Disagreements become toxic when they become status battles. The skilful disagreer makes every effort to make their adversary feel good about themselves.
On 6 May 1993, 15,000 white men marched through the town of Potchefstroom, not far from Johannesburg, South Africa. They were heavily armed and wore brown shirts with swastikas. The men were members of competing factions within the South African far right, who shared a belief in the genetic superiority of white Afrikaners. The Afrikaners, many of whom were ex-military and had fought in the war against Angola, were uniting forces against what they saw as a hostile black takeover of their country.
Just over three years previously, the South African government had released Nelson Mandela from prison after twenty-seven years, following intense domestic and international pressure. They had also legalised his party, the African National Congress (ANC). Apartheid, the system that enabled the country’s white minority to rule South Africa and exclude its black majority, was on its way out. Mandela, now in a power-sharing arrangement with the white government, was planning democratic elections, in which everyone, black and white, could vote. That would inevitably mean the ANC taking power, with Mandela as president. The white ‘Afrikaner nation’ would be lost forever – unless it was won through force of arms.
The Potchefstroom march culminated in a fiery speech by Eugene Terreblanche, leader of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, and an admirer of Adolf Hitler. At the climax of the ceremony, Terreblanche singled out a figure from the crowd. Constand Viljoen, a silver-haired man with a martial bearing, was rapturously applauded as he stepped on to the podium.
General Viljoen was a decorated military veteran, and the commander of the South African Defence Force during the most violent years of confrontation with black activists. He had been a ruthless enforcer of white supremacy, organising assassinations of black leaders and imposing brutal punishments on black communities which threatened disruption. Now, he was called upon to vanquish Mandela, whom white nationalists believed should have been hanged a long time ago. Viljoen was apartheid’s last best hope. To thunderous cheers, he promised the crowd he would lead them to the promised land of a separatist white state: ‘A bloody conflict which will require sacrifices is inevitable, but we will gladly sacrifice because our cause is just.’
Mandela was understandably alarmed by what unfolded at Potchefstroom. He had received word that Viljoen was organising a force of as many as 100,000 men, many of them trained fighters. Mandela could have had Viljoen arrested for treason or inciting violence. But he calculated that this would make a martyr out of Viljoen, just as his own arrest had done for him, decades before. Mandela was also uncertain whether the South African military would back him in a fight against a man many of them revered.
More than this, Mandela’s objective wasn’t merely to win power. His overriding goal was to see South Africa become a full democracy, in which all races, and all political factions, felt included. So he decided on a different course, less obvious and in some ways harder. He invited Viljoen to tea.
In September 1993, Mandela met Viljoen, after contacting him via secret channels. Viljoen showed up to Mandela’s home, in a Johannesburg suburb, accompanied by three other former generals. He knocked on the door and waited for a servant to open it. To his surprise, it was Mandela who greeted them. With a wide smile, the ANC leader shook hands with his visitors, declaring himself delighted to meet them. Ushering them in, Mandela suggested that he and Viljoen talk privately first, before the formal meeting began.
The two men went into Mandela’s living room. Mandela asked Viljoen if he took tea. Viljoen said yes. Mandela poured him a cup. Mandela asked Viljoen if he took milk. Viljoen said yes. Mandela served him milk. Mandela asked if Viljoen took sugar, and Viljoen said yes, and Mandela added some sugar.
Thirteen years later, Viljoen recounted every detail of this encounter to the British journalist John Carlin. The elderly Viljoen was stiff and cautious. In telling the story of the tea, he allowed himself a rare expression of amazement. ‘All I had to do was stir it!’
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Suppose you are meeting someone for the first time – an employer who is interviewing you for a job, or your new tutor at university. As you start talking, what impression of yourself do you want to convey? The sociologist Erving Goffman called this desired impression your face: the public image a person wants to establish in a social interaction.
