Tributes to an Extraordinary Career: An Overview Open Access

The set of articles in this special section of Negotiation Journal honor the life and work of our colleague and friend, Thomas (Tom) C. Schelling, who died in December 2016 at the age of 95. Among his many accomplishments, Tom won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2005 (shared with Robert Aumann). He was considered one of the “founding fathers” of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and one of the Cold War era’s leading national security experts. For more than twenty years he served on the Kennedy School faculty, where he also cofounded what became the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. In addition, he was a professor in Harvard’s economics department, and a professor in both the economics departments and public policy schools at the University of Maryland, as well as a member of Negotiation Journal’s Editorial Advisory Board for more than thirty years.

His is considered to be one of the “household” names in our field, As Marie Chevrier notes in her contribution to the issue, his courses at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government were simply referred to by students as “Schelling” as in “I’m taking Schelling this semester” (in this issue, p. 317).

While the breadth and depth of his scholarship are treasured by his academic colleagues, his writing also stands out because of its wide accessibility to nonacademics and generalists as well. In his contribution to the issue, Dean Pruitt relates an anecdote about his own father, a lay reader who found Tom’s writing to be unusually lucid. Of course, receiving the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2005 cemented his scholarly reputation, but many of us who knew him recognized the importance of his contributions long before the prize was awarded. We also enjoyed his friendship and mentorship, and the contributors to this special issue describe his personal qualities as well as his intellectual contributions.

Tom sought to explicate both coercive and cooperative approaches to negotiation in what he termed “mixed‐motive” conflicts. On the coercive side he compared “compellent” (“you must take Action A or else”) with “deterrent” (“you must not take Action B or else”) threats. As both Dean Pruitt and Oran Young note in their tributes, compellent threats were found to be more effective because they made the threatener appear to be more hostile. (An example is President Ronald Reagan’s invocation of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” in 1983, in which he sought to compel the Soviet Union to disarm immediately rather than only warning them of the consequences of not disarming.)

Tom also explored ways to encourage coordination toward agreement. His ideas were unique and often initially seemed counterintuitive until he explained them fully. They stir a sense in the reader of “why didn’t I think of that?” For example, he was particularly interested in situations in which explicit bargaining was precluded, and what he called “tacit bargaining” took place. In their contributions, Young, Pruitt, and Chevrier describe how his simple realization that people who cannot communicate make mutual guesses about each other’s expectations led to the development of one of his most powerful theoretical concepts: the “focal point.” As Pruitt notes, a focal point is a “prominent alternative” that “stands out for both, that each thinks stands out for the other, that each thinks the other thinks stands out for the first, and so on to the limits of cognition” (in this issue, p. 285). The prominent alternative may be a salient location or a 50/50 solution to the bargaining problem.

Tom was a visionary theorist who made important contributions to policy and practice, but he was not primarily an empirical researcher. Nonetheless, as Pruitt points out, he generated ideas that were tested in the laboratory, keeping researchers busy for decades. For example, researchers sought to refine his theories of deterrence and compellence, prominent alternatives, and the salience of equality versus equity norms. Their results clarified under which conditions compellent and deterrent threats work, when prominence produces coordination, and the popularity and impact of equitable and equality solutions.

Nearly all the authors describe his enormous contribution to the cause of preventing nuclear annihilation. Young argues that Tom’s ideas helped lead the way to the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963 and later to other broader strategic arms limitation agreements between the Soviet Union and the United States. His ideas were also influential, Graham Allison argues, in the negotiations that led to the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

But his reasoning when it came to nuclear deterrence could also seem counterintuitive. As Mac Destler and Peter Reuter discuss in their article, his Nobel address (reprinted here) raised cautions about the dangers of a world without nuclear weapons: Tom “pointed out that nations might rid themselves of nuclear weapons but were unlikely to rid themselves of the capacity to build new ones” (in this issue, p. 312). Rather than eliminating nuclear arsenals, Tom focused on how to prevent nations from escalating to the point of using them, arguing that weapons stockpiles actually reduced the temptation to start a war and that war is more likely to be initiated by states that do not have nuclear weapons and end with their use. Disarmament, he argued, was not the solution to war prevention; converting the use of fissionable material was. These ideas have been a cornerstone of the negotiations with Iran over their nuclear weapons capability.

Several of the articles in this collection apply Tom’s insights to current international events. Allison construes the recent face‐off between Donald Trump and Kim Jong‐un of North Korea as what Tom would call a game of “chicken.” Unlike previous U.S. presidents, Trump seems unwilling to “swerve”—to the potential detriment of South Korea, Japan, and China, who may be the unwitting victims of a nuclear exchange. But recent diplomatic progress on this front suggests that standing one’s ground may be effective.

