How does our anger at "them" create the things we're angry about?

Examining self-reinforcing and self-fulfilling-prophecy aspects of conflict

I’d appreciate any thoughts on this one. If you know of resources related to how conflict can lead to more extremity and “boomerang” effects that I might be missing, I appreciate you letting me know. Or if you have examples that are lesser known that come to mind, that’s helpful, too.

In my books, the central idea was that our ways of engaging in conflict can either make things worse (for example, creating more anger and more pushback from our opponents) or make things better (for example, defusing tensions, and making compromise more likely).

Put another way: Responding to our opponents in contemptuous and demeaning ways can help create the very things we’re upset and scared about, including their stances that we view as extreme and dangerous. There can be a positive feedback loop — a self-reinforcing cycle — at work. The emotions involved, and how we express those emotions, are key to the conflict — and not, as many people believe, something off to the side.

One of my reasons for wanting to work on making that case is that it feels like it’s not as examined as it should be. I think it’s a hugely important idea to communicate because it is what helps people see that treating their opponents with contempt isn’t just conflict-amplifying — but that it’s bad even for one’s own goals and aims. In order to get politically passionate people to want to consider these ideas, you have to get them to see how contemptuous approaches are self-defeating. Those approaches may, in the short term, gain a group a political win, but in the long term, they lay the groundwork for more anger and extremity (on both sides), more dysfunction, gridlock, and chaos in general, and a dynamic where politically passionate people are constantly at risk of having the things “their team” has accomplished rolled back if/when their opponents take power.

Looking back at my books now, I’m not that happy with the parts where I explain how our approaches can be self-defeating, so I’ve been looking into this idea more. Below I’m going to try to list the various ways that demeaning and aggressive approaches to conflict can create a “boomerang effect” and make our opponents more extreme and more committed to fight us. This is an attempt to get all the ideas I’ve found in one place — and it’s my hope that if you see something important in these areas that I’ve missed, you’ll let me know.

These points below take for granted that the underlying nature of most conflicts is people having distorted, overly pessimistic views of the “other side.” And, because we’ll naturally think that our views of “them” are correct (not distorted), we’ll often be blind to how our treatment of our opponents is insulting and demeaning.

• Our anger and fear amplify our opponents’ anger and fear. Demeaning and contemptuous approaches increase our opponents’ anger and fear, which lead to them being more willing to respond in aggressive, punitive ways. This can impact people’s stances on many issues. For any issue that pertains to “them” gaining power, one’s emotions may shift on that issue (e.g., voting-related policies; immigration). And if one thinks their opponents’ goals for a specific issue are immoral and dangerous, they’ll more easily support an aggressive policy to combat that.

  • A 2024 study by Hasell et al found that exposure to political attacks online made people more cynical and angry (more on that).

• Anger and fear make people less reasonable. There’s a lot of research on how anger and other negative emotions make our thinking worse. We’re more reactive, we’re less logical, we’re more punitive, we’re more certain of our stances. In effect, how we treat our opponents can make them less reasonable and more extreme. Also, our anger and fear can make us less reasonable — and that in turn can make our opponents less likely to take our concerns seriously.

• Insults can lead to a “boomerang effect.”:

  • A 1957 study by Abelson and Miller found that insulting people during an attempt at persuasion made them double down on their stances, in a “boomerang effect,” also known as reactance.

  • A 2014 paper by Kim, Levine, and Allen found that “weak yet consistent evidence of persuasive boomerang emerged for personal insult. Insulted participants... tended to change attitude in the opposite direction significantly more... than did the participants who received no personal insult.”

• Poor arguments can also lead to a “boomerang effect.” That 2014 study by Kim et al (and other work) showed that poor arguments can also anger people and drive them away. Polarization leads us to lose interest in crafting persuasive arguments; we become more team-based and biased in our words and actions. This increase in weaker arguments might in turn agitate our opponents and make them more committed to their stances.

• We’re drawn to being the opposite of people we dislike. A 2017 paper by Randy Stein is interesting: it examines how we can have an instinctual urge to be unlike a disliked outgroup. This can help explain how conflict can act like a centrifuge, pushing our stances to the outside, serving to coalesce our stances into us-vs-them camps for both major and minor things. The more hostility we aim at our opponents, the more they may feel drawn to be unlike us.

• Defensive measures are easily seen as offensive provocations. The security dilemma refers to the idea that states, in trying to increase their own security (e.g., through military means) will be increasingly threatening to other states, no matter their intentions. Therefore, even good-faith attempts at trying to increase security can be conflict-amplifying. This is usually applied to international relations but we can see a similar dynamic between groups in general. (For example, attempts to prevent the “other side” from undoing what “our side” accomplished when in power may seem defensive to us but an offensive provocation to our opponents.) While some aspects of this can’t be avoided, it emphasizes the importance of considering the manner in which we approach our defense.

