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A Conversation with Amanda Ripley: a Best-Selling Journalist’s View of High Conflict · It’s All Your Fault: High Conflict People

• Megan Hunter: Welcome to It's All Your Fault on TruStory FM, the one and only podcast dedicated to helping you identify and deal with the most challenging human interactions, those with someone who may have a high conflict personality. I'm Megan Hunter, and I'm here with my co-host Bill Eddy and our special guest, Amanda Ripley. We are the co-founders of the High Conflict Institute in San Diego, California. Today, our format is slightly different as I'm actually on the road and unable to participate in the discussion unfortunately, but that's okay because I think you'll be very fascinated listening to two people who have dedicated a great deal of their lives to resolving conflict, to understanding human behavior, and to just helping others understand conflict, particularly high conflict. But first, a couple of notes. If you have a question about high conflict situations or a high conflict individual, please send them to podcast at highconflictinstitute.com or on our website at highconflictinstitute.com/podcast where you'll also find the show notes and links. Please give us a rate of review and tell your friends, colleagues, or family about us especially if they're dealing with a high conflict situation. We're very grateful. Now, here's what you've been waiting for. I'm so very pleased to welcome Amanda Ripley to Its All Your Fault Podcast. It's a rare, rare privilege to have the opportunity to have a New York Times best selling author on our show. In fact, this is the first time. So Amanda is a best selling author and investigative journalist. She started her journalism career covering courts and crime for the Washington City paper. And then she spent about 10 years working for Time Magazine, one of my favorites growing up in New York, Washington and Paris. Currently Amanda lives in Washington DC with her family. And to discuss her writing she's appeared on various major programs like ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NPR. And she's spoken at the Pentagon, the Senate, the house of representatives, the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security as well as conferences. I'm sure there are many on leadership, conflict resolution and education. And of course she is the author of High Conflict, her third book, which was preceded by two other great books, the smartest kids in the world, which was a New York Times best seller and The Unthinkable Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why in 2008. And she happens to have an engaging, positive, upbeat presence that makes everyone around her smile. At least I know she makes me smile. And when I think about it, she motivates us to do better in the world. So welcome Amanda. Bill Eddy: Amanda, welcome to the show. You've had a powerful career as a New York Times bestselling author and an investigative journalist. Can you tell us briefly what led you to this career? Amanda Ripley: Sure. Thanks for having me Bill. I'm really glad to be here with you. Excited for this conversation. So I was a journalist for 20 years and then about six years ago, I started feeling like something was going on in the country that I did not understand. And it was deeply unsettling. I had covered a lot of conflict, I had covered terrorism and crime and disasters and education, which actually had the most conflict and then it just felt like the the political conflict we were in as a country was no longer behaving in a linear fashion. I couldn't make sense of it. So I sort of stopped what I was doing and started learning from people like you who work intimately with conflict, but differently than journalists. So everyone from psychologists, to lawyers, to mediators, negotiators, gang violence interrupters, and just trying to understand what I had missed. And it was a lot, it was a lot. So that's what got me obsessed with conflict and writing this most recent book about it. Bill Eddy: Well, I know you've got two other books that have done well. One was The Smartest Kids in The World in 2014, that was a New York Times best seller and the Unthinkable Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why in 2008. So in a way it seems like your writing has been building up to this new venture with high conflict. And I just wanted to ask you this kind of an awkward question, but how did you decide to embrace this messy stomach turning topic of high conflict? Amanda Ripley: Well, in every case books are my therapy. In addition to real therapy, it's my way of trying to find a way to make sense of a really wicked problem. So with the Smartest Kids in The World, it was education which I had written a lot about in the US but I had kept hearing about these countries that allegedly educate all their kids to really high levels. And I just didn't believe it honestly, I couldn't imagine exactly what they were doing differently so I followed American teenagers to those countries and high schools in those countries for a year. And so in every case, including in High Conflict, the most recent book, I have one trick which is find people who have been through the woods and out again, who can see the water they're swimming in in a way that the rest of us cannot and see what we can learn from them about what works, what doesn't, where we can locate hope. So whether it's people who've survived disasters or American kids, who've been parachuted into other