Conflicted Page 3
In the post-war years, researchers focused on distinguishing couples mired in hostility from those who mostly got along just fine. Hundreds of studies found that unhappy couples have more arguments, whereas happy couples express more agreement and affection. Conflict was framed only as a problem, the solutions to which were found in that bottom-right quadrant. This gave rise to what we’ll call the standard model of relationships: a happy couple is one in which the partners frequently share their feelings with each other and avoid hostile arguments. But we all know couples who disagree a great deal and occasionally have shouting matches, yet still seem happy; perhaps you are in one of them.
The couples in Overall’s study who engaged in more open conflict stated they did not enjoy it: they experienced tension and felt upset. Afterwards, they told the researchers the conversation had not been successful in solving their problem. But they were not necessarily right about that. When Overall’s team invited the couples back to the lab a year later, they asked them whether they had made any progress towards resolving the problem they had talked about. Most relationship experts would have predicted that the couples who engaged in direct opposition – fierce argument – would have made the least progress. Overall found the opposite: the more confrontational couples were the ones more likely to have made headway in solving their issues.
The standard model has a big hole in it. Open conflict is not always harmful to a marriage or long-term relationship. There is now mounting evidence to suggest something like the reverse: that disagreement, criticism and even anger can, over time, increase marital satisfaction. Falling out has benefits.
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As a young research psychologist at the University of Texas in the mid-1970s, William Ickes was dissatisfied by the way human interaction was only studied under artificial conditions, with participants following strict instructions on what to talk about. He was interested in how well two people were able to read each other’s minds during spontaneous conversation – or, in the jargon of the field, ‘unstructured dyadic interaction’ (a ‘dyad’ is a pair of individuals – a two-person group). Ickes’s resulting body of work offers us a crucial clue to the role of conflict in happy relationships.
Ickes had his respondents, who were university students, arrive at the laboratory in male–female pairs who didn’t know each other. Each pair would be ushered into a room that was empty except for a couch and a slide projector. The experimenter would ask them to sit down and explain that he was going to ask them to view and rate some slides. It would then turn out that the projector was broken, and the experimenter had to fetch a new bulb. Left alone, the pair would strike up a conversation, stilted at first but gaining momentum as the minutes passed. Then the experimenter would return and reveal the real purpose of the experiment. A concealed video camera had been recording the pair’s interaction.
In the second stage of the study, the respondents would be taken into separate rooms to view a tape of their conversation. They would be asked to pause the tape at any point that they remembered having a specific thought, write down what they were thinking or feeling at that moment, and assess what their conversation partner might have been thinking or feeling too. Later, the tapes would be analysed by the researchers, who assigned scores for the accuracy with which any individual was able to read his or her interlocutor’s mind.
In 1957, the influential psychotherapist Carl Rogers defined empathy as the ability to track, from moment to moment, the ‘changing felt meanings which flow in this other person’. But until Ickes, nobody had a way of measuring it. Ickes was the first to find a way to assess a person’s ‘empathic accuracy’ – their success at inferring what is going on inside the head of the person they’re talking to. His methodology has been adapted to the study of many types of dyad, including friends and married couples.
One of Ickes’s major findings about mind-reading is that people are really bad at it. On a scale from 0 to 100, the average empathic accuracy score was twenty-two, and the best scored only fifty-five. (Ickes noted that people on first dates can relax: there’s little chance their companion knows what they’re thinking.) It’s the relationship that makes the biggest difference. Ickes found that friends are better at mind-reading than strangers, because they have a shared store of information about each other, which they can draw on to make quick and accurate inferences. Another way of putting this is that strangers communicate in a low-context environment, in which it pays to be explicit and get all the information out there, whereas friendship is a high-context environment, in which we can deploy heavily coded, highly compressed messages.
Close friends communicate very efficiently and rarely have to make much of an effort to be understood by each other. In contrast, that couple at the next table on a first date have to work really hard at understanding each other, and frequently get it wrong. That said, strangers are quick learners. Ickes found that they got better at reading each other’s minds the more information they exchanged, especially when the information established some common ground or shared interest. Friends exchanged more information than strangers, because the talk flowed more freely, but, importantly, that made little or no difference to their empathic accuracy.
That brings us to something important. Friends and strangers process new information about each other differently. Strangers pay close attention to it because it helps them form a picture of the other person. Close friends, who rely on what they already know about the other person, tend to discount the importance of new information about them. They don’t listen quite as hard because they don’t feel they need to.
Generally, men perform worse on tests of empathic accuracy in couples than women. The evidence suggests that it’s not that men have any less ability to empathise, it’s just that they’re less likely to try. In the lab, offering cash in exchange for accuracy has been found to wipe out the difference between men and women. So it’s not that men can’t detect their partner’s thoughts and feelings, it’s that, for much of the time, they can’t be bothered.