We put effort into establishing the appropriate face for each encounter. The face you want to show a potential boss will be different to the face you want to show someone on a date. Goffman called this effort facework. With people we trust and know well, we don’t worry so much about face. With those we don’t know – especially if those people have some power over us – we put in the facework. When we put in the facework and we still don’t achieve the face we want, it feels bad. If you want to be seen as authoritative and someone treats you with minimal respect, you feel embarrassed and even humiliated.
Skilful disagreers don’t just think about their own face; they’re highly attuned to the other’s face. One of the most powerful social skills is the ability to give face: to confirm the public image that the other person wishes to project. You don’t need to be selfless to think this is important. In any conversation, when the other person feels their desired face is being accepted and confirmed, they’re going to be a lot easier to deal with, and more likely to listen to what you have to say.
Nelson Mandela was a genius of facework, particularly when it came to the art of giving face. His elaborate show of courtesy towards Viljoen was strategic. He knew that difficult conversations lay ahead between him and the former general, and a less sophisticated operator would have got straight into them. Mandela knew he had some work to do first.
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At the 1972 Olympic Games in West Germany, a group of Palestinian terrorists seized eleven Israeli athletes. The terrorists made their demands, the authorities refused them. The Munich police resorted to firepower. Twenty-two people were killed, including all the hostages. In the wake of what became known as the Munich Massacre, law-enforcement agencies around the world realised they had an urgent problem. Officers communicating with hostage-takers in order to avoid or minimise violence had no protocol to follow. Police departments realised that they needed to learn negotiation skills. Hostage negotiators, who may be specialists or trained officers with other responsibilities, are now deployed in a wide range of situations. The best ones are not just expert in tactics, but in the subtle art of giving face.
In ‘instrumental’ crises, the interaction tends to be relatively rational in character. The hostage-taker sets out clear demands, and a bargaining process ensues. In ‘expressive’ crises, the hostage-takers want to say something – to people at home, to the world. They are usually people who have acted impulsively: a father who has kidnapped his daughter after losing custody, a man who has tied up his girlfriend and is threatening to kill her. Most often, negotiators are dealing with individuals who have taken themselves hostage: people who have climbed to the top of a tall building and are threatening to jump. The hostage-taker in an ‘expressive’ scenario is usually on an emotional edge – angry, desperate, deeply insecure, and liable to act in unpredictable ways.
Negotiators are taught to soothe and reassure the hostage-taker before getting to the negotiation. William Donohue, a professor of communication at the University of Michigan, has spent decades studying conflict-ridden conversations – some successful, some failed – involving terrorists, Somalian pirates, and people on the brink of suicide. He talked to me about a key component of face: how powerful a person feels. Hostage-takers in expressive situations want their importance to be recognised in some way – to have their status acknowledged.
Donohue and his collaborator Paul Taylor, of Lancaster University in the UK, coined the term ‘one-down’ to describe the party, in any kind of negotiation, who feels most insecure about their relative status. One-down parties are more likely to act aggressively and competitively, at the expense of finding common ground or coming up with solutions. In 1974, Spain and the United States opened negotiations over the status of certain US military bases on Spanish soil. The political scientist Daniel Druckman looked at when American and Spanish negotiators adopted ‘hard tactics’ or ‘soft tactics’. He found that the Spanish team used threats and accusations three times as often as the American team. The Spanish, one-down, were aggressively asserting their autonomy.
When a hostage-taker feels dominated, he is more likely to resort to violence. ‘That’s when words fail,’ Donohue told me. ‘In effect, the hostage-taker says, “You haven’t acknowledged respect for me, so I have to gain it by controlling you physically.”’ People will go to great, even self-destructive lengths to avoid the perception that they are being walked over. One-down parties often play dirty, attacking their adversary from unexpected, hard-to-defend angles. Instead of looking for solutions that might work for everyone, they treat every negotiation as a zero-sum game in which someone must win and the other must lose. Instead of engaging with the content, they attack the person as a way of asserting their status.
