Conflicted Read online

  For marriage, read society as a whole. Children are less likely to obey parental authority silently; organisations rely less on command-and-control and more on collaboration; journalists no longer expect readers to take their word for it; football managers have discovered that screaming at their players in the dressing room is not necessarily the most effective route to success. Everyone expects their opinion to be heard and, increasingly, it can be. In this raucous, irreverent, gloriously diverse world, previously implicit rules about what can and cannot be said are looser and more fluid, sometimes even disappearing. With less context to guide our decisions, the number of things on which ‘we all agree’ is shrinking fast.

  The low-context shift has been a long time in the making but its speed is being accelerated, at a dizzying rate, by communication technologies. Humans have a highly evolved ability to discern a person’s intent from their eyes, posture and movement, the pitch and inflexion of their speech. Online, that context is taken away. Smartphone interfaces and microblogging platforms are low-context by design, restricting the user to a few words or images at a time. We get only a crude read on someone’s intent from text, even when the signal is boosted with emojis. Think about what defines low-context culture, at least in its extreme form: endless chatter, frequent argument; everyone telling you what they think, all the time. Remind you of anything? As Ian Macduff, an expert in conflict resolution, puts it, ‘The world of the internet looks predominantly like a low-context world.’ Meanwhile, we rely on conflict-resolution tactics evolved for the world of 200,000 years ago.

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  If humans were purely rational entities, we would listen politely to an opposing view before offering a considered response. In reality, disagreement floods our brain with chemical signals that make it hard to focus on the issue at hand. The signals tell us, this is an attack on me. ‘I disagree with you’ becomes ‘I don’t like you.’ Instead of opening our minds to the other’s point of view, we focus on defending ourselves.

  This aversion to disagreement is steeped in evolutionary history. Neuroscientists Jonas Kaplan, Sarah Gimbel and Sam Harris used brain imaging to observe what happens when people are presented with evidence that challenges their strongly held political beliefs. They found that it triggers the same areas of the brain that activate in response to physical threat. Even in relatively mild disagreements, our interlocutor becomes a dangerous antagonist out to harm us. That’s why our bodies react as they do: the chest tightens, the pulse rate quickens.

  Animals respond to threat with two basic tactics, first identified by the Harvard biologist Walter Bradford Cannon in 1915: fight or flight. Humans are no different. A disagreement can tempt us to become aggressive and lash out, or it can induce us to back off and swallow our opinions out of a desire to avoid conflict. These atavistic responses still influence our behaviour in today’s low-context environments: we either get into hostile and mostly pointless arguments or do everything we can to avoid arguing at all. In the twenty-first century, both responses are dysfunctional.

  You don’t have to look far to see the fight response to disagreement: just open your social media feeds or read the comments section on your favourite website. This is partly for the reason we’ve identified – the internet gives everyone the chance to disagree with anyone – but also because social media is custom-designed to turn disagreements into public shouting matches. Social media is reputed to create ‘echo chambers’, in which people only encounter views they already agree with, but evidence points the other way. Social media users have more diverse news diets than non-users – one study shows that they get their news from twice as many places, and while they may still prefer to visit outlets that affirm their worldview, when people use more sources they tend to get wider exposure to different viewpoints, whether they like it or not. Instead of creating bubbles, the internet is bursting them, generating hostility, fear and anger.

  Moralising language – this is utterly disgusting; he’s evil – is a prominent feature of online discourse. Molly Crockett, a neuroscientist at Yale, has pointed out that in our offline lives we rarely encounter behaviours we perceive as immoral – a study conducted in the USA and Canada suggested that witnessing immoral acts accounts for less than 5 per cent of our daily experiences – but on the internet, we come across them all the time. The news can sometimes read like a parade of villains and atrocities. The data suggests that people are more likely to learn online about acts they consider morally outrageous than through traditional media. This is partly because content that outrages is more likely to be shared. A team of scientists led by William Brady, a computational social psychologist at New York University, analysed over half a million tweets made about controversial political issues. They found that using moral and emotional words in a tweet increased its diffusion through the network, via retweets, by 20 per cent for each additional word. Users who post angry messages get the status boost of likes and retweets, and the platforms on which those messages are posted gain the attention and engagement that they sell to advertisers. Online platforms therefore have an incentive to push forward the most extreme and triggering versions of every argument. Nuance, reflection and mutual understanding are not just casualties of the crossfire, but necessary victims.

  Social norms developed over centuries to protect relationships from the spread of anger, such as the convention not to discuss contentious subjects with strangers, don’t apply online: we blithely post, tweet and forward radioactive messages to people we don’t know. When we get angry at strangers, we are less likely to make any effort to see their point of view, or to treat them fairly; psychologists have found that people they prime to feel angry are then more likely to be prejudiced against individuals who are different to them, even though those individuals have nothing to do with the source of their anger.