countries to go to high school or in this case people and communities who have been stuck in really toxic conflict and are now in a much healthier kind of conflict. Bill Eddy: Because it really gives a sense of hope. Your other books seem to have a lot of hope in them. And I think this book does too. So you focus in many ways on kind of the macro level of high conflict group conflicts, gangs, city councils, polarized national politics. We with High Conflict Institute have focused more maybe in the micro. We've been focused on the interpersonal relationships, families, the workplace, legal disputes and personalities. It'd be kind of interesting to hear how you define high conflict and see how that may be similar or different at the macro level. Amanda Ripley: Yeah, that's a great point. I'd love to hear where the intersections are and where the divergences are. And I think for me, I think we both maybe started from the same place. For me, I was looking back at high conflict divorces and the idea that there were these certain couples who were just stuck in perpetual cycles of blame for years in the courts. And looking at that research and sort of expanding it outwards to what is often called intractable conflict or malignant conflict in international relations and in other countries, and trying to understand what is the distinguishing feature of high conflict. For me, the way I think about it in my own head is it's any conflict that really takes on a life of its own. So it becomes conflict for conflict's sake. And as part of that, we become more and more certain of our own moral superiority. And we start to make a lot of mistakes about the other person or the other side. And then in time it feels like the only acceptable solution is total victory or annihilation. So everyone suffers to different degrees, but how do you define it though? Bill Eddy: We tend to define it around personalities. So we see, like you said, a divorce conflict from our, I did a study a few years ago and I take a poll at seminars. I say, "How many see high conflict divorce as one high conflict person and the other's pretty reasonable trying to cope and how many see it as too high conflict people?" And it tends to come out around 50:50. And so we focus more on the personality with four characteristics, preoccupation with blaming others, a hundred percent all or nothing thinking, unmanaged emotions, and extreme behaviors, which really, I think fit with the dynamic you're seeing. It's more the details of that pattern of behavior. And I think I'll call it macro view, you see the conflict itself as having a life of its own. And I think we see more like looking at the individuals what's the individual behavior and can we change the individual's behavior? Like our new ways for families method, for training parents and divorce cases to learn a set of skills, like flexible thinking, managed emotions, moderate behavior, and checking themselves instead of blaming others. So it's interesting because I think we're looking really very similarly from different angles. Amanda Ripley: Yeah. Yeah. It's so interesting because on the one hand they're intertwined. You can't separate the macro from the micro, although you have to think about it that way sometimes. But I think what you and your books have taught me are about these interpersonal dynamics and the individual skill sets that we can use to manage them. And also when I think about the macro questions, we have to do all those things and stop designing our institutions to reward high conflict. Right? Bill Eddy: Right. Amanda Ripley: So we get this kind of top down and bottom up solutions we need both because that's kind of how we got here. Bill Eddy: What's exciting is I think that there's a future in both that the world needs to see it in a big way, but also look at their own involvement individually. Amanda Ripley: Yeah, absolutely. Bill Eddy: Let me ask you to get a little core of your book, High Conflict, why we get trapped and how we get out is what do you see as the primary reasons we get trapped? Amanda Ripley: The four kind of trip wires that I focused on that seem to be present in every case that I looked at, whether it was a politician in California who got trapped in high conflict or a gang leader in Chicago or an activist in England or even a gorilla fighter in Columbia, in every case, there were four conditions that were present to different degrees. And those four conditions were humiliation, conflict entrepreneurs, which you know a lot about and also corruption perceived or real, usually it's both. And finally binary group identities where sort of a false binary of us versus them labels that really oversimplify. Bill Eddy: That very much fits I think with our perspective. But it's interesting, you're seeing it in the group context. Now, could you just say a little bit more about conflict entrepreneurs? Because I think that concept really has a lot of merit because some people really seem to benefit. Amanda Ripley: Right. As you know, I called you up months ago and said, "Bill, do you think conflict entrepreneurs are high conflict people?" And we had this fascinating conversation about where those two terms overlap. So I love learning from that intersection. And I don't pretend to have an answer to that. I think probably the answer we came up with was often yes, that they are the same, but basically conflict entrepreneurs are people or platforms that exploit conflict for their own ends. And that could be for psychological ends, for attention, for a