By contrast, there are those who enter a negotiation expecting to succeed because they are, or perceive themselves to be, in the stronger position. They may well therefore adopt a more relaxed and expansive approach, focusing on the substance of the disagreement and looking for win–win solutions. They may also take more risks with their face, making moves that might otherwise be seen as weak, offering a more friendly and conciliatory dialogue. Since they don’t fear losing face, they can reach out a hand.
This is why giving face is so important. It is in a negotiator’s interest for their counterpart to feel as secure as possible. Skilled negotiators are always trying to create the adversary they want. They know that when they’re one-up, the smart thing to do is to narrow the gap. Mandela’s tea service was a way of charming Viljoen but it wasn’t just that; it was a way of lowering himself in order to make Viljoen feel he was not one-down.
Donohue analysed the transcripts of twenty mediated disputes between husbands and wives in California, over custody and visitation rights. Donohue found that husbands used much more aggressive tactics, while wives focused on the facts. Husbands were more likely to bring up issues relating to the relationship, to complain about the lack of consideration for their rights, to question the trustworthiness of their spouse. These tactics tended to raise the emotional temperature of the conversation, harden the positions of both parties and turn the dispute into a pure power struggle, making progress towards an agreement difficult or impossible. Why did the husbands behave like this? Because they felt one-down: the courts tend to award custody rights to wives.
If this is a reversal of the stereotypical marital dispute, in which the woman is more emotionally driven than the man, the difference is instructive. As Alan Sillars found, there is some truth to the stereotype: women tend to be more tuned in to the relationship level of marital conversations, while men focus more on content. But as you’ll recall, this is a function of motivation – when men want to tune in to emotions, they can. The question of who is acting emotionally, then, isn’t so much to do with gender as it is to which partner is on the wrong side of a power relationship.
In any conversation where there is an unequal power balance, the more powerful party is more likely to be focused on the top line – on the content or matter at hand – while the one-down party focuses on the relationship. Here are a few examples:
When a debate becomes volatile and dysfunctional it’s often because someone in the conversation feels they are not getting the face they deserve. This helps to explain the pervasiveness of bad temper on social media, which can sometimes feel like a status competition in which the currency is attention. On Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, anyone can get likes, retweets or new followers – in theory. But although there are exceptions, it is actually very hard for people who are not already celebrities to build a following. Gulled by the promise of high status, users then get angry when status is denied. In 2016, researchers from the University of Southern California set out to quantify this phenomenon. Focusing on Twitter, they identified a random sample of about 6,000 users and monitored their activity over the course of a month. They found that the top 20 per cent of Twitter users ‘own’ 96 per cent of all followers, 93 per cent of retweets, and 93 per cent of mentions. They discovered a ‘rich get richer and poor get poorer’ effect. Users who already have a lot of followers are more likely to gain new ones; users who are ‘poor’ in attention are more likely to lose them.
Social media appears to give everyone an equal chance of being heard. In reality, it is geared to reward a tiny minority with massive amounts of attention, while the majority has very little. The system is rigged.
So far, we’ve been talking about one aspect of facework: status. However, there is another, closely related yet distinct component of a person’s face, which is not so much about how high or low they feel, as who they feel they are.
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Having served Constand Viljoen a carefully prepared cup of tea, Mandela switched gears. He pointed out to Viljoen that if their respective sides went to battle, there was no way Viljoen’s forces could defeat the government’s forces, but they could do great damage. Many lives would be lost on both sides with no clear winner. It was in the interests of both sides to come to an agreement. Viljoen did not dissent.
Mandela then surprised Viljoen for a second time. He started speaking about his respect for the Afrikaner people – the very people who had branded him a terrorist and a traitor, imprisoned him for decades, destroyed his family life, and oppressed his fellow blacks. The Afrikaners, said Mandela, had done him and his people a huge amount of harm, but he still believed in their humanity. Mandela said that ‘if the child of an Afrikaner’s [black] farm labourer got sick, the Afrikaner farmer would take him in his [truck] to the hospital, phone to check up on him, and take his parents to see him.’