  Of course, social media is not real life and there’s little evidence that people are replicating these angry disagreements in person. However, this is not the undiluted good news it seems. The hollow outrage we see online may actually be evidence of the absence of real, reflective disagreements: fight as a smokescreen for flight. In William Brady’s study of the spread of moral outrage on Twitter, the diffusion was happening within groups of liberals and conservatives, not between them. People were bonding with each other through shared anger at the out-group, yet nobody was engaging in argument. In a sense, the outrage was only superficially about disagreement. The whole point of engaging in it was to agree with your own side.

  In America, Republican and Democrat voters are increasingly divided into different neighbourhoods, churches and shops. Rather than getting into more arguments, voters are doing everything they can to avoid them, having been turned off politics by the divisive rhetoric they see in the media. A 2020 study from Columbia University found that politics was the most avoided conversation topic in the USA. Political scientists Samara Klar and Yanna Krupnikov have found that the presence in a neighbourhood of election placards from either party lowers its attractiveness to all buyers. In an online survey, just over 20 per cent of respondents said they would be unhappy about the arrival of a new colleague at work with the same political views as theirs, if that person talked about politics in the office. That figure rose to 40 per cent after those same respondents read an article about political polarisation, priming concerns about uncomfortable interactions.

  Even in low-context cultures, people are inclined to duck those conversations that have potential for conflict and its associated stress. The truth is that it feels better to be agreed with than disagreed with, and to agree than disagree, particularly with someone we don’t want to alienate. But avoidance – flight – can lead to alienation too.

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  Posterous, a Tumblr-like microblogging platform, was founded by Garry Tan in 2008. It took off like a rocket, becoming one of most popular sites on the internet. Tan and his partner raised millions of dollars and attained celebrity status among their peers in Silicon Valley. But in 2010,
traffic to the site flat-lined, and the founders had no idea why. ‘We didn’t know why we were growing, and we didn’t know why we stopped,’ Tan told me. He and his partner became locked in disagreement over what to do.

  A study from Harvard Business School found that 65 per cent of start-ups fail because of ‘co-founder conflict’. To succeed, the leaders of new businesses often have to make a difficult transition from being a group of friends working on a cool idea to being managers of a complex enterprise with multiple stakeholders. People who made choices by instinct and on their own terms acquire new, often onerous responsibilities, with barely any preparation. Staff hired because they were friends or family have their limitations exposed under pressure, and the original gang can have its solidarity tested to breaking point.

  Tan, who is scrupulously polite, finds confrontation hard. (‘My dad was strong-willed and inconsiderate. I evolved to be the opposite.’) The tensions with his friend drove him to the edge of a mental and physical collapse. He couldn’t sleep, he could barely eat, and he had the resting pulse of someone taking a brisk run. For the sake of his health, he resigned from the company he had given everything to create. (Posterous was acquired by Twitter, becoming defunct soon after.)

  When Posterous went into freefall, Tan and his partner urgently needed to collaborate on solutions. Instead, they avoided each other. The problem, as he came to see it, was that they never had any fights during the years of success: ‘I skipped the hard work that it takes to get that relationship and do our best work: embracing conflict and resolving it . . . We rarely spoke directly and honestly with one another.’ On the surface, the relationship had seemed strong; underneath, it was brittle.

  The modern workplace puts a great emphasis on getting along with colleagues and creating psychological safety. In the worst version of this, everyone feels compelled to nod along, suppress doubts and swallow awkward questions. Different parts of an organisation should be in tension with one another and staff should discuss those tensions openly, rather than silently pursuing their own priorities. A culture that tacitly prohibits disagreement makes the organisation more vulnerable to petty office politics, errors of judgement and abuses of power. People around a table should feel not just able but compelled to speak up when they think something, or someone, is wrong.

  The costs and benefits of disagreement are not symmetrical. The benefits of avoiding disagreement, or any kind of conflict, are immediate – you can leave the room, literally or psychologically, and instantly feel more relaxed. The benefits of having disagreements are not always apparent in the moment, compared to the discomfort associated with them; they tend to be longer term, cumulative and, ultimately, bigger.

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  Psychologists who study personality have identified a handful of consistent traits to measure, like openness (how much a person likes new experiences) and conscientiousness (how efficient and organised they are). Another term they use describes how sympathetic and compassionate a person is, in short, how nice they are. What have the psychologists named this trait? Agreeableness. It’s not just scientists. In everyday language, we use the word ‘disagreeable’ to mean something or someone we don’t like. We have an ingrained sense that disagreeing is a somehow unwelcome or even shameful behaviour.

  Overcoming our difficulty with disagreement cannot entail avoiding it. Instead, we need to change radically the way we think and feel about it. Conflict isn’t something that humans fall into now and again by accident. It’s a crucial component of life – literally so. Cells and organisms survive by exposing themselves to low doses of toxins. That enables them to learn about the ever-changing environment in which they live, so that when a potentially fatal dose of the same toxin comes along, they’re better prepared to cope with it. Human relationships are similar – living things that need conflict in order to survive and flourish.