sense of power, control, meaning, belonging, it could be for profit. It's usually an unholy mix of both. Bill Eddy: Yeah. Well, I think what you opened my eyes to was the idea that some organizations or platforms, as you said could be really like calculating almost. We need more conflict to boost sales or to boost eyeballs. Amanda Ripley: Right. Right. Sometimes it's subconscious but sometimes it's explicit. I remember running into a national newspaper editor several years ago at a dinner in DC and he was saying how worried they were that Trump was going to lose. Even though he personally was anti-Trump he knew how good it was for readership. Bill Eddy: Yeah. A lot of exposure. It's stunning to have this crossover I think from what's entertaining and governance. Amanda Ripley: Yeah. Right. Bill Eddy: And that's the idea. Amanda Ripley: Spectacle and governance have become one. Bill Eddy: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think now that politics is more about entertainment than government and yet the boundaries are so blurred and that there's people that are making money by blurring those boundaries. So it's interesting and certainly concerning. Well, let me ask then your key strategies for getting out of high conflict, because I think that's good too. Amanda Ripley: Yeah. Well typically the first step that most people and communities that I followed took, again, from all different walks of life, they would typically, the first thing they would do actually would be to distance themselves from the conflict entrepreneurs in their lives. And they didn't always call them that sometimes it was their lawyer. Sometimes it was their campaign advisor. Sometimes it was a colleague or a family member and one way or another, for different reasons, they reached a saturation point in the conflict and they realized that the losses were outweighing the gains. There's usually some kind of shock that proceeds that realization. And they start to notice that there are certain people, or sometimes it's who's in your social media feed, it's where you get your news, but they start to notice that these people, these conflict entrepreneurs are kind of feeding their worst instincts and they seem to delight in every twist and turn the conflict takes. So that seemed to be the first step. And you'll appreciate this Bill that after the book came out, a bunch of people wrote to me and said, "Okay, great, thanks a lot for giving us a name for this behavior conflict entrepreneurs. What though do we do if we can't distance ourselves from the conflict entrepreneurs?" And so that's when I reached out to you and wrote a piece about that and now I just send people to the High Conflict Institute because yes, there are lots of cases where you can't. Maybe they're your boss or your husband or your ex-husband and you can't just create that distance. Bill Eddy: Yeah. Well, that's where we came up with really techniques for managing that relationship when you can't get away from that relationship. And you're absolutely right. So many people can't get away like co-parents and divorce. They don't want to deal with the other person, but they have to. Amanda Ripley: But they have to. Exactly. Bill Eddy: Yeah and people that don't want to leave their job, they may be a year from retirement and all of that. So it's tricky but- Amanda Ripley: It is tricky. Yeah. Bill Eddy: Understanding this is good. So go ahead. Some of the other strategies. Amanda Ripley: Some of the other strategies, once people were able to get a little space, however, that is, it might be from following your tips to manage the conflict and create some boundaries with the person and some sanity for themselves. However, they're able to get some space. Then the next step is typically investigating the under story of the conflict for themselves, for their opponents. And I think you and I have talked about this as well, but a lot of times there's the thing that conflict seems to be about and then the thing it's really about. And it could be different things for different people but it's really important to get clear about what it is. So just to take a quick example, one of the people that I followed for the book is a conflict expert named Gary Friedman, a mediator who teaches negotiation at Harvard and Stanford and has helped thousands of people through really difficult conflicts all over the world. And he ran for local office in his tiny town in California, a few years ago at the request of his neighbors who really wanted him to come in and fix politics, stop making it so toxic. And they figured who better than Gary. And as he put it took about an eighth of a second before he got pulled into high conflict in his own little town because that's how politics is designed and he's human. For him he did stop relying on his campaign advisor who was using a lot of the techniques and rules of national politics and he started relying on his wife. So he distanced himself from the conflict entrepreneur, but then he had to get really curious about what was really going on here for him and for everyone else. And the truth is he was bringing a lot to the table that he wasn't acknowledging. He was trying to prove that 40 years of his work could fix politics without saying that. And so when it didn't work, when he ran into opposition, when people made fun of his code of conduct for the meetings and so forth, it felt deeply threatening and humiliating. So that's that other feature humiliation. And that's where we get into real trouble. But at least he had