Conflicted Page 20
Lloyd, out of character now, explained that I needed to get better at knowing when to give way. ‘I don’t think you should be afraid to use the words I use – my language. These are little hurdles I’m setting for you. If I know you’re battling to hold those words in, I will keep pushing. If you say, “Yes, I would think he was a cunt,” there’s nowhere for me to go with that. Or when I asked you if you thought I could be a rapist – just say yes! Then I’ve got nothing to push back on.’ Sometimes he puts his feet on the table, he said, to lure the interviewer into a futile argument. Less experienced interviewers see this as a threat to their authority and get diverted by it; smart interviewers ignore it. ‘After a while, it gets uncomfortable for me and I take my feet down anyway.’
When Frank Barnet tried to rattle me by personalising the conversation, said Laurence, I should have gently returned to the question I wanted to pursue. ‘You could have said, “Yes, of course I’d think – in your words – he was a cunt, but my feelings are neither here nor there. I’m here to interview you about the rape of a young girl. That’s the job I have to do.”’
But my biggest error, said Lawrence, was not exploring why Barnet was behaving so unpleasantly. He thought I had missed an opening when Barnet said he didn’t like the police. ‘You could have reflected that back,’ said Lawrence. ‘You could have said, “Did the police have it in for you?”’ Lloyd agreed. ‘It’s a human experience, a truth of his life. You don’t have to take personal responsibility for it, but you could have acknowledged it. You could have said, “That sounds like a bad experience.”’ Asking him about it might have helped me understand who I was talking to, and it would have had another subtle benefit: ‘It has a subconscious impact,’ said Lloyd. ‘I get into the mode of actually talking, rather than just giving short answers and blunt questions.’
By showing interest in his life, I might have lowered his defences. But it’s hard to be curious when you feel angry. In fact, it’s hard to think straight at all.
* * *
A team of psychologists at University College London invited subjects into the lab in pairs. The first person was hooked up to a little squeezing machine, which applied a very small force on her finger. She was then instructed to press down on the other person’s finger using exactly the same amount of force. Crucially, the other person had no idea about this part of the instruction.
The second person was then instructed to push back on the first person’s finger, using exactly the same amount of force as they felt. The two individuals traded finger pushes, while the scientists measured the precise force they used. In every pair of pushers tested, the use of force escalated quickly, until the two people were pushing down on each other’s finger with about twenty times the original force.
It’s an experiment that offers an ominous glimpse into the dynamics of human escalation. Each participant thought they were behaving proportionately to the other, and while nobody was deliberately raising the stakes, somehow the pressure rose anyway. This raises a question: why don’t all of our conflicts escalate in the same way?
One answer is that some people react slowly to the emotional signals they receive from others. Researchers who study marital communication find that couples who reciprocate each other’s negativity are more likely to be unhappy (for although, as we’ve seen, negativity can be helpful to a relationship, too much bad feeling is obviously unhealthy; what matters is the ratio of positive to negative feelings over time). More surprisingly, this is also true of couples who reciprocate each other’s positivity. Unhappy marriages and families are just more febrile; feelings fly around at a faster rate than in happier ones. In his lab, the relationship scientist John Gottman has measured the effect of argument on the physiology of married partners – on heart rate and sweat glands – and correlated it with the longevity of the marriage. If one partner’s behaviour affects the other’s physical functioning this way, the marriage is likely to end in divorce.
Individuals who have ‘emotional inertia’ – who tend to stay close to the same emotional state, whatever is going on – also act as stabilising influences. If you are frustrated by the way that your partner or a colleague doesn’t seem to respond immediately to your mood, good or bad, there may be reason to be grateful for it. A measure of emotional inertia is healthy in a relationship, or a group. When you’re putting together a team or choosing a partner, it might be wise to think about the mix of personalities through this lens. A good team should have passionate, creative people in it, but unless it has sceptical or just plain unexcitable individuals too, disagreements are liable to race out of control in unpredictable ways. The Beatles really needed Ringo.
Getting the right mix of personalities is one thing, but just as important to preventing escalations is to try and be your inner Ringo – to calm your more volatile responses when you need to. The participants in the finger-pushing experiment were acting in a manner that the relationship scientist Alan Sillars calls, in the context of marital rows, ‘mindless reciprocation’. Each was instinctively responding to the other’s last move and neither was asking themselves how to respond to it (to be clear, nobody had asked them to). Since they had no goal to achieve, they exerted little self-control.
Huthwaite International, a UK-based company that provides training in sales and negotiation skills, has been collecting data on the behaviour of negotiators for over fifty years. It has carried out a series of long-term studies using a consistent methodology based on direct observation of real negotiations. One of the aims of this research has been to establish differences in behaviour between highly skilled negotiators and average ones (negotiators deemed as highly effective have to be rated as such by both sides, and to have a track record of success).