This link between our ability to mind-read and our motivation to do so helps to explain a somewhat disturbing finding from the field of relationship science: that while couples get better at reading each other’s minds in the first months and years of a relationship, the longer they stay together, the worse they become at understanding each other.
During those initial years, each member of a couple builds a mental model of their partner, through which they interpret whatever their partner says or does. Assuming the relationship is a good one, the model will be pretty accurate – to use the language of a statistician, it will be a good fit for the reality of the person. You learn your partner’s predilections and turns of mind. You know that if your partner is grumpy in the morning, it’s probably because they had a bad night’s sleep or are worrying about work. You can tell, when they ask you what you were doing last night, whether they are genuinely interested or whether they’re annoyed at you for staying out. Many of your partner’s utterances that would be opaque or meaningless to others make instant sense to you.
A model like this is a wondrous thing, but in its efficiency is its demise. Once you think you’ve got your partner worked out, you stop noticing new information about them. You might even come to believe that you know them better than they know themselves. However, no matter how close you and your partner are, you are having different experiences every day, and while people tend not to undergo radical shifts in personality as they age, they do develop and change. Over time, as the gap between model and person grows, your reading of your partner worsens. The model becomes an ill-fitted stereotype, a simplified and inadequate image of the real thing. If that process continues for long, it can end in a shocking rupture – like when your partner turns around and tells you they’re leaving.
Talking to each other a lot doesn’t mean you will avoid this pitfall. We’re led to believe that more talking leads to greater understanding, but while this sounds sensible, several studies have fou
nd no correlation between empathic accuracy and how much or how clearly couples communicate. Indeed, more communication can lead to less understanding. As the relationship scientist and expert in marital conflict Alan Sillars put it to me, ‘“Talking it out” doesn’t always work. It can make things worse.’ If the model of either or both partners has become a distorting lens, then each partner is consistently making mistaken assumptions about what the other is thinking. The more they talk politely, the more the errors pile up, on both sides. Each becomes increasingly frustrated with the other for not understanding them.
Some couples manage to avoid this fate precisely because they never build efficient models of each other. According to Ickes, the couples most likely to retain their empathic accuracy are those who have either a ‘continuing ignorance of each other’s predilections or an unwillingness to accommodate them’. In other words, ignorance and stubbornness have a role to play in successful relationships. Sometimes it’s good to be inflexible, even when it creates conflict.
In fact, it may be that creating conflict is the point. ‘Listening is one path to understanding,’ says Alan Sillars. ‘So is negativity.’ In a heated argument, you’re more likely to hear what your partner genuinely thinks and wants. You find out what they’re truly like. ‘Conflict provides us with information,’ says Nickola Overall. ‘The way people respond to us in conflict tells us a lot about how co-operative they are, whether they can be trusted, what they care about.’ Conflict in a relationship is not an unfortunate accident. It’s a way of learning about others, including and especially those we know most well.
In 2010, American researchers Jim McNulty and Michelle Russell analysed data from two longitudinal studies of relationships. They found that couples who at the beginning of the study engaged in angry rows over relatively trivial problems were less likely to be happy in their relationship four years later. However, couples who were having hostile arguments about deeper problems, such as money or substance abuse, were more likely to feel good about their relationship by the end of the study period.
In a separate paper, McNulty found that for newlywed couples experiencing serious problems, the kinds of ‘positive’ behaviours encouraged by the standard advice, such as always being affectionate and generous, even hurt some relationships because it stopped the couples facing up to their problems. Indirect co-operation – the softer, subtler approach – can work for minor problems, such as who should be driving the kids to football at weekends, but isn’t great for when a couple has something really important to work through, such as whether one partner is drinking too much.
A measure of ‘negative directness’ seems to be crucial for solving knottier issues. ‘In the short term,’ Russell told me, ‘negative behaviours can make you feel shitty. Nobody likes to be blamed for something or told they’re in the wrong. But it can have this motivational effect. It can really get to the root of the problem.’ Sometimes, one partner simply hasn’t realised that something is a major problem; they need to be enlightened in no uncertain terms. ‘A strong emotional response, yelling and anger, can be needed to demonstrate to the person on the receiving end just how much something means to their partner,’ Russell told me.
In other words, the occasional row is useful because it updates our mental models. People speak their minds freely, uninhibited by fears about how what they say will affect the relationship, and they do it in a way that demands close attention. That means they often – explicitly or implicitly – disclose new information about how they’re feeling and who they are. A good argument blows up the stereotype.
In a study published in 2018, Nickola Overall found evidence for an additional benefit to negative directness: it shows you care about each other. Overall recruited 180 couples and asked each partner, separately, to identify the persistent problems in the relationship, where one partner wanted the other to change. The couples were then asked to discuss one of these problems, in a room together, alone, while being filmed by discreetly positioned cameras. They often got into heated arguments.