to understand that for himself so that he could let go of some of the petty fights that he didn't really need to have and have the right fights that he really needed to have. Because as you know in high conflict, we often have a lot of the wrong fights with the wrong people at the wrong time, which means we're not having the right fight that we really do need to have the kind of conflict that makes us stronger. Bill Eddy: Yeah. And that's a really good point that conflict itself isn't bad. That the conflict may help us lead to something new and better but high conflict that's where you get into trouble. Anymore strategies? Amanda Ripley: Well, another thing he did was that he really tried to rehumanize himself and other people. But that meant one of the things that comes up again and again, when I hear from leaders right now, whether they're superintendents or pastors or politicians, they're all really struggling as you know in high conflict, in different ways. And their instinct, their intuition when they have to make an unpopular decision right now is to be incredibly certain and stoic, never let them see you sweat. Build a wall. That's our intuition in conflict and totally understandable. You don't want to expose yourself to attack, but in reality, our intuition almost always makes high conflict worse. It's an amazing rule of thumb that I see over and over again. Right. So in Gary's case, he had to reveal just 10%, not a hundred percent, but reveal some of his humanity and admit when he didn't know the right answer, when he wasn't sure how to vote on something, but he was going to do this. This is what he was going to do and here's why, but he could appreciate the other side's argument. And he was struggling and just admitting that made him much more human and therefore harder to dehumanize for his opponents. Bill Eddy: Yeah. That's a really good point. What we find ourselves often saying is you have to do the opposite of what you feel like doing. And so- Amanda Ripley: Exactly. Bill Eddy: It's stunning that's the dynamics of this. And I think just really helpful that you figured that out, but with what you were seeing. Amanda Ripley: So like for you, it's the opposite is you have to spend more time with conflict entrepreneurs or high conflict people to understand them better. Is that an example? Bill Eddy: Yeah. Well, I think what we've learned is to not kind of like judo or something, is that negative energy coming at us is spin it around, back towards them and instead of when they're coming at us, you're an idiot Bill. You don't know what you're doing is to respond with. "Wow. Sounds like you're really frustrated. Tell me more. What's frustrating you?" Amanda Ripley: Yes. Tell me more. Bill Eddy: And that's something I know you've gotten, some of your writing is to go deeper and then you get more of what's really going on which leads me to my next question, which is, you're a great storyteller in your book. And I think in all your writing. And one of your books, chapters is title complicating the narrative. And in there you told a story of how some liberals and conservatives learn to understand and like each other. So if you could explain complicating the narrative and tell us that story. Amanda Ripley: First of all, I love that idea of like the jujitsu of like taking the negative energy and deflecting it. Tell me more is one of the go-to questions that I now train journalists on to just have in their pocket. Especially when you find yourself feeling really put off by what someone has just told you in an interview. Now this is, assuming it's not a live interview when someone says something like really offensive, your instinct, my instinct is just to shut it down. I want to shut them down. Right just verbally. And in fact, what is way more powerful is to say, "Tell me more. Tell me more about that. Like how did you come to that?" I'm so curious. And it takes a lot of practice because it's not intuitive, but I swear it has changed my life. Those three words. And we now it's on my wall. It's one of the questions we ask in conflict for- Bill Eddy: Fantastic. Amanda Ripley: ... for the work I do now that just really it doesn't always lead to deeper revelations, but it always leads to better outcomes than the alternatives. Bill Eddy: It calms the conflict. Amanda Ripley: Yeah. It's unexpected you step out of the dance and it takes the other person by surprise. So you have to mean it is the hardest part, I think. Bill Eddy: Right. Well, actually you don't have to mean it. You can just do it. Amanda Ripley: You don't have mean it. Bill Eddy: And then as long as you're listening, then you do start to mean it because- Amanda Ripley: Yeah. You can kind of get ahead of it and then catch up. Yeah. Bill Eddy: Yeah. I worked in alcohol and drug treatment for a few years and one of the sayings they had is fake it till you make it. And I think it's worth faking interest and curiosity because then you'll become interested and curious. And that's, I know one of the themes that you like to promote. Amanda Ripley: Yeah. Oh, I love that. So, yeah. Sorry to answer your question- Bill Eddy: Yeah, complicating the narrative. What does that mean? Amanda Ripley: Yeah. So there's a place at Columbia University, a lab called the Difficult Conversations Lab, which is run by a professor named Peter Coleman and his colleagues. And they have run over 500 people through awkward tense conversations about hot button, controversial issues, like gun control and abortion over many years. And then they record