One of the major differences identified by Huthwaite’s researchers is the way that negotiators handle conflict. Like anyone else, negotiators sometimes get mad with their counterparts when they come up against a disagreement. Huthwaite uses the term ‘defending/attacking’ for emotionally heated behaviour, in which the negotiator either displays aggression towards the other party or makes an emotional defence of themselves. The company’s researchers have observed that the behaviour has a tendency to form ‘a spiral of increasing intensity’. As one party attacks, the other defends, in a way that the other perceives as an attack. As a result, defensive and offensive moves become hard to tell apart.
Average negotiators are most likely to react defensively to disagreement or implied criticism, using phrases like ‘You can’t blame us for that’ or ‘It’s not our fault.’ But all this does is provoke a sharp reaction from the other side, setting off a spiral. In fact, average negotiators engage in defend–attack spirals three times as often as skilled ones. They also follow a pattern of escalation that relationship scientists have identified as common in marital rows, starting their attacking behaviour slowly, with low-level sniping, and gradually increasing its intensity, as the other side does the same, until a full-on confrontation ensues.
More skilled negotiators handle things differently. It’s not that they never employ hostility, but they do so rarely, and when they attack, they hit hard and without warning. What this suggests is that skilled negotiators exert more conscious control over their aggression than less skilled ones. When they get hot, it’s because they are using heat as a means to an end. Perhaps they want to send a signal about what they care about, or to move the discussion out of a rut. Whatever it is, what they never do is let the conversation control them.
In the negotiations leading up the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, the UK government’s chief negotiator, Jonathan Powell, spent endless hours with politicians and officials from all sides of the Northern Ireland conflict, patiently mediating arguments, soaking up anger and blame. Powell has a typically diplomatic temperament, level-headed and calm, but the strain of his role took a toll on him. In his book about the negotiations, Great Hatred, Little Room, he describes a moment in which he lost his self-control altogether. At a meeting
attended by his boss, the British prime minister Tony Blair, Powell exploded in fury at a Unionist official, who he thought was going to great lengths to needle the British. He grabbed the man by the lapels and had to be pulled away by Blair. Powell knew he had made a mistake. Afterwards, Blair took him aside and told him, ‘You should never lose your temper by accident.’
Skilful communicators, says Alan Sillars, refuse to submit to the logic of reciprocity without considering, first, if that’s the wise thing to do. They deliberately slow the conversation down and consider their options. They’re not just thinking about what they want to do, but how what they do affects the other, and about the best way to reach their goal for the conversation. That’s not easy when you are feeling a surge of rage or fear, which raises your heart rate, priming you to take quick, impulsive decisions, often bad ones. But just being aware of what is causing your reaction can help you bring it under control.
* * *
Don Gulla, of Polis, suggested I talk to Ellis Amdur. Amdur is a specialist in anger – his own and others. He works with police officers and other professionals who have anger-filled encounters in the course of their job. Raised in a middle-class household in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Amdur grew up with an acute sense of vulnerability to existential harm. ‘I’m Jewish, this was the 1950s. My parents taught me to never trust a Christian. When the holocaust comes, they said, the Christians will either participate or turn their back.’ He went to a school where kids were free with their fists and, after losing one fight badly, he decided to learn the art of combat.
After studying psychology at Yale, Amdur spent nearly fourteen years in Japan at a number of martial arts schools. He returned to the USA to study a form of psychotherapy influenced by phenomenology, which explores how we perceive the world as shaped by what we believe. ‘I was drawn to a way of thinking that says you have to be able to bracket your preconceptions to see what’s in front of your eyes. A good police officer, or anyone who is skilled in crisis, can identify the salient data in an encounter and screen out what isn’t important. To do that, you need to study your own reactions and be aware of them.’
To Amdur, anger is never just anger. He teaches officers how to assess, to a finely calibrated degree, the kind of anger a person is displaying, and how to handle it. ‘Chaotic rage – delirium. Terrified rage – a cornered wolf who doesn’t want to fight but will. Cool rage – a predator maintaining control. Hot rage – like a bear that wants to tear you up. Manipulative rage – like a rat that needs to get through a maze to a goal. Deceptive rage – like a snake in tall grass. You need a different approach for each type.’
Amdur talks about the brain as having three levels: human, mammal and reptile (‘It’s not neurologically accurate but it’s a useful metaphor for aggression’). In human-brain, he says, ‘We can have some heat in the encounter but we’re interested in what the other person is trying to say. We’re trying to achieve a win–win outcome. Another word for it is dialogue.’ When a disagreement raises the heart rate, we can move into mammal-brain. The encounter becomes a struggle over dominance, with the dominant emotion being anger. Who do you think you are? ‘My focus becomes on what I have to say and I have little interest in what others are saying. That’s why you hear people saying, You’re not listening. Give me a chance to talk. You don’t get it.’ The reptile-brain is different again: ‘This is when anger takes over. An angry person cares only about winning the argument. That goal may overlap with truth – they may be right – but truth is not the goal. You cannot problem solve with an angry person.’ You can’t even ask questions of them, since, to the angry person, your questions confirm that you haven’t been listening to them. ‘If you say, “Are you mad?” they’ll reply, “What the fuck do you think?” Better to say, “I see you’re mad.”’ In reptile brain, rage takes over.
