relationship. Here are a few examples:

  An interrogator says, ‘Tell us what you know, or you’re in big trouble.’ The suspect thinks, ‘You’re trying to control me.’

  A parent says, ‘Why did you come home so late?’ The teenage daughter thinks, ‘You’re treating me like a little kid.’

  A doctor says, ‘We can’t find anything wrong with you.’ The patient thinks, ‘You don’t care about me.’

  A customer service representative says, ‘The reason we didn’t get the package to you is . . .’ The customer thinks, ‘Can’t you just say sorry like you mean it?’

  A politician says, ‘The economy is growing more strongly than ever.’ A voter thinks, ‘Stop talking to me like I’m an idiot.’ (Indeed, one way that politicians misjudge their electorates is when they under-estimate the extent to which the voters feel one-down from them. Politicians can become so absorbed in the content of their debates that they pay insufficient attention to the relationships underlying them.)

  When a debate becomes volatile and dysfunctional it’s often because someone in the conversation feels they are not getting the face they deserve. This helps to explain the pervasiveness of bad temper on social media, which can sometimes feel like a status competition in which the currency is attention. On Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, anyone can get likes, retweets or new followers – in theory. But although there are exceptions, it is actually very hard for people who are not already celebrities to build a following. Gulled by the promise of high status, users then get angry when status is denied. In 2016, researchers from the University of Southern California set out to quantify this phenomenon. Focusing on Twitter, they identified a random sample of about 6,000 users and monitored their activity over the course of a month. They found that the top 20 per cent of Twitter users ‘own’ 96 per cent of all followers, 93 per cent of retweets, and 93 per cent of mentions. They discovered a ‘rich get richer and poor get poorer’ effect. Users who already have a lot of followers are more likely to gain new ones; users who are ‘poor’ in attention are more likely to lose them.

  Social media appears to give everyone an equal chance of being heard. In reality, it is geared to reward a tiny minority with massive amounts of attention, while the majority has very little. The system is rigged.

  So far, we’ve been talking about one aspect of facework: status. However, there is another, closely related yet distinct component of a person’s face, which is not so much about how high or low they feel, as who they feel they are.

  * * *

  Having served Constand Viljoen a carefully prepared cup of tea, Mandela switched gears. He pointed out to Viljoen that if their respective sides went to battle, there was no way Viljoen’s forces could defeat the government’s forces, but they could do great damage. Many lives would be lost on both sides with no clear winner. It was in the interests of both sides to come to an agreement. Viljoen did not dissent.

  Mandela then surprised Viljoen for a second time. He started speaking about his respect for the Afrikaner people – the very people who had branded him a terrorist and a traitor, imprisoned him for decades, destroyed his family life, and oppressed his fellow blacks. The Afrikaners, said Mandela, had done him and his people a huge amount of harm, but he still believed in their humanity. Mandela said that ‘if the child of an Afrikaner’s [black] farm labourer got sick, the Afrikaner farmer would take him in his [truck] to the hospital, phone to check up on him, and take his parents to see him.’

  We can’t know for sure that Mandela believed what he said about Afrikaners, but certainly Viljoen didn’t doubt his sincerity. Mandela’s directness about the damage that Afrikaners had done to him made Viljoen more convinced that he was speaking honestly. Something else convinced him too – Mandela spoke to him, then and throughout
their subsequent meetings not in English, but in Afrikaans.

  When people are used to being on the wrong end of a power relationship, they often become very good readers of people. They gauge the relationship level of conversations, in order to convert their psychological insight into influence. If Mandela was an exceptionally skilful reader of other people, it was at least partly because he had spent so long figuring out how to get what he wanted from a position of powerlessness. In prison, he turned the white guards into his allies and in some cases close friends, in order to eke out some freedoms in captivity. One of the ways he went about this was by making them see that he respected them as Afrikaners.

  One of the first tasks Mandela set himself in prison was to learn the language of his captors. Some of his fellow political prisoners were upset with Mandela for this. To them, it felt like giving in to the enemy, but to Mandela, who was thinking far into the future, it was a way to co-opt his oppressors. He studied Afrikaner history, too, including the exploits of their war heroes. He read Afrikaans novels and poetry. None of this was a trick. Mandela genuinely believed that Afrikaners were South African; that he and they belonged to the same land. He also believed that one day they could be persuaded to agree with him.

  At least from his early days in captivity, Mandela had decided that black South Africans could not fight their way to freedom: they would only achieve democracy by talking. That meant talking to South Africa’s white rulers, and in order to have a successful conversation with them, Mandela realised he would have to teach them not be afraid of him, and not to hate him. He would have to create the adversary he wanted. That meant reassuring them that their identity was not under threat.