Aroop Mukharji and Richard J. Zeckhauser depict the United States–North Korea stand‐off as a “wait or propose” game. Waiting is dangerous as neither party is eager to be the first proposer. Tacit bargaining is an option for reducing the costs of proposing, and this may be in play at the moment. Another option is back channel negotiation, a strategy whose logic and costs Mukharji and Zeckhauser examine. Tom looms large as a major intellectual inspiration for these analyses. He worked tirelessly to avoid conflict by identifying enemies’ mutual and transcendent interests. He may be regarded as a realist with a conscience.

Young illuminates Tom’s approach by describing the interactions between him and Eliott Norse, a pioneer in the development of the concept of biological diversity, when they both served on a National Research Council (NRC) committee on global environmental change. Norse argued passionately in favor of transformative changes in human behavior in order to preserve the planet’s ecosystems, while Tom argued dispassionately for steering human behavior in desired directions without holding out hope for major transformation.

The larger “macro‐level” social impact of individual choices was an ongoing focus of his analysis. For example, he analyzed the impact of individual preferences on collective patterns of segregation, and his dynamic models showed that even slight preferences for racially similar neighbors can have large effects on societal segregation with implications for racial conflict (Schelling 1971). Another example of the societal implications of binary choices made by individuals is found in the intriguing “Hockey Helmets, Concealed Weapons, and Daylight Saving” article (Schelling 1973), which I discuss in my own contribution to this issue. Schelling showed what these seemingly different choices have in common. His thesis that human actions could lead to undesirable macro‐level effects was developed most fully in his 1987 book Micromotives and Macrobehavior and served as a basis for later research on linkages between micro and macro levels of analysis.

I note also in my tribute the range of policy areas to which Tom contributed. In addition to his work on arms control, segregation, and micro to macro impacts, he wrote about energy and environmental policy, the military draft, health policy, tobacco and drug policy, and ethical issues in public policy and business. (Many of these contributions are collected in his 1984 book Choice and Consequence.) In all of these areas, it is evident that Tom preferred modeling rather than empirical research, sought to illuminate the public policy consequences of his analyses, and approached a topic as a dispassionate social scientist. But his passion for the analytical craft and scientific discovery was obvious, He was also keen on seeing his ideas applied to help make a better world, and he had little concern which side of the political aisle embraced these ideas.

The articles by Destler and Reuter and by Chevrier reveal the person behind the ideas. Destler and Reuter describe his years as their colleague at the University of Maryland, which included many service and teaching contributions to the school and involved tireless travel to institutions around the globe where he shared his perspective on nuclear weapons and climate change. Those perspectives were also of great value to the students in his seminars at the Kennedy School and the University of Maryland.

Chevrier’s tribute provides additional personal insights, describing her experience with Tom as a teacher and friend. Although he was not effusive in his praise, she writes, Tom had a way of communicating a student’s worth, providing the needed self‐confidence to launch a career. Simply knowing that he respected your work (or the questions you asked in class) could do wonders for self‐esteem. Juxtaposing two images of the old and young Tom, Chevrier notes that “the aging sage was also the young fearless [horseback] rider, readying himself for an extraordinary life” (in this issue, p. 320).

I knew Tom Schelling for several decades, from a first encounter at a meeting in Washington D.C. in the mid‐1960s to joining him for dinner at his home a few years ago. Over the years, we crossed paths in Washington, Boston, Chicago, Cape Cod, and in Vienna at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis. Each of these encounters was memorable. I remember him cautioning young scholars about lowering their expectations of receiving tenure at Harvard, describing his maverick role on the NRC committee, and his appreciation for a paper I delivered at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and books that I edited at the NRC. Most memorably, I recall a dinner that Dean Pruitt and I enjoyed at the home of Tom and his wife, Alice, in Bethesda, Maryland when Dean and I presented him with the 2007 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Association for Conflict Management (see picture). He followed his terrific talk to the Association in Chicago on the value of game theory by giving autographed copies of a reprinted version of his 1960 book The Strategy of Conflict to everyone in the audience.

Our last communication is poignant. I sent him an email message informing him about the following quote I had discovered from the political theorist Jon Elster:

Tom replied, “That’s quite an endorsement, isn’t it? I never saw it before. Jon certainly never showed it to me. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. Whenever I’m feeling unappreciated I’ll bring it up on my screen and read it.”

It’s difficult to imagine that Tom Schelling was ever unappreciated. As the contributions to this special section attest, his ideas have formed some of the strongest bedrock of scholarship in many fields, including conflict and negotiation analysis, for the last fifty years. I suspect they will continue to excite and inspire scholars, as they excited Jon Elster, for many years to come.