We can’t know for sure that Mandela believed what he said about Afrikaners, but certainly Viljoen didn’t doubt his sincerity. Mandela’s directness about the damage that Afrikaners had done to him made Viljoen more convinced that he was speaking honestly. Something else convinced him too – Mandela spoke to him, then and throughout their subsequent meetings not in English, but in Afrikaans.
When people are used to being on the wrong end of a power relationship, they often become very good readers of people. They gauge the relationship level of conversations, in order to convert their psychological insight into influence. If Mandela was an exceptionally skilful reader of other people, it was at least partly because he had spent so long figuring out how to get what he wanted from a position of powerlessness. In prison, he turned the white guards into his allies and in some cases close friends, in order to eke out some freedoms in captivity. One of the ways he went about this was by making them see that he respected them as Afrikaners.
One of the first tasks Mandela set himself in prison was to learn the language of his captors. Some of his fellow political prisoners were upset with Mandela for this. To them, it felt like giving in to the enemy, but to Mandela, who was thinking far into the future, it was a way to co-opt his oppressors. He studied Afrikaner history, too, including the exploits of their war heroes. He read Afrikaans novels and poetry. None of this was a trick. Mandela genuinely believed that Afrikaners were South African; that he and they belonged to the same land. He also believed that one day they could be persuaded to agree with him.
At least from his early days in captivity, Mandela had decided that black South Africans could not fight their way to freedom: they would only achieve democracy by talking. That meant talking to South Africa’s white rulers, and in order to have a successful conversation with them, Mandela realised he would have to teach them not be afraid of him, and not to hate him. He would have to create the adversary he wanted. That meant reassuring them that their identity was not under threat.
In the months after their first meeting, Mandela tried to convince Viljoen and his allies to give up their guns and participate in the democratic process. He made one particular gesture that went a long way towards convincing Viljoen to surrender his cause. South Africa’s national anthem was an Afrikaans song of conquest. Now that apartheid was being dismantled, most ANC leaders wanted it replaced with their own liberation anthem. Mandela disagreed. To stamp on such a symbol of Afrikaner pride, he said, would be a grave mistake.
Mandela proposed an awkward but workable solution: both anthems would be sung at official occasions, one after the other. Was this a substantial political concession? No, it was a gesture – but a powerful one. It was another way for Mandela to reassure Viljoen that he would never have to give up who he was.
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Elisa Sobo, a professor of anthropology at San Diego State University, has interviewed parents who refuse vaccines. Why were these people, many of them smart and highly educated, ignoring mainstream medical advice that was based on sound science? Sobo concluded that for these individuals opposition to vaccines is not just a belief, but an ‘act of identification’ – that is, it’s more about opting in to a group than opting out of a treatment, like ‘getting a gang tattoo, slipping on a wedding ring, or binge-watching a popular streamed TV show’. The refusal is ‘more about who one is and with whom one identifies than who one isn’t or whom one opposes’. Sobo points out that this is also true of those who opt in to vaccines: our desire to be associated with mainstream views on medicine is also a way of signalling who we are. That’s why arguments between the two sides quickly become clashes of identity.
William Donohue, who has studied the topic for several decades, told me that what drags participants into destructive conflict is usually a struggle over who they are. ‘I’ve seen it in hostage situations, in politics, in marital arguments. You don’t know anything, you have problems, you’re insensitive. One person feels like the other is attacking who they are, so they defend themselves, or hit back. It escalates.’
That our opinions come tangled up with our sense of ourselves is not necessarily a bad thing, as we saw earlier, but it is something we need to be aware of when trying to get someone to do something they do not want to do, whether that’s stop smoking, adapt to a new working practice, or vote for our candidate. Our goal should be to prise the disputed opinion or action away from the person’s sense of self – to lower the identity stakes. The skilful disagreer finds a way of helping their adversary conclude that they can say or do something different, and still be themselves.
