Daniel Druckman

Global environmental change: Understanding the human dimensions

Global environmental change often seems to be the most carefully examined issue of our time. Yet understanding the human side--human causes of and responses to environmental change--has not yet received sustained attention. Global Environmental Change offers a strategy for combining the efforts of natural and social scientists to better understand how our actions influence global change and how global change influences us. The volume is accessible to the nonscientist and provides a wide range of examples and case studies. It explores how the attitudes and actions of individuals, governments, and organizations intertwine to leave their mark on the health of the planet. The book focuses on establishing a framework for this new field of study, identifying problems that must be overcome if we are to deepen our understanding of the human dimensions of global change, presenting conclusions and recommendations.

Nationalism, Patriotism, and Group Loyalty: A Social Psychological Perspective

The purpose of this essay is to introduce the reader to a social psychological perspective on the roots of nationalism. At its heart is the description of how individuals develop feelings about and attachments to groups-how they build loyalty to groups. The review explores how such loyalty can lead to hostile reactions to other groups, can become translated into stereotypes that are shared by individuals, can shape the collective behavior of groups, and can help differentiate the multiple groups that define any political environment. At a time when ethnic nationalism seems insurgent and capable of pushing much of the world into chaos and war, there is increased need both to understand and to learn how to cope with the conditions that promote such extreme group loyalty. While each of the social sciences has something to say about nationalism, social psychologists have, over the years, contributed, in often neglected ways, to our knowledge about the roots of nationalism. Specifically, they have explored the factors that arouse feelings of group loyalty when such group loyalty promotes hostility toward other groups; how cross-cutting or multiple loyalties can change the face of nationalism; and how individual group loyalties influence and shape collective behavior. It is the purpose of this article to discuss this literature and show its relevance to what is happening in the postCold War world. Focusing their attention primarily on individuals and small interacting groups, social psychologists have sought basic knowledge about the ways in which people relate to groups and nations. Central to this focus is the role played by feelings of loyalty to groups and the conditions that arouse or reduce attachments. While relying largely on data from laboratory experiments and surveys of college students, the results are relevant to a wide variety of situations and populations. Whether or not the findings have such broad implications depends on the conditions under which we can reasonably draw conclusions from them about the behavior of national aggregates. It may be that the phenomena do, in fact, aggregate directly from the individual to the collective much as votes can be aggregated. Or, we may be able to make a strong analogy between the behavior of individuals and small groups, on the one hand, and that of leaders, social movements, and whole national populations on the other. We will use both approaches and consider some of the implications of such issues as we review the research.

Determinants of Compromising Behavior in Negotiation

Effects of nine variables on compromising behavior and time to resolution were evaluated by a meta-analysis of published bargaining experiments reported over a 25-year period. The strongest effect sizes were obtained for the variables of negotiators orientation, prenegotiation experience, time pressure, and the initial distance between positions. The orientation effect was particularly strong when it was communicated to bargainers by constituents or by the experimenter; the position distance effect was stronger for cognitive than for interest conflicts. Significantly weaker effect sizes were shown for opponents concession strategy, representation, and accountability. The weakest effects occurred for the large versus small issues and visibility variables. These results challenge the assertion that group representation is a key determinant of competitive behavior in bargaining. Strong pressures on representatives to be accountable to their constituents did not increase the size of the effects. Analyses of differences in procedures used in the strongest and weakest effect size studies in each category suggest a number of conditions under which bargainers are likely to be intransigent.

Turning points in international negotiation : a comparative analysis

A turning-points analysis of 34 cases of international negotiation is performed in three parts: precipitants (external, substantive, or procedural), process departures (abrupt or nonabrupt), and immediate and later consequences (escalatory or de-escalatory). The cases are divided into three types according to issue area: security, political (including environmental), and trade or economic negotiations. The results are summarized in terms of paths to outcomes: security negotiations are characterized primarily by external precipitants leading to abrupt departures in process that typically turn the talks in the direction of agreements; process departures or turning points in political and trade talks are usually precipitated by either substantive or procedural decisions made by the negotiators that also lead to agreements. Implications of the findings are discussed in terms of the risk-averse and reactive orientations taken by governments in the area of security policy. They are also discussed in the context of strengths and limitations of the comparative analysis approach and in relation to analyses of 11 cases of domestic negotiations in the airlines industry.

Stages, Turning Points, and Crises

A framework for the analysis of processes of international negotiations is described. It construes the process as an unfolding set of stages in which turning points and crises mark passage from one stage to another. This sequence is driven by certain factors that influence negotiator activities and rhetoric. The framework is applied to the bilateral negotiations between Spain and the United States over military base rights (1975-1976). A pattern of influences and events is shown to resemble a balancing process, alternating between an intensifying influence (lack of coordination within a delegation) and a moderating influence (high-level meetings to produce a framework agreement) on the conflict. Content analysis of the discussions suggests an indicator of forthcoming impasses: A large difference between the delegations in hard or soft behavior preceded an impasse in the next round. This pattern of responsiveness has been observed in other negotiating contexts and is referred to as “threshold-adjustment.” Implications of these findings for a general model of negotiating behavior are discussed.

