## Metadata - Author: [[Ian Leslie]] - Full Title: Conflicted - Category: #books ## Highlights - For most of our existence as a species, humans have operated in high-context mode. Our ancestors lived in settlements and tribes with shared traditions and settled chains of command. Now, we frequently encounter others with values and customs different to our own. At the same time, we are more temperamentally egalitarian than ever. Everywhere you look, there are interactions in which all parties have or demand an equal voice. Take the way that marriage has changed. Seventy years ago, there would have been little need for the partners in most marriages to discuss who was going to perform which household chores, or who looked after the children – such things went unsaid. People outsourced those decisions to the culture. With the rise of gender equality, the modern household requires more explicit communication and negotiation. Context no longer tells us who should be doing the laundry. You can believe, as I do, that this change is overwhelmingly a good thing, and still recognise that it increases the potential for thorny disagreements. ([Location 179](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DHMCXVD&location=179)) - 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. ([Location 186](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DHMCXVD&location=186)) - 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. ([Location 206](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DHMCXVD&location=206)) - Note: Recently, there is awareness that there is a 3rd option - tend - 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. ([Location 214](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DHMCXVD&location=214)) - 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. ([Location 223](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DHMCXVD&location=223)) - 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. ([Location 228](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DHMCXVD&location=228)) - Note: It's a good practice to be aware that we only know the tip.of the iceberg with strangrrs. - 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. ([Location 235](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DHMCXVD&location=235)) - 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. ([Location 246](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DHMCXVD&location=246)) - 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. ([Location 284](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DHMCXVD&location=284)) - 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. ([Location 300](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DHMCXVD&location=300)) - 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. ([Location 307](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DHMCXVD&location=307)) - Evidence suggests that when people interpret disagreements as personal attacks, their cognitive function is impaired, in two principal ways. First, they become rigid in their thinking, clinging to the first position they choose, even when it is shown to be wrong. Second, they engage in ‘biased information processing’: new information is only absorbed insofar as it fortifies their position. In short, they become exclusively focused on proving themselves right rather than helping the group be right, which makes the group itself a little more stupid. ([Location 538](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DHMCXVD&location=538)) - Neuroscientists can look at pictures of individual brains, but they can’t yet study, with any precision, what happens to brains when we interact with others (you can only fit one person in an MRI scanner). And so, with a few exceptions, they ignore it. ([Location 700](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DHMCXVD&location=700))