those encounters and study them all kinds of ways. And they basically found there's roughly two categories of conversations. One are the kinds of conversations that go pretty badly that get stuck and people leave more annoyed and unsatisfied than they came in. They just experience one or two negative emotions over and over. And then there's another category of conversations which people did experience negative emotions. They experienced anger, frustration, but then they have flashes of curiosity, maybe even humor back to anger, maybe a flash of understanding. So it's like a whole galaxy of emotion. And in those conversations, people ask more questions and they emerge from the lab more satisfied than when they came in. So that looks a lot more like good conflict, like the kind of conflict that we need more of where we learned something about ourselves, the other side, or the problem that we didn't know before, even as we continue to disagree. So then they were trying to figure out, well, how could they induce those good conflict conversations? And what they found is if they exposed people to a short news story, print news story to read before they went in, they could make a significant difference. And here's the trick. They took the control group, read a traditional news story about some other controversial issue. And it had two sides back and forth. And then the treatment group was given a news story of the same length, which is important, not longer that had roughly the same facts, but it was framed as a more complicated problem. So in other words, there weren't just two sides to the gun debate. There were three or four or five, and that is actually more accurate in fact. And it acknowledged that people have complicated emotions about say abortion. That most Americans are neither on one extreme or the other and that in the polling, if you ask the question slightly differently, you get very different answers. There's a lot of internal conflict over abortion. So anyway, when they gave people that more complicated narrative, people went into the lab and were much more likely to have those better conversations about conflict, even on an unrelated topic. So the implication for journalists, although they didn't do this for journalists, but the implication for journalist was pretty exciting and pretty clear, which is in times of high conflict, complexity is breaking news. It's more interesting and it's more accurate and it is contagious. So people get more curious and people get more out of the conflict as opposed to just feeling despair and misery and contempt. Bill Eddy: I just think that's excellent and that it gives details of how to think about conflict instead of just kind of an all or nothing in or out view is just think at a more complicated level. Well, let me ask you, because this is very exciting. What you're teaching is say a little bit about what you're teaching to journalists, because that's a whole area we've never even gone there and yet you're inside that fields. You're the perfect person for that. Amanda Ripley: Yeah. I would actually love to have you go there. I think it would be fascinating to get you or Megan just talking to journalists about how they can manage high conflict people in their own work, in their newsroom, in the communities they serve. So yeah, so what we do so with my colleague, this all started with a nonprofit called the Solutions Journalism Network. And they're the ones who asked me to write this piece, which was called Complicating the Narrative, which is how I found out about the Difficult Conversations Lab and sort of started me down this path. And after that piece came out, a bunch of newsrooms reached out to them and said, "Hey, could you train us in some of these skills? So we could cover conflict more effectively." And to their credit Solutions Journalism was like, "Sure." And they created a curriculum with a TV and radio journalist who's incredibly talented named Alen Hofer. And she trained over a thousand journalists on sort of deep listening skills and asking different questions like saying, tell me more, that kind of thing. And then since then she and I have started an organization called Good Conflict where we build on those ideas and we go in and we help newsrooms and other organizations understand that distinction between high conflict and good conflict, what to look for so that you avoid high conflict or at least don't make it worse. And then also how to map the conflicts that your community is facing because that's something that researchers often do in high conflict, but not something that journalists do. And then how to investigate the under story. Like I mentioned like how to get underneath the usual talking points of the conflict. Bill Eddy: That's excellent. That's exciting. Well, that leads to my last question which is also a journalism question. And you can tell me what's wrong with the way I frame this question. So we're told every day that our nation is hopelessly polarized by the news media is telling us that. Many of us in the conflict resolution field don't really buy it. We don't say we're that polarized. So my question is, is the news media accurately reporting this polarization or is the news media actively driving this polarization? Amanda Ripley: Interesting. I'm curious. I know I'm supposed to answer the questions and you're supposed to ask, can I ask you real quick? What makes you say that you don't think the country is polarized? I have some ideas, but I'm curious. Bill Eddy: Myself, just from so much