Overall and her team coded the interactions for communication style and then checked in with the couples over the following twelve months. She discovered a specific reason that negative-direct arguing can have a beneficial effect on relationship health. When the person arguing for change is previously perceived by their partner to have been less than fully committed to the relationship, their anger, even their hostility, provides evidence that they really do care. Anger is information. ‘Expressing negative emotions can convey investment,’ said Overall.
The same principles apply to other types of close relationship. Parents do not necessarily gain a greater understanding of their teenage children by talking to them about whatever is troubling the relationship. But pressure and confrontation by the child reliably alerts parents to how their children are feeling. Parents who want a deeper understanding of their children can’t simply expect them to ‘open up’ whenever a problem arises. Greater understanding develops over the course of what Alan Sillars terms ‘frequent and unrestrained conversations’. When you keep being candid about the little stuff – including the stuff that annoys you – the big stuff is easier to deal with when it comes up.
‘We’re still not good at painting a picture of the ways in which dramatic and difficult conflict can be constructive,’ says Sillars. ‘Relationships can be deeply troubled at points but ultimately better for the people in them as a consequence of confrontation, if that helps them find a new equilibrium.’ Michelle Russell agrees: ‘Psychology as a whole tends to undervalue the role of negative behaviours and emotions. They can be useful and adaptive. Sometimes you need to feel bad about yourself.’
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Rows may be more useful than we realise, but there is no question that they can be destructive too. What distinguishes the bad rows from the good ones? Answering that question requires us to understand something fundamental about how people communicate.
In an experiment run by Alan Sillars, a wife and husband were filmed discussing their marriage. Afterwards, each of them watched the film separately, and gave their commentary. Here’s a sample of the husband’s commentary:
-Well, Penny is starting to talk about when she was sick in hospital and she doesn’t think I contributed enough at that time or that . . . and I thought I did.
-This is what I get all the time at home, I think . . . I don’t go out all that often.
-I was just trying to explain to Penny here that, uh, in my mind, she is always first to me, even though sometimes it seems like I try harder to do other things.
This is a sample of the wife’s commentary, on the same part of the conversation:
-Now, I think he was trying to avoid the real issues, so I was getting upset and mad again.
-I wanted him to just understand what I was saying so I was aggravated that he was just kind of smirking and not listening.
-I felt hurt because he wasn’t really listening to what I said about my feelings.
You can see there is a mismatch here. The husband is focused on the literal meaning of what’s being said – on the events being referred to and the ostensible point of contention, of whether or not he goes out too much. Meanwhile, his wife tracks the conversation at a kind of meta-level. She talks about the feelings she was having during the conversation, and about her husband’s desire to avoid the real issues.
In any conversation, we’re responding both to its content: to what the discussion or argument is ostensibly about, whether that be money or politics or housework or something else; and also to signals about our relationship: how each sees themselves in relation to the other. The content level is explicit and fully verbalised, and full of concrete references to real-world events, like how much money someone earns or the rights and wrongs of drug policy. The relationship level is implicit and largely unspoken, conveyed as much in our tone of voice and communication style (warm or cold, teasing or sarcastic, animated or taciturn) as in our words. At the content level, the
re is an exchange of messages; at the relationship level, an exchange of signals.
When the participants are essentially in agreement at this relationship level – when each person is happy with how they think they are being characterised by the other – the content conversation goes smoothly. Problems get solved, tasks performed, ideas hatched. When there is an unspoken disagreement at the relationship level, the crackle and spark of conflict disrupts the content conversation. One or both of the parties find it hard to focus on what they’re meant to be talking about because they’re engaged in an unspoken, unacknowledged struggle to elicit the other person’s respect, or affection, or simply attention. The disagreement either becomes deadlocked or explodes into a damaging row.
According to Sillars, who has observed and coded hundreds of such conversations, when marital disagreements go badly it’s often because one of the partners is only tracking the content level of the conversation and not paying any attention to something that’s going on at the relationship level. It is also possible to err in the other direction: one partner might have an exaggerated vigilance to the relationship level and so misinterpret what the other person says, seeing insinuations or insults where none were made.
It might not surprise you to discover that, according to the data, men are more likely to be guilty of making the first kind of error, while women are more likely to make the second. In fact, men often become so absorbed in their own words that they fail to notice the relationship signals their partner is sending. Sillars has found that, ‘Husbands thought about themselves more than they thought about their partners, whereas wives thought about their partners more than themselves.’ Of course, the confusion can occur in both directions. Either way, the person liable to be getting most upset by the dispute is the person most sensitive to the relationship level. A disagreement is more likely to be productive when both partners are paying the same attention to both levels.