High Conflict
Political polarization has become dangerously toxic. Can we find a way out?
Around the globe this election year, many of us are getting mired in “high conflict”—a toxic, messy and expanding new form of political polarization that is stoking violence and undermining our democracy. New research offers some new rules for resilience.
The video went globally viral. Bullets popping. People screaming. A grainy silhouette of a gunman on the roof of a building about 400 feet from the stage of Saturday’s Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, who shot eight bullets at the former president and into the crowd. Trump flinches when one of them grazes his right ear; he then dives under the speaker’s podium for cover. Secret Service agents crouch over him. When the shooter is “neutralized,” they lift Trump up to move him out.
Turning his bloody ear and face to the crowd, Trump pumps his fist into the air in front of an American flag and shouts, “Fight, fight, fight!” — enabling photographers to capture an instantly iconic image of him, standing up, securing his rebel brand in the drama of the moment for all time.
I watched the coverage unfold last Saturday at a dinner party with people split in their support for Biden and Trump, but whose mobile phones started buzzing in unison to alert us all to the news. As the evening progressed, some of us thought that maybe now all the hateful rhetoric of this high-boil re-election campaign might start to ease, at least a little— and at least for a while.
We were wrong.
Within minutes of the attack, MAGA Republicans began flocking to social media to blame President Biden for the shooting. “Today is not just some isolated incident,” Ohio senator J.D. Vance proclaimed confidently on social media, a day before he became Trump’s running mate. “The Biden campaign says that President Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Vance added, “and that rhetoric led directly to this attempted assassination.”
GOP Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia wrote in a separate post that the shooting must have been orchestrated, and that “Joe Biden sent the orders.” Vladimir Putin and Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov said Biden and the Democratic Party “put Trump’s life in obvious danger and provoked his assassination attempt by trying but failing to remove him from the presidential race.” Elon Musk, meanwhile, took to X (formerly Twitter) to blame “the media” for being “in cahoots” with Biden by “downplaying the assassination attempt to deny the threat of political violence from the left.”
Journalist David Frum, unlike others, made an immediate, post-shooting reference to the politically violent January 6, 2021 mob attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters, writing critically in The Atlantic: “Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.”
A flash poll taken by YouGov in the wake of Saturday’s shooting said 67% of Americans are “exhausted” by the rhetorical warfare but also believe more political violence is likely to occur before the November election.
The New Challenge
Ouch. We’re no longer simply polarized, says Amanda Ripley, a researcher on conflict and author of High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. In her words, we’re “Zombie dancing” into a more dangerous sphere of conflict. Top political and behavioral researchers call it “high conflict” —what happens when deep discord distills into an intransigent, good-versus-evil kind of ongoing feud that is dividing many Americans into an “us” and a deeply disliked “them”—even though the “them” people are called names but are rarely ever met, seen, known or heard.
“In this high conflict state, the normal rules of engagement don’t apply,” says Ripley. “The brain behaves differently.” Once someone gets drawn into high conflict, they become certain of their own righteousness, make negative assumptions about those who have a different position on something and become increasingly certain of their own superiority. “… When we get into that kind of conflict, we stop listening,” Ripley says. “We stop interacting. We stop thinking. We replace debate with disgust.” At a deeper level, she added, high conflict traps us in a pattern of distress in which conflict, itself, becomes the point and the goal, which then sweeps everything into its vortex” and makes interaction nearly impossible, and truth hard to both find and fathom.
The Data
How is all of this going down with average Americans? Rather than emphasize the power of persuasion, as Abraham Lincoln advised, many of our political leaders are now perceived to prefer the power of force.
According to the Polarization Research Lab—a collaboration of Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University—nearly half of Democrats (45%) think Republicans support partisan violence and 42% of Republicans think the same of Democrats. The reality: Less than 4% of Americans back political violence.
Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago who has studied American attitudes toward political violence since the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, conducted a nationwide poll last month on the topic of political violence. In his study, 10% of those surveyed said that the “use of force is justified to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.” A third of those who gave that answer also said they own a gun, and 7% said they “support force to restore Trump to the presidency.”
In October, the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, published a report that found that nearly 14% of those surveyed strongly agreed that there would be a civil war in the United States in the next few years. Nearly 8% of respondents to the study said they believed “there would be a situation in the next few years where political violence would be justified” and were intending to arm themselves.
Of course, social media, for all its initial promises of interpersonal harmony, isn’t always helping. For some domestic politicians and overseas agitators, it has become an efficient machine for stoking rage and tearing people apart when it isn’t bringing extremists together. There are now “conflict entrepreneurs” – political strategists and bad guy marketers who want to catalyze division to help their clients amass power. “Want to make bigoted appeals to a particular group? You don’t need an especially sophisticated set of digital platforms and disinformation campaigns to get people to feel fearful and despairing, convincing them to turn against a democracy that includes people they hate,” says Barbara F. Walter, author of the 2023 book, How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them. “There’s groundless comfort,” Walter adds, in assuming that autocracy has to arrive with a military coup. “Now, autocracies are being ushered in by the voters, themselves.”
