Why We Pick Fights More Often When We’re Young

I inherited my father’s temper and with it the natural inclination to pick fights when least desirable and even less effective. It’s something I completely dislike and want to improve. If you think about it, a fight accomplishes little or nothing compared to a calm sit-down. But if fighting is irrational, then why do we insist on it?

Fighting seems to be an attempt to retain control of a situation that you feel is beyond your reach. Maybe it’s an attempt to reclaim a relationship which is falling apart. Maybe it’s a way to voice your opinion and ensure that you’re not taken advantage of. Or perhaps fighting is a coping mechanism for whatever negative emotion is eating you apart inside.

Whatever it is, ultimately fighting causes more harm than good, and little by little tears you apart from your loved ones. Repeated fighting over issues that aren’t worthy of the attention will widen the gap between two people rather than mend the harm done. If you fight to make your opinion known, there are better ways. A collected, resolute communication of one’s feelings will go across much better than accusations of insensitivity. If you fight for control, know that the moment you raise your voice, your argument will suffer.

So, why the instinctual tendency to fight rather than keep calm and talk it through? Psychologists provide a couple of reasons why adolescents and young adults often resort to fighting.

Fighting occurs because one party feels wronged by the other, not valued, misunderstood, or ignored. To arrive at the conclusion that we’ve been wronged, we observe behavior, weigh emotions and reflect on the situation as a whole. Then, we conclude that our partner has been wrong in one or more ways. This obviously welcomes a flood of other emotions among which sadness, frustration, anger and isolation might appear.

The desire to fight begins, then, from observing another’s behavior, rationalizing it and then reflecting on that behavior and drawing conclusions. This isn’t done objectively because we’re not computers. We’re composite beings whose brains and emotional experience are all subjective. We don’t gather information objectively from our environment.

Rather we filter it, analyze it and digest information not as it is, but as we are.

Thus immediately there is a bias that permeates how we view a situation that affects our subsequent conclusions. Being subjective, we might misread signs or facts and interpret them differently than as they were intended. This in turn becomes what psychologists call the “actor-observer bias.” When observing another person’s behavior we tend to attribute their actions to their character while underestimating the influence of situational factors. For example, if the desk clerk doesn’t smile at me, I may jump to the conclusion that she’s rude, rather than think maybe she’s having a bad day or was distracted when I approached her.

We take a leap when we decide someone is being insensitive or uncaring without considering situational factors that may have caused their behavior. Nonetheless when it comes to interpreting our own actions we rely more heavily on situational factors to explain our behavior. It was because I was tired that I wasn’t listening to him not because I didn’t care.

There’s yet another bias hidden in our evaluative processing. In her Tedtalk, cognitive psychologist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore explains that the adolescent brain – which ranges from puberty up until an individual becomes fully independent – is still in development and one of the things it hasn’t yet perfected, is perspective taking. The ability of a teenager or young adult to step into another’s shoes is much harder than for an older adult. 

The medial prefrontal cortex is much more activated in adolescents when they think about other people, and their emotions and mental states, explains Blakemore. This is the part of the brain that is still under development from mid to late adolescence and also involved in the ability to take another’s perspective.

So, “if you have a teenage son or a daughter and you sometimes think they have problems taking other people’s perspectives, you’re right. They do. And this is why.”

It’s not entirely our faults then that we tend to pick fights more than usual during our young adult years. Our brains are still under development and prevent us from fully understanding another person’s point of view.

But not only––psychologists say that the emotional seat of the brain, the amygdala, are much more active in adolescents which might lead to more emotional outbursts than other age groups. The overactive amygdalae of twenty-somethings, says clinical psychologist Meg Jay, set of a fight-or-flight response which explains why “they are tempted to break up or pick a fight to force some kind of closure so they don’t get caught by surprise.”

Jay goes on to explain that it’s irrational to think that a relationship is so fragile as to warrant a break-up or big fight over something as miniscule as a late text. It’s our emotional brain and our underdeveloped prefrontal cortex that’s making us think that a fight or outburst is the appropriate response. It’s illusory that fighting will give us control of the situation. More often it will simply escalate a situation that could have passed on calmly. So, what does Meg Jay advise us twenty-somethings?

Learn to calm yourself down, she says. “If we externalize our distress too much, we don’t learn to handle bad days on our own . . . we don’t learn how to calm ourselves down, and this in and of itself undermines confidence.” 

When we externalize our distress, we’re throwing it back to someone else, relying on their response to calm ourselves. Fighting is often a search for reassurance more than a mode of conflict resolution.

The next time the urge to fight arises, sit down with yourself instead, take some deep breaths, and recognize that feelings are fleeting. Borrow some distance and learn to disassociate from your emotions. In other words, learn to calm yourself down.