  Psychologists who study conflict in families used to focus on its destructive potential; a high level of parent–child discord is one hallmark of adolescent unhappiness. But increasing attention is now paid to conflict’s constructive role. Over the course of a typical day, adolescents report three or four conflicts with parents and one or two with friends. In a study published in 1989, a team of social psychologists led by Abraham Tesser of the University of Georgia asked families with children aged between eleven and fourteen to keep a record of their disagreements, over anything from what to watch on TV to whether it was time to do homework. The researchers found that the kids who had a relatively high number of disagreements with their parents were happier, more socially adapted, and more successful at school.

  This applied only to those who had calm disagreements, however; children who had a lot of angry disagreements at home did not do so well. Similarly, a 2007 study, involving teenagers in Miami, found that children with more conflict at home were more likely to do well at school, but only if their underlying family relationships were warm and supportive. This points to something I’ll be exploring throughout this book: the extent to which healthy disagreements depend on healthy relationships. It’s vital to note, though, that the reverse is also true. Frequent and open disagreement makes a relationship better able to withstand a serious challenge – such as your business imploding.

  As an investor, Garry Tan advises start-up founders to have open disagreements. Too many times, he says, he’s seen founders make the same error: ‘Conflict is bad, therefore we should minimise it.’ The most common mistake that managers make is to conclude, from the vivid evidence that fighting is dysfunctional, that conflict is intrinsically undesirable. In fact, the relationship between conflict and successful teamwork is not a simple linear one, in which more conflict leads to less success, or vice versa. It is what statisticians describe as curvilinear. It runs on an inverted U (see below):

  In families, too, the evidence suggests that disagreement is beneficial, because it exposes problems and instigates change. After those benefits are realised, however, additional fighting starts to corrode relationships. For teenagers, some conflict can be productive, but unremitting discord just makes them miserable.

  It’s telling that we don’t have a good word for engaging in a non-hostile disagreement with the shared aim of moving the participants toward a new understanding, better decision, or new idea. ‘Debate’ implies a competition with winners and losers. ‘Argument’ comes tinged with animosity. ‘Dialogue’ is too bland, ‘dialectic’ too obscure. This linguistic gap is evidence of how unpracticed we are at productive disagreement. Fight and flight come naturally to us; disagreeing well does not. Words matter. In their classic work, Metaphors We Live By, the linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson point out that we talk about argument as if it is war: we say that her claims are indefensible, that he attacked the weakest point of my thesis, that I demolished his argument, that she shot down my idea. Those metaphors have real effects; they shape how we argue. We see the person we’re arguing with as an enemy who must be defeated. We feel attacked, so we defend our positions. Imagine a culture, say Lakoff and Johnson, where argument is viewed as a dance: a collaborative performance, with the aim being to conduct it in the most satisfying and elegant way. It’s possible we would argue, and experience argument, very differently. Instead of finding it stressful and unpleasant, we could find it stimulating and enjoyable. Instead of driving us apart, it could draw us together.

  2. How Conflict Brings Us Closer

  Couples and teams are happier when they are in the habit of passionate disagreement. Conflict can draw people together.

  Nickola Overall, a psychology professor at the University of Auckland, was raised in a sprawling, rambunctious New Zealand family in which nobody was shy of speaking their mind. ‘Whenever friends or colleagues meet members of my family, they say to me, “OK I can see why you study direct conflict!”’ Overall is an expert on how and why couples get into rows. She’s interested in romantic relationships because couples are interesting in themselves, but also because ‘The way people try to m
anage conflict in a relationship tells you about the strategies people use at work or in politics.’

  In 2008, Overall began a study of relationships that was to have a lasting impact on her field. She invited married couples to discuss a problem in their relationship on camera, but without anyone else in the room. Some of the couples discussed their problem reasonably and coolly; others got into a heated argument. ‘People often ask me whether couples really get into personal rows in a laboratory but they do, quite easily,’ says Overall. ‘Each couple has two or three things they frequently fight about, and when they talk about one of those things they very quickly expose their anger and hurt feelings.’ Overall and her colleagues then reviewed the tapes of the sessions, analysing each one according to a schema commonly used in the field which categorises four communication styles used by couples having a difficult conversation:

  ‘Direct co-operation’ involves explicit attempts to reason through tough decisions or to solve problems. ‘Indirect co-operation’ refers to behaviours that soften and reduce conflict, from a hug to an apology or an attempt to lighten the mood. ‘Direct opposition’ is getting into what we in Britain call a proper barney, involving angry accusations and demands for change. ‘Indirect opposition’ is popularly known as ‘passive aggression’ – trying to make the other person feel guilty about something, emphasising how hurt you have been by their actions, ostentatiously declaring that I will clean up the kitchen again, it’s really no problem.