Onstage or behind the scenes? Relative learning benefits of simulation role-play and design

In this article, the authors report the results of two experiments that explored hypotheses about the relative learning advantages of role-play and scenario design. The experiments were conducted with similar student populations in Australia and Israel. Using a matched-pairs design, participants were randomly assigned to design and role-play conditions. They worked on their tasks following an hour-long lecture on three negotiation concepts: alternatives, time pressure, and negotiating power. A lecture-only control group was implemented in the Australian experiment. In both experiments, designers, working “behind the scenes,” indicated better concept learning in the short run than their role-play counterparts performing “onstage,” as well as in comparison with the control group. They showed better understanding of the way the concepts are related and retained the learning gains over time. Moreover, the designers were at least as motivated as role-players and controls and, for the Israel participants, showed more motivation. The results, favoring designers, spread widely across the various questions, asked immediately after the experience and 1 week later: 86% of the answers given favored designers in terms of direction; 52% of these were statistically significant. Implications are discussed for explanatory mechanisms, programmatic research, and teaching/training approaches.

Value Differences and Conflict Resolution Facilitation or Delinking

Three conditions are compared for their effects on attempts to resolve differences on issues concerning both values and interests. Two of the conditions were designed to facilitate resolutions in different ways: One reflected the “values-first” approach while the other allowed the parties to concentrate on their interests apart from differences in values (“interests-first”). Both approaches produced more resolutions and more improved perceptions of the negotiating climate than a third condition in which interests derived directly from values that were not the focus of prenegotiation exercises designed to increase understanding. However, the processes by which dyads in the two conditions achieved resolutions differed. Dyads in the values-first condition were more cooperative in the discussions from their initial positions than were those in the interests-first condition. Implications of these results for models of negotiation and for long-term intergroup cooperation were discussed along with suggestions for further analytical work.

International Peacekeeping and Conflict Resolution A Taxonomic Analysis with Implications

International peacekeeping has undergone some dramatic changes in the past decade. This study represents what is one of the few systematic attempts to classify peacekeeping missions according to function. Yet the authors do not stop their investigation at this juncture. Using a theoretical framework derived from the scholarly literature on conflict management and resolution, the authors are able to scale different peacekeeping functions along two dimensions (primary vs. third-party roles and integrative vs. distributive processes) and understand their interrelationships. For example, how compatible might be the functions of traditional peacekeeping with newer roles such as nation building? From these results, implications for building theory in peacekeeping studies as well as more practical concerns, such as how peacekeeping soldiers might be trained for different missions, are discussed.

Value Differences and Conflict Resolution Familiarity or Liking

Effects of familiarity and liking on negotiating perceptions and behaviors are explored in two experiments, one focusing on prenegotiation expectations and perceptions (experiment 1), the other on negotiation processes and outcomes (experiment 2). Both experiments were embedded in the context of a simulation of conflict between groups resembling the Greek and Turkish communities in Cyprus. Results obtained in the two experiments showed different effects for the familiarity and liking variables: Analytically distinct effects for these variables on prenegotiation perceptions contrasted with the combined effects on negotiating behavior and postnegotiation perceptions. In experiment 1, liking influenced expected movement from initial positions, perceptions of the opponent, and types of strategies prepared for the negotiation; familiarity had its primary impact on perceptions of the situation as being conducive to agreement. Results of experiment 2 showed that reducing either liking or familiarity served to reduce willingness to reach compromise agreements, whether actual or desired. These results suggest that the positive effects obtained for a facilitation condition reported in an earlier study by Druckman, Broome, and Korper (1988) may have been due to the combination of familiarity and liking produced by the experimental manipulation. Implications of the results obtained in both experiments are discussed in terms of changing expectations and uncertainty reduction. Further analyses of negotiating process dynamics would elucidate the difference between reaching agreements in the short run and developing relationships between groups over the long term.

The Situational Levers of Negotiating Flexibility

The effects of a number of situational variables on decisions to be flexible or inflexible were explored in a simulation of an international negotiation on the regulation of gases contributing to the depletion of the ozone layer. Four negotiating-stage scenarios were created, each consisting of a particular combination of variables arranged into three experimental conditions. The experiment was run with two international samples, one consisting of scientists, the other of diplomats from different countries. The hypothesized differences among the conditions were obtained for both samples. Using a pair-comparisons format, participants were asked to judge the relative importance of the variables, within stages, in producing flexibility. Analyses of these judgments revealed trajectories of factors leading to agreement or to stalemate for both samples. These results were also compared with those obtained from a meta-analysis of earlier experiments examining similar variables. The simulation results, based on combined impacts of variables, were stronger than those obtained in the earlier experiments where variables were manipulated one at a time.