VIRTUAL: Berkeley Arts & Letters & Greater Good Science Center present Amanda Ripley with Jason Marsh / High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

Berkeley Arts & Letters and the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley are thrilled to present Amanda Ripley for her new book High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. She’ll be in conversation with GGSC executive director Jason Marsh.

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.

You can order High Conflict here – we’re currently offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay.

About the book

When we are baffled by the insanity of the “other side”—in our politics, at work, or at home—it’s because we aren’t seeing how the conflict itself has taken over.

That’s what “high conflict” does. It’s the invisible hand of our time. And it’s different from the useful friction of healthy conflict. That’s good conflict, and it’s a necessary force that pushes us to be better people.

High conflict, by contrast, is what happens when discord distills into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them. In this state, the normal rules of engagement no longer apply. The brain behaves differently. We feel increasingly certain of our own superiority and, at the same time, more and more mystified by the other side.

New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist Amanda Ripley investigates how good people get captured by high conflict—and how they break free.

Our journey begins in California, where a world-renowned conflict expert struggles to extract himself from a political feud. Then we meet a Chicago gang leader who dedicates his life to a vendetta—only to find himself working beside the man who killed his childhood idol. Next, we travel to Colombia, to find out whether thousands of people can be nudged out of high conflict at scale. Finally, we return to America to see what happens when a group of liberal Manhattan Jews and conservative Michigan corrections officers choose to stay in each other’s homes in order to understand one another better.

All these people, in dramatically different situations, were drawn into high conflict by similar forces, including conflict entrepreneurs, humiliation, and false binaries. But ultimately, all of them found ways to transform high conflict into something good, something that made them better people. They rehumanized and recatego­rized their opponents, and they revived curiosity and wonder, even as they continued to fight for what they knew was right.

People do escape high conflict. Individuals—even entire communities—can short-circuit the feedback loops of outrage and blame, if they want to. This is a mind-opening new way to think about conflict that will transform how we move through the world.

About the authors

Amanda Ripley is the New York Times bestselling author of The Smartest Kids in the World and The Unthinkable. She writes for The Atlantic, Politico, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications.

Jason Marsh is the executive director of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center and the founding editor in chief of the center’s award-winning online magazine, Greater Good, which engages 1 million readers each month. He is also the founding producer of the GGSC’s online course and podcast–both called The Science of Happiness--which have reached millions of students and listeners worldwide. Marsh has co-edited three anthologies of Greater Good articles: The Compassionate Instinct, Are We Born Racist?, and The Gratitude Project; his own articles for Greater Good have explored everything from the psychology of the bystander to the reasons why he should finally start meditating. His writing has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the opinion section of CNN.com. Previously, he worked as a reporter and producer at KQED Public Radio in San Francisco, as a documentary producer, and as a kindergarten teacher. He lives with his wife and daughter in Berkeley.

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.