• High-conflict approaches increase the demand for polarizing leaders. This is the key theme of what is maybe the best book on American polarization (by James Druckman et al). A key piece of research here by Druckman et al found that high partisan hostility pre-Covid was later correlated with more extreme stances on Covid. The pathway for this, Druckman believes, is that high hostility leads to an instinct to “follow the lead” of more hostile leaders, who will generally have more extreme stances. This is important for helping understand why, if you’re bothered by leaders you see as divisive, you should want to lower contempt and pessimism on both sides of the conflict. (To be specific: if you see Trump as a divisive leader, it’s important to recognize that support for more divisive approaches didn’t arise out of the blue; where we’re at is a result of decades of increasing affective polarization.)

• Violence can create backlash. As probably wouldn’t be surprising, when we act in more militant and violent ways, we can turn people off. Omar Wasow’s research found that violent civil-rights-related protest in the 60s influenced people to vote for more conservative candidates. (I would think this is just a more extreme manifestation of the idea that insults create backlash, but I’m not sure.)

• Treating our opponents aggressively can lend support to their pessimistic narratives about us. This is especially the case for more anti-establishment, anti-elite movements: “the establishment” seeming to hate populist groups can backfire by making it seem like their narratives are correct. (For example, some research has examined how the demonization of European far right groups may have helped them. From Downs’ paper: “where the far right is flourishing most […] the mainstream parties have largely sought to boycott, isolate, ostracize and outlaw the far-right parties.”)

• We like to trigger “them,” which lends support to their pessimistic views of us. We tend to know what bothers our opponents, and conflict leads to more people wanting to speak and act in ways that bother “them.” For example, some pro-Trump trolls will use insensitive and non-PC language merely to bother people. Or anti-Trump people may troll by calling pro-Trump people “Nazis” and “racists” without good reason. Doing these things helps them build their case of our badness. The book The Anatomy of Peace was good for understanding the ways how, when in conflict, we can induce the very behaviors we dislike. (Personally, I think Trump is someone who likes to do precisely what his opponents tell him he should not, and I think this can help explain many of his behaviors.)

• Conflict makes us care less about bad, extreme, divisive stuff on “our side.” Conflict makes people focus on the badness of their opponents; they care less about bad things on their side. This can lead us to not care about legitimately harmful things that we should care about and address. It can also lead to the “other side” seeing us as more unreasonable because of our downplaying and ignoring of those bad things.

• Other theoretical and less obvious psychological factors that can lead to more extremity. There might be a variety of less obvious ways that conflict stresses us out and amplifies extremity. For example: in a more unified society, our shared narratives and “truths” can be comforting. When we lose that and our narratives grow more divergent, that can be a “threat to meaning:” and threats to meaning can result in people wanting to double down on their beliefs and lash out. Cognitive dissonance might play a role: conflict might pressure us to believe in or express support for things on “our side” that we know are unreasonable; to resolve that discomfort, we may find ourselves trying extra-hard to justify our stances, thus making our stances more hardened and less nuanced.

More on tit-for-tat dynamics, aka “conflict spirals”

Here’s a bit more on the “boomerang” effect. In that 2014 paper by Kim et al, they put persuasion “boomerang” in the context of other studies supporting the tit-for-tat nature of how insults and aggressions can work in the realm of persuasion:

Much evidence demonstrates the principle of “tit-for-tat” in action. Experimental subjects would deliver as many electric shocks as they had received from the confederate in the previous round (Helm, Bonoma, & Tedeschi, 1972). The exchange of small harms in the first round often leads into another exchange of more serious harms in the next round (for conflict spiral theory, see Lawler, Ford, & Blegen, 1988). Threats evoke counter-threats in bargaining (Deutsch & Krauss, 1960, 1962; Krauss & Deutsch, 1966; Youngs, 1986). Smokers ridicule anti-smoking campaign messages as absurd and even feel impulses that they must light up especially right in front of the posters stating “No Smoking” (Wolburg, 2006). Angered workers often unleash revenge in covert, for example, by deliberately withholding the information that the harm-doer is expected to seek on a subsequent occasion (see Allred, 1999, for review).

Support for more depolarizing approaches

This was an admittedly messy attempt to summarize the things I’ve found that help support the premise that we should want to engage in less angry, less judgmental, and more nuanced and calm ways with each other. That we should want to do that not for the sake of some abstract larger-group benefit or for the sake of “resolving the conflict” but for the sake of our own goals and aims. Because when we take high-animosity approaches to conflict, we’ll madden our opponents and make them both a) more extreme in their beliefs, and b) more willing to take highly aggressive responses.

These factors can help us understand how we are affecting the “other side” and shifting their stances in various ways. It can help us see that our political groups don’t exist in a vacuum: that they are connected to each other, and that their emotions play a major role in what they think and do.

If your reaction reading this was “but one side is much worse and you’ve ignored that,” I recommend this piece on the complexity of conflict and the asymmetrical nature of groups: seeing those things can help us approach conflict with more humility, even as we may think “the other side is much worse.”