Okay, so what can be done? “If you have leaders who are talking in ways that encourage violence, condone violence or at least don’t mitigate it or don’t challenge it,” says Walter, “the odds of people who will be inclined to be violent increases. …Political violence has increased and will keep building if we do nothing to stop it.”
Is it possible to short circuit the feedback loops which normalize outrage and blame? To re-humanize and recategorize political opponents and revive curiosity and wonder, even as they continue to fight for what they think is right? Can we stop those who advocate using violence to undermine democracy? What will it take for high conflict-driven Americans to leave their foxholes and consider new ideas?
The Difficult Conversations Lab
To try to find some answers, I recently set aside a couple of hours before one of the change management and media classes I teach at Columbia University to see what Peter T. Coleman, director of the Difficult Conversations Lab, had to say about all of this. The lab is a windowless room on campus, where some difficult conversations take place regularly. There, Coleman directs and does research with his team on division and high conflict.
How does it work? Participants sign a waiver warning them the the experiments could cause stress or unpleasant feelings—before they are surveyed on a range of fraught topics, from abortion to the Israel-Gaza conflict to the 2024 elections, to name a few. Participants are paired with someone who utterly disagrees with them on a topic and are then asked to talk things through around a small conference table, all while being recorded.
It does not always go well, Coleman says, but that’s the point. “It’s hard to study real-life, intractable conflict as it happens,” he said. “This is an attempt to get as close as we can.” So far, the lab and several university affiliates worldwide have hosted and analyzed nearly 500 contentious encounters.
What have they found so far? It’s promising, Coleman says. “We started out thinking that high conflict is intractable, but after doing some of these surveys, we’re not so sure.” If humor and curiosity become part of these conversations, people tend to ask each other more questions and come out of the lab more satisfied than when they arrived, he says.
So Coleman started thinking. Could he induce a response to get people into healthier conflict situations? An early experiment catalyzed possibility.
Participants were shown a traditional news story before they went into the lab, about some hot-button controversy. Half the group was given a traditional news story quoting people from two sides of an issue. The other half of the group was given a story of the same length about the same issue, but which also included more complexity, like references to acknowledge that it’s hard to sort Americans into two camps when it comes to some issues, like abortion rights or age limits on the presidency. “Americans have complicated feelings about these and many issues,” Coleman says.
The result: Those in the more complex group asked more questions of each other and felt better coming out of the lab. Complexity can be cultivated, Coleman says. Doing so decreases the us versus them framework, and showing good will is the gateway drug for better listening during these conversations. “People need to believe that you want to know more about them, sincerely, and obtain some balance of experience across the divide. They want to genuinely feel like they’ve been heard, and to be told they made an interesting point,” Coleman says. “ High conflict does not have to be a permanent state.”
New Rules
Want to try some experiments of your own in the workplace or in the political arena to better broker conflict? For starters, know that breaking through doesn’t happen in a single conversation, nor many. It takes a commitment to longer-term interaction, as possible. There are no short-cuts.
Here are some basics from the Lab to consider if you’re just getting started:
Complicate the narrative. Recognize that any story or “truism” that characterizes one side as consisting of pure heroes and the other of cartoonish villains is probably not true. Instead, ask questions. What is being oversimplified? What do you want the other side to understand about you? What do want to understand about the other side? What’s the question nobody is asking you about where you stand? What do you want to know about the political divide that feels like a blind spot? How do you know some of the things you believe others do not?
Reduce the binary. Us is who? “Them” is who? Break it down into a list of six different groups representing each “us” and each “them” and talk about what makes each group unique in how it views an issue or event.
Marginalize the fire-starters. Avoid, at first, people who see their role as creating chaos and division. Cease listening to those who seem to get a thrill out of a fight.
Introduce complexity. Coleman’s lab did a recent analysis comparing the top one percent of counties in America that were polarized with the bottom one percent and found that it’s important for communities to be inclusive and diverse socially and politically. “Toxic polarization is mitigated in the least polarized counties by sports teams, workplaces, unions, religious organizations,” he said. “The most important preventative notion is mixing. And intentionally doing that, whether you’re an urban designer, or mayor, or in a family, and you realize that if everybody in your life has the same political opinion, maybe you need to figure out how to introduce some kind of dissonance into that conversation.”
Build rapport immediately. Building relationships is necessary to long-term learning and interaction.
Listen. Acquire advanced listening skills, the kind almost no one has naturally. More than half of what people need to ease high conflict is to feel heard. Those mired in high conflict rarely feel heard. Many executives can become better listeners. “Listening is the most powerful and under-appreciated leadership skill to acquire,” says Coleman.
“This isn’t just about how we can speak with each other better,” he added. “It’s about our country. It’s about working to nurture our democracy out of crisis to make it better for more people and to help more people to feel like they belong.”
Says Ripley: “Getting out of high conflict in the political arena will make us better citizens, and require us to find the gray between the black-and-white, the place where all of us live. Helping others to find it will help us get closer to being in this country, together, if a democracy is what we wish to keep.”
Got some stories about high conflict in your work and communities? Please share!