Why People Fight

People don’t normally instigate fights because we all instinctively know it’s painful and costly in terms of time, energy, and emotions. Fights, as we define the word, are interactions in which we use emotional or verbal violence in defense against a threat to our lives. That's any threat to our literal, social or emotional lives, as we know them. We fight for our  survival. But if we want more than to just survive, there are usually more effective (and less destructive!) ways to get there. So why do we get entangled in conflicts in the first place?

It was a mystery to me until I talked it through with Erna. “Fighting is a violent act, there’s no question about it. But most of us are willing to resort to violence in self-defense. Most fights begin not because someone has gone on the offensive, but because they feel like they are defending themselves from an attack – a perceived attack that might not have been intended as one.”

We fight because we feel threatened. We believe we’re reacting to an attack, and end up evoking the same reaction from the target of our “defense.” However, it’s extremely difficult to know who threw the first intended punch. I use the word “intended” because most fights arise by accident –fights are violent and destructive, so we naturally avoid them.

Let’s look at some of the common rationalizations people deploy to justify a fight:

People fight because they want the same limited resources

At first I thought, “This is some caveman [baloney],” but it’s easy to see that this still happens today! How many people did we see on the news fighting over toilet paper at the onset of the Covid pandemic? How many countries have gone to war over oil?

When people feel like their survival is on the line, they will definitely fight for self-preservation. Sure, toilet paper isn’t technically critical to our survival as a species, but we all sure reacted like it was when we couldn’t readily get our hands on it! This is one of the few reasons people will knowingly initiate a fight: to try to take something they need from someone else (though “need” has a very squishy definition to people at times).

Some people will even go so far as to fight for a resource because they think it gives them power, not just because their survival depends on it. The more resources you control, the more you can exert your will on the people around you who need the resources you possess.

People fight to restore their status after a perceived slight

I was watching Hamilton for the millionth time with my daughter when she said, “I don’t get it.” “Get what?” I asked. “Dueling. It’s so stupid. How is that supposed to help anything?” Clearly she’s onto something: fighting to maintain your reputation, fighting to defend your pride, seem like foolish endeavors.

But when people are treated in a way that lowers their perceived status, in the most extreme circumstances, this can jeopardize their ability to function in their society, thereby creating an existential crisis.

Imagine you’re mob boss Tony Soprano: you can’t show any signs of weakness in your dog-eat-dog world. If word got out that you suffer from anxiety attacks and that you see a psychiatrist, people would smell blood in the water and challenge your dominance. (I know I’m mixing animal kingdom metaphors here, but this shows exactly how base this particular instinct is.)

If you let any slight go unanswered, this will signal to others that you can be pushed around. In the world of organized crime – and other antisocial societies where people regularly exist in their Snake Brain – any sign of weakness or vulnerability could lead to actual death. This is why maintaining a good reputation is paramount; turning the other cheek is not an option.

People fight because they have a difference in expectations of each other’s behavior

This category is what causes most run-of-the-mill fights: you expect your kids to finish their chores before playing computer games; you expect your partner not to leave you with an empty tank of gas when they borrow your car; you expect the Help Desk to actually help you resolve your technical issues. These can all cause tremendous amounts of anger and frustration.

When someone fails to do what you want them to do, this feels like a threat to your power. To the Snake Brain, a loss of power is just as great a threat to your survival as loss of life. How does it make such a radical leap under such banal circumstances? Because an alarm is an alarm and the Snake Brain is binary: either the alarm is on and it must fight/flee, or the alarm is off and things are fine.

Normally, the Sage Brain will notice if the Snake Brain sounds an alarm, assess the situation and shut the alarm off. Whether the problem is large or small, the Sage Brain will acknowledge the alarm and formulate a plan to deal with the situation. But when your Snake Brain is being overwhelmed by alarms, and your Sage Brain is at capacity, every new alarm is enough to make your Snake Brain react (this is why sometimes we have a long fuse and other times our fuse is much shorter). And when that alarm is anger over not being able to exercise your power, that reaction is to fight.

But will fighting actually help solve any of these problems? You don’t really want to injure the other person (or if you do, that’s your Snake Brain talking!) – what you really want is to achieve your desired results with the least cost to you: finished chores, full tank of gas, working computer. Fights are costly! There’s almost always a better solution to achieving the result you want.

People fight because they have a difference of opinion

Take sports fans of opposing teams, for example (I’m looking at you, Arsenal and Manchester United fans): they will get into knock-down, all-out brawls with each other, and for what? Their fighting doesn’t make one bit of difference to the performance of either of their teams. Will anyone ever be convinced to switch their loyalties based on the insults slung about their team? No, but for some fans – usually those whose identities are too closely linked to their team’s – agreeing to disagree is just not an option.

I am also not immune to fighting over differences of opinion. My mom and I once got into an extremely heated argument about Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston’s divorce: one of us was Team Jennifer and the other was Team Angelina. She was so angry with me after our argument that she stopped taking my nightly calls for a week! (For the record: I don’t know Brad, Jen, or Angie, and their relationships are clearly none of my business.)

Oftentimes, the differences of opinion people fight over are more ideological in nature, such as politics or or religion. We are often willing to fight over these opinions because of how they define us, and how our worldview would have to change if we were to adopt someone else's opposing opinion.

But if you’re trying to change someone’s opinion, attacking them is never going to work. When has a full-blown fight ever led someone to say, “Wow, you’re right, I’m wrong, I change my mind!”? Never. If you want to change someone’s mind, you’re going to have to reason with them, and this can only happen in the Sage Brain.

Or you can just let them keep their difference of opinion – it works just fine for James Carville and Mary Matalin.

People fight because they’re mad at someone else

We call this the misattribution of anger. A woman gets mad at work because her boss unfairly criticizes her during her annual review. She doesn’t feel like she can do anything to push back on her boss because raises haven’t been announced and she doesn’t want to further jeopardize her position, so she bottles up her anger and goes through the motions for the rest of the day.

When she gets home, she gets angry because she finds her husband scrolling on his phone in the kitchen instead of starting dinner, like she asked. “I know you had a bad day, so I ordered takeout,” he says.

“I didn’t want takeout, I wanted you to start dinner!” Oy. Now the husband’s upset, but he doesn’t really want to fight with his already taxed wife. So who knows who he’ll take out his anger on next? (Not the dog, I am against harming even fictional dogs.)

So what do we do instead of fighting?

There is a way to handle confrontations that can win you more than just survival. We call it functional confrontation. Unless you’re up against an immediate life-or-death situation, engaging your Sage Brain in functional confrontation will always produce a superior result. “Proving” this in an essay would be about as exciting as reading one of those geometry proofs everyone hates in high school, so instead of taking that (boring, tedious) approach, we hope you’ll stick with us throughout our blog posts and see the advantages of functional confrontation in action.

Here is a good place to start.