One way to do that is to have the disagreement away from an audience. In Boston in 1994, in the wake of a shooting at an abortion clinic, the philanthropist Laura Chasin reached out to six abortion activists, three of them pro-life, three pro-choice, and asked them to meet in secret to see if they could build some kind of understanding. Hard and even painful as it was, the six women met, clandestinely, over a period of years. At first, they found their positions hardening, and none of them ever changed their minds on the fundamental points. But over time, as they got to know each other, they felt able to think, communicate and negotiate in more unconstrained, less simplistic ways. Note, too, that at their first meeting, Mandela took Viljoen aside. The less that people feel compelled to maintain their face in front of allies, the more flexible they feel able to be.
The same principle applies to workplace conflicts. In front of an audience of colleagues, people are more likely to focus on how they want to be seen, rather than on the right way to solve the problem. If it is important to me to be seen as competent, I might react angrily to any challenge to my work. If I want to be seen as nice and co-operative, I might refrain from expressing my strongly felt opposition to a proposal in terms strong enough for anyone to notice. That’s why, when a difficult work conversation arises, the participants often propose to ‘take it offline’. The phrase used to mean simply an in-person discussion, but it has gained the additional nuance of, ‘Let’s take this potentially tough conversation to a place where there is less at stake for our faces.’
Taking a disagreement offline can work but it should only ever be seen as a second-best option. It means the problem at hand is exposed to the scrutiny of fewer minds, losing the benefits of open disagreements. The best way to lower the identity stakes is to create a workplace culture in which people do not feel much need to protect their face; a culture in which different opinions are explicitly encouraged, mistakes are expected, rules of conduct are understood, and everyone trusts that everyone else cares about the collective goal. Then you can really have it out.
Still, in most disagreements, face is at stake in some way, and while getting out of sight of an audience is one way of lowering the identity stakes, another way is to give face – to affirm your adversary’s ideal sense of themselves, as Mandela did with Viljoen. When you show me that you believe in who I am and want to be seen as, you make it easier for me to reconsider my position. By being personally gracious, you can depersonalise the disagreement.
Sometimes that can be as simple as offering a compliment at the very moment your adversary feels most vulnerable. Jonathan Wender, the ex-cop who co-founded Polis Solutions, has written a book about policing in which he notes that the act of arrest is a moment of potential humiliation for the suspect. Wender argues that when police officers are making an arrest they should do what they can to make the person being arrested feel better about themselves. He gives the example of arresting a man he calls Calvin, suspected of violent assault:
The officer and I each took hold of one of Calvin’s arms and told him he was under arrest. He began to struggle and was clearly ready to fight. Given his large stature and history of violence, we wanted to avoid fighting with Calvin, which would inevitably leave him and officers injured. I . . . told Calvin, ‘Look, you’re just too big for us to fight with.’
Wender writes, ‘Officers can de-escalate a potential fight by . . . affirming his dignity, especially in public.’ As we’ve seen, it is in a cop’s interest to make the person they have arrested feel good, or at least less bad, about themselves, just as it was in Mandela’s interest to affirm Viljoen’s dignity. This is common sense – or at least it ought to be. It is amazing how often people commit what you might call the overdog’s mistake: when, having achieved a dominant position, they brutally ram their advantage home, wounding the other party’s sense of self. By doing so, they might gain some fleeting satisfaction, but they also create the adversary they do not want.
Wounded people are dangerous. In Memphis, I watched as the Polis trainer Mike O’Neill told the class that when he was a cop, he had seen officers hit suspects after they had been cuffed, sometimes in front of the suspect’s friends or family. Not only was that wrong, he said, it was dumb: the act of humiliating someone in an arrest ‘can kill your colleagues’. There was a grave murmur of assent in the room. Suspects who have been humiliated do not forget it, and often look for ways to get their own back on a cop – any cop – years down the line. It is a pattern familiar to students of history. Humiliation hurts the humiliators and those associated with them. In a study of ten international diplomatic crises, political scientists William Zartman and Johannes Aurik described how, when stronger countries exert power over weaker countries, the weaker ones accede in the short term but look for ways to retaliate later on.
