Why do we fight?

An existential perspective on human conflict

By most accounts, I am a conflict-averse person — someone who uncontroversially prefers social harmony to the chaos of conflict. There are likely a number of reasons for this, which are, in turn, likely rooted deep in my psychological makeup and the culture in which I’ve happened to grow up. Too many threads to untangle.

But what I’m interested in here is the fact that we find ourselves in conflict at all — that despite millions of years of fine-tuning our social apparatuses, we end up in some degree of conflict daily, if not hourly.

To begin, we should consider what conflict truly is. It may seem obvious, but, like most things pertaining to the mind, its existence (and persistence) relies on a few subtle assumptions:

• You have desires that bubble up into your consciousness and drive you to pursue a goal. In other words, you know enough about what you want to pursue it.

• Everyone else has that same capacity — along with their own entirely unique blend of influences, which have led them to entirely different desires and conclusions.

• Conflict emerges when your system’s desire is incompatible with my system’s desire — the two cannot be simultaneously fulfilled.

It’s via this second assumption that we realize conflict demands sentience. We don’t call it conflict when the fridge doesn’t have the food you want, even though that scenario entails a clash of your interests with an element of reality. Conflict is instead a clash of conscious interests. My own personal messy set of wants no longer line up neatly with yours — and now we have a problem.

This might, again, seem ridiculously basic. But it illustrates a fundamental principle of our conscious minds: we intuitively know and accept that everyone else shares the same perceptual experience we do¹. This is the famous theory of mind capacity that we are born without and steadily develop as we grow into our minds. A young child doesn’t seem to conceive of their self as one among many — rather, they exist as an island, monumentally frustrated when the world inexplicably doesn’t bend to their will.

And yet, that acceptance only goes so far. Where we accept shared and common consciousness, we often fail to accept that someone else’s consciousness is rooted in a set of circumstances as varied, complex, and powerful as our own.

Conflict, on its own, would be a frustration, another existential injustice among a slew of others in a world that grants us consciousness and then presents us with an unending stream of challenges and indignities. We could rage at this world and its pernicious habit of stymying us and failing to permit all the outcomes we desire.

Interestingly, though, we don’t rage at the world when a conflict presents itself. We rage at the person: the perceived agent of chaos, the point of failure. In an effort to bring our own desired outcome to fruition, we carelessly objectify our partner in conflict, viewing them as an object to be conquered, a hopeless obstruction.

As a more dangerous turn in this narrative, when someone’s interests conflict with ours, we don’t consider it a clash of equals who, despite our best intentions, have stumbled upon a set of mutually exclusive desires. No, once we’ve acknowledged that the other is an impediment in our way, we view them as an incompetent impediment, an irrational and inferior agent who couldn’t possibly understand the situation or its stakes. We’re infamously quick to judge others based on what we perceive as their personal foibles and failures, rather than a rational response to a set of extenuating circumstances, as we intuitively view our own actions.

This pervasive self-serving bias is a stunning and telling failure of empathy, of theory of mind, of the faculties that make us human. And it’s so ubiquitous that it’s been nicknamed the fundamental attribution error by psychologists. The error is a fundamental part of our world narrative, an automatic and indefensible way of saving face in a competitive landscape where we’ve learned to prioritize our own interests and conscious experience for our survival — both metaphorical and literal.

In his book The Psychology of Money, finance writer Morgan Housel aptly explains that “no one is crazy” when it comes to their financial decisions. What looks crazy to one individual is the other’s rational effort amid their own upbringing, circumstance, and current knowledge. Blowing your money at the casino is a rational move if it’s what you always saw your parents do, it brings you more joy and hope than anything else in life right now, and you haven’t yet learned the importance of saving and investing.

The same goes for conflict. When we approach conflict, we’re often coming from a place of moral superiority or just plain superiority: I understand the situation better than you, have more important needs than you, deserve this more than you. To prevail in conflict, we feel that we must develop a thick-skinned aversion to empathy, to acknowledging what the other may need or deserve. The more empathy we have, the less we’re able to barrel into a conflict with the conviction to stamp out our opponent.

This puts us in an interesting position: bestowed with unprecedented and unparalleled social detection skills, and yet doomed to fail to apply them when it undermines our own interests. In other words, our knack for cognitive empathy² extends only so far as we’re willing (and incentivized) to deploy it.

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Coping with conflict in a big, growing world

For three years, I worked in a social psychological research lab that specialized in the mechanics of our interpersonal relationships, particularly romantic ones. As you may have guessed, one topic of recurring interest was conflict. More specifically, we studied the ways in which our underlying beliefs about conflict often drive our responses to it.