of our personal experience is people with quite different opinions speaking one to one, for example, police, community, that stuff. When you get people speaking one to one polarization, which is mostly emotional at least that's my view. Polarization's an emotional not logical process and that the emotional stuff just melts away and people like each other. There's also an article I read the New York times did a study with over 500 people in 2019 in Houston, Texas. They got representative sample of the country together and had them talk in small groups, one to one and people became much less emotionally polarized. They didn't necessarily reverse their opinions, but they liked each other. And some of them continued and formed friendships with people with different points of view. I know in my life I have people with different points of view, but we still like each other. Amanda Ripley: Right. So you're talking about the deliberative democracy approach to getting people together, to have meaningful conversations with some guardrails and I think that's right. And it's interesting how when you said polarization is mostly emotional, I think that's maybe where the answer lies. So there's two kinds of polarization in the research. One is ideological polarization, which is actually not that extreme in the US but then there's affective polarization, which is dislike and distrust of the other side of opposing partisans. And that is quite high by almost any measure compared to other countries compared to our own history. So it's fascinating because a lot of that has to do with our political, segregation has to do with the way certain news outlets have really kind of inflamed the emotional, the fear, the dislike, the distrust. It has to do with the way social media amplifies extremists. So something like 95% of political tweets are done by 5% of Twitter users. Bill Eddy: Interesting. Amanda Ripley: And remember that 80% of Americans do not use Twitter at all. Bill Eddy: I'm one of those. I don't touch it. Amanda Ripley: Yeah. There you go. So maybe that's why you don't think we're that polarized. So part of it is a distortion based on what lens you're looking through and part of it is that distortion becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bill Eddy: And does the news media bear some responsibility for that? Amanda Ripley: For sure. Absolutely. Bill Eddy: Okay. Amanda Ripley: A hundred percent. I think it's hard to generalize because there's like a huge variety of people and business models under the umbrella of news media but yeah, I think all of them bear different degrees of responsibility as does social media. They're all attention based economies. They're all trying to get your attention and the cheapest laziest easiest way to do that is through outrage and fear. Bill Eddy: Yeah. Well thank you so much, Amanda. We could talk on, I can already tell for a few hours, but we really appreciate you coming on, giving us your thoughts, telling us what's in your book, the High conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. And I just personally want to recommend it. It's great storytelling as well as making the key points that we really agree with. We need to reduce the high conflict in the world and still have conflict. What'd you call it good conflict. Amanda Ripley: Good conflict. Yes. Well thank you Bill. I'm very grateful to be in conversation with you and for all of your generous help and wisdom over the past couple of years. So I really appreciate the work that you're doing Megan Hunter: A big thanks Amanda, for joining Bill today. What a fascinating conversation. I'm sure our listeners enjoyed this very much. So we're very grateful to have had you on our show and grateful for the time that you spent talking with us and sharing your information and wisdom with our listeners. As Bill mentioned, the title of Amanda's book is High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. You'll find the link in the show notes and of course it's widely available in various formats everywhere books are sold in the world. You'll be able to find her other books on her website, which we've also listed in the links along with the couple of articles that she's either been interviewed in and some book excerpts you'll find everything in the show notes. So next week is our monthly Q&A lab. We'll answer two questions. One from a parent who's dealing with a high conflict, 19 year old son with violent, aggressive behaviors and who wants her to admit to abuse in his childhood that actually didn't happen. And second, we'll answer a question about what to do in a group with a high conflict individual, particularly in a group where everything is meant to be equal. How to handle the paranoia and other high conflict behaviors, including being erased from the group and from social media memory. So send your questions to podcast@highconflictinstitute.com or submit them to highconflictinstitute.com/podcast. Tell your friends about us and we'd be very grateful if you'd leave a review wherever you listen to our podcast. Until next week, have a great one and keep learning about high conflict behavior so you can handle it in your life and keep striving toward the missing piece. It's All Your Fault is a production of TruStory FM. Engineering by Andy Nelson, music by Wolf Samuels, John Cogans and Ziv Moran. Find the show, show notes and transcripts at trustory.fm or high conflict institute.com/podcast. If your podcast app allows ratings and reviews, please consider doing that for our show.