Imagine if Mandela had entered that conversation with Viljoen the way that people argue with each other in public today. First of all, he would have attacked his identity: he would, in front of as many people as possible, have called Viljoen a white supremacist with blood on his hands. Then he would have explained to the former general, in an aggressive tone, why he needed to disarm and accept Mandela’s terms, since it was the only morally correct and practically viable course for him to take. Mandela would have been perfectly justified in doing all this; he would have been in the right on every count. But how do you think Viljoen would have reacted?
The American politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has described how to have a conversation with someone with whom you strongly disagree. You don’t have to share her politics to see that it is good advice:
I have this mentor. And one of the best pieces of advice that he gave me is ‘always give someone the golden gate of retreat’, which is: give someone enough rope, give someone enough compassion, enough opportunity in a conversation for them to look good changing their mind. And it’s a really important thing to be able to do, because if you’re just like, ‘Oh you said this thing! You’re racist!’ And now you’re forcing that person to say, ‘No I’m not.’ Et cetera. There’s no golden gate of retreat there. The only retreat there is to just barrel right through the opposing opinion.
When we’re in an argument with someone, we should be thinking about how they can change their mind and look good – maintain or even enhance their face – at the same time. Often this is very hard to do in the moment of the dispute itself, when opinion and face are bound even more tightly together than they are before or after (writer Rachel Cusk defines an argument as ‘an emergency of self-definition’). However, by showing that we have listened to and respected our interlocutor’s point of view, we make it more likely that, like the vaccination convert we heard from earlier, they will come around at some later point. If and when they do, we should avoid scolding them for not agreeing with us all along. It’s amazing quite how often people in polarised debates do this; it hardly makes it more tempting to switch sides. Instead, we should remember that they have achieved something we have not: a change of mind.
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Within six months of that first cup of tea with Mandela, Viljoen took what he described as the toughest decision of his life: he ordered his followers to lay down their arms. Shortly after that, he announced that not only would he not disrupt the upcoming democratic elections, he would take part in them. In return for no political concessions whatsoever, Viljoen had given his blessing to a political process that, ten months earlier, he vowed to fight to the death. Mandela had transformed his most formidable enemy into an opponent with whom he could peacefully disagree.
It’s impossible not to admire Mandela’s shrewdness and skill in dealing with a dangerous enemy he needed to win round (part of his shrewdness was seeing that he needed to win him round). But his adversary deserves credit here as well. Viljoen made a deep, painful change to his mindset. He abandoned his original position in order to accept that black South Africans could be fellow citizens and Mandela his leader. He then had to sell that vision to his own side, taking enormous risks with his ‘face’. What Mandela did was help Viljoen realise that he did not have to surrender his identity. He could be part of the nation and still be proudly himself: an Afrikaner, a military veteran, a South African citizen.
Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as president in May 1994, and a new parliament opened, one that reflected the racial diversity of South Africa: two-thirds of the new representatives were black. Viljoen himself had won a seat, after his party picked up nine seats in the election. John Carlin, who was there for the opening, watched Mandela walk into a chamber that had previously been all-white and overwhelmingly male and which now embodied the diversity of South Africa. Carlin noticed something in particular: Viljoen was staring at Mandela, entranced.
Twelve years later, Carlin put it to Viljoen that what he had seen on his face that day was profound respect, and even affection. Viljoen, who was uncomfortable with sentiment, replied tersely: ‘Yes, that would be correct.’ Then he remembered something else. ‘Mandela came in and he saw me and he came across the floor to me, which he was not really supposed to do according to parliamentary protocol. He shook my hand and he had a big smile on his face and said how happy he was to see me there.’ A voice had called out from the gallery: ‘Give him a hug, General!’ ‘And did you?’ asked Carlin. ‘I am a military man and he was my president,’ said Viljoen. ‘I shook his hand and I stood to attention.’