It led me to one of my favorite findings in psychology (which also happens to be one of the most commonplace, accessible ones): your mindset matters very much.³

In the lab, we approached conflict with the understanding that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s highly situational and dependent on its participants and their relationship micro-culture. The lab took the charitable view that perhaps conflict is primarily a failure of imagination, caused by erroneous underlying beliefs. If we can get you to look at conflict with less dread and more optimism, perhaps you’ll handle it differently.

More precisely, we investigated whether believing conflict resolution to be zero-sum versus non-zero-sum altered people’s behavior during the conflict itself⁴. Put simply, do we handle conflict more constructively when we believe that most of the time we can find a win-win solution? Can just the belief in the possibility of a win-win solution make us better partners and better people?

While not fully conclusive, early results signaled the under-appreciated importance of the little voice in our head telling us how the world operates. On average, we’re more likely to respond to our partner in healthier, more understanding ways when our beliefs says ah, don’t worry — there must be a way to work this out for both of us. Though they might seem insignificant, our working hypotheses of the social world deeply influence our reactions to it. And the beautiful part is that we can, over time, nudge our beliefs in the right direction, effectively reshaping how we perceive a conflict when it first presents itself.

These results are fascinating for two reasons:

• Conflict is inevitable, which means any tool to help us navigate it is a big deal.

• Most people don’t seem to handle or navigate conflict particularly well, so handling it a bit more effectively can dramatically improve our quality of life compared to those around us.

If you live in relative physical comfort, much of the discomfort and unease that you’ll experience will stem from interpersonal conflict, rather than the historical reality of physical suffering. Since you have enough to eat, you’ll instead face mounting tension with your spouse, your children, your parents, your siblings, your coworkers, your manager, your political rivals, fellow social media commenters, fellow drivers — the list goes on. I know well-off people who simmer in frustration all day because of a disagreement with a coworker or a fight with their spouse or a sibling rivalry gone awry. There’s no escape from the trenches of conflict.

All this to say that, in the modern world, your wellbeing will increasingly come to depend on your ability to wade through (and avoid succumbing to) conflict’s nasty backwaters. As life becomes more and more frictionless thanks to an endlessly advancing technological landscape, we’ll have yet more time and opportunity to get on each others’ nerves, discover our incompatible desires, fight over the significant and the insignificant alike. When all the inconveniences of life shutter away, the ongoing saga of human conflict will remain — whether in the flesh, online, or in the metaverse.

Moving forward, then, it will be the ones who can remain unflappable during conflict who will triumph — the ones who come at conflict with a level-headed mantra of this is surmountable, there is a promising way out of this. The elusive soft skills of empathy, negotiation, perspective-taking, mindfulness, emotion regulation, and self-soothing will all go hand in hand with mental well-being on an increasingly globalized, digitized, and divisive world stage.

There’s a subtle art to this perspective. It requires the dignified balance of respect for my own needs and respect for yours — a rejection of both capitulation and needless warring. Most importantly, it requires rare levels of imagination. Where others see a bottomless pit, you must have the cleverness and creativity to see a ladder feeding up to sunlight.

Though I believe we are largely products of our particular corner of space and time and material being, I also believe that we are agents of our own experience — that the illusions of full ownership over our self and experience has the potential to work in our favor if we swing it the right way, at least some of the time. When faced with conflict, we can gently nudge ourselves toward the thought that the other person is more like us than not, that we’re not doomed to win or lose, that there just might be a resolution that benefits both of us on the other side.

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Thank you for reading. If you found this article valuable or thought-provoking, I hope you’ll consider “liking” and sharing it to help others come across it.

1. We extend this same principle to faceless, large-scale institutions, like countries, universities, and sports teams — which is why we say things like “The U.S. entered the conflict,” knowing that there is no single, monolithic U.S., but rather distributed networks of figureheads and decision-makers. Intuitively, we grant a nation the agency and mental experience of an individual. I wrote more about this here.

2. Meaning our ability to understand what another is experiencing, rather than feel it.

3. There are a whole bunch of psychologists whose work points to this conclusion. Here I’m linking to a Stanford psychologist whose entire lab is dedicated to exploring the fascinating power of mindsets when it comes to a number of variables, particularly our stress and health.

4. This zero-sum vs. non-zero-sum research was a spinoff of the lab’s original work exploring our more general motivational systems in relationships. Unlike much relationship research, which claims we’re fundamentally selfish in our relationships, this line of thought suggests that our motivational systems are much more complex and can be altered when repeatedly prompted.