Amdur asks his students to reflect on their own psychological hot buttons – what kinds of things are liable to send them into a rage? He tells cops that it’s crucial to prepare for the possibility that someone might push one of their buttons that day. ‘Let’s say you have a certain insecurity. You don’t think about it most of the time, until someone activates it. By reminding myself of what my buttons are, I’m more likely to roll with it when it happens. I won’t have that intense threat reaction. I’m prepared.’
In Memphis, the Polis trainers often returned to the importance of self-mastery under pressure, while noting that sometimes they needed a little help from colleagues. ‘Everybody has triggers,’ Mike O’Neill told the room. ‘Mine was any domestic violence [DV] incident. My parents fought. If I was dealing with a DV, I could explode in a New York second. My partner knew that about me. He’d say, “I got this, Mike.”’
One of the Memphis officers, a man, spoke up. ‘My trigger is when children are involved. I visited an apartment, and it was in a horrible mess. I could see the guy spent all his money on beer. There were cockroaches everywhere – and this little kid was on the sofa. I started losing it. My partner had to take me outside.’
* * *
My brief encounter with Frank Barnet brought home to me how insanely hard it is to do what expert interrogators do. Your mind has to operate at full capacity on at least three levels at once. First, you are playing a cognitive chess game, focusing on what you know about this suspect, what they know about what you know, and what you need to get from them. Second, you are trying to establish an emotional relationship of rapport or trust with an individual who is doing their best to push you away. Third, you’re in a struggle with yourself.
I knew it was a bad idea to lose my temper with Frank or to react to his provocations. But that did not mean I found it easy to stop myself from doing so, and if I couldn’t control my own behaviour, I had little hope of influencing his. Of course, this isn’t true only of encounters in police cells and military camps. In any heated conversation, the conflict we’re having with another person is entwined in a conflict we’re having within ourselves.
I find it helpful to think about this internal argument as a struggle between competing goals. Whatever we’re doing, there’s always a goal or goals we’re trying to achieve, whether we’re fully aware of them or not. Behavioural scientist William T. Powers envisioned the mind as a series of goal-driven systems, stacked in a hierarchy. The lowest systems control our body – the central nervous system, our muscles – while the highest levels involve conscious awareness and purpose. At the lowest levels, actions can be performed automatically and unthinkingly, because they have instructions from above; when you’re driving a car you don’t have to think about every movement you make, because you’ve set yourself the goal of driving. That goal is itself in the service of a higher, more strategic goal – visiting the furniture store. Our problems arise, said Powers, when systems get into conflict with each other. Maybe your body has set you the goal of staying on the sofa, but your higher system is demanding you visit the store, because the sofa needs replacing. So you feel anxious and unhappy until one side or the other wins out.
In a confrontation of any kind – with your partner, with a colleague, with a stranger – we often get stuck in one of these inner struggles. Our lower, more instinctual system has set us the goal of winning the argument in front of us, while a higher system has set goal of maintaining a good relationship with this person. The competition is not necessarily an even match. Those lower systems are powerful; they can bully us. We get so focused on the goal in front of us – to win the argument, to best this person, to display our superior intelligence and wit – that we lose awareness of any higher goal altogether. Even when the error signals are loud and clear – when the argument feels stressful and painful – we charge ahead, blinkers on.
When someone is being rude or hostile to you, it’s almost like an invitation to you to do the same. A part of you naturally wants to accept the invitation and rip right into them. When that happens, we’re allowing them to control our reactions, instead of remembering that we have a choice of goals. Ma
ybe your goal is to make that person feel bad about themselves, or to humiliate them – maybe you don’t care about burning the relationship. In which case, go ahead. Pursue that goal mindfully.
But often, it’s better to refuse their invitation and choose your own tone. If you’re talking to someone with whom you want or need to have a good ongoing relationship, following them down to the low ground will be a bad move for both of you. In which case, the best thing to do is to back up, slow down, and consciously choose your own path, instead of the one you have been invited to follow.
William Powers provided a useful way of thinking about this: whenever we get stuck in an internal conflict we should kick the problem up to the next level, like an employee passing the buck to his line manager. In other words, we should try and get more perspective on our behaviour and more clarity on our goals. Specifically, we can ask why and how. The how question shines the spotlight down to our lower-level behaviours. So, in an unpleasant argument with someone, we might take a mental step back and ask, how am I conducting myself in this argument? Am I being bad-tempered, sarcastic, aggressive? The why question shines the spotlight up to our higher goals. Why am I engaging in this row – what am I after, what’s the point? When you know the answer to why, you can decide on what to do about how. You might change your tone and become warmer or more playful – or, if the moment calls for it, more aggressive, like those expert negotiators did at moments of their choosing.
Moving up a level like this does not guarantee your interlocutor will respond in the manner you’re inviting them to. For instance, they might respond to your warmer tone with more aggression. But at the very least, it lifts you up and out of the moment you’re in. Winning the argument right now suddenly feels less important. Even if you can’t reach a reconciliation with the other person, you’ll be reconciled with yourself.