from decades of research all over the world, as soon as you sort us humans into two

oppositional groups, it just brings out the worst in us.

Hey, I'm Kelly Corrigan. Welcome to Kelly Corrigan Wonders. Today's episode is actually a

conversation about wonder, not the Grand Canyon version, but the aha version

that comes anytime you understand someone in a way that reveals a solution to a problem

you deemed unsolvable. Amanda Ripley started thinking about conflict as a kid sitting on the

stairs listening to her parents' fight. Now she's one of the world's

top students on the subject, studying why we get trapped and how we get out in places like

Northern Ireland and Colombia and all over the United States. But she's just as curious about

divorce and estrangement and race and politics. She offers clarity on the kind of high conflict that

destroys lives and offers ideas on how to downgrade to healthy, productive debate.

We'll be right back with Amanda Ripley.

Welcome to Kelly Corrigan Wonders.

Hey, welcome back. This is Kelly, and I'm here with Amanda Ripley talking about conflict,

both at a personal level, the kinds of things that leads to divorce and estrangement,

but also on a global level.

Hey, Amanda, thanks for doing this.

Hi, Kelly, good to be here.

So I thought we would spend our time together in sort of two chunks.

One is trying to identify what are the forces that take us into conflict over and over and over again as human beings around the globe time over time.

And then the second half after the break, I wanted to go through specifically the ways that we get out of conflict. And by conflict, we're talking about everything from marital conflict to

global conflict. Oh, it sounds right. That's a story in my life, those two questions.

...