Off the Map

About the time I took to reading Thomas Schelling’s famous book, The Strategy of Conflict, I started to see life as a negotiation.

In the book, Schelling sees conflicts as “essentially bargaining situations.”  While I can’t remember my exact evolution of thought, it seems that somewhere around that sentence in the book I started to interpret “bargaining” as “negotiation,” and from there, conflicts as negotiations, and from there, nearly every interaction as a negotiation of some sort.

Many people see negotiations as verbal exchanges.  I say what I want, you say what you want, and we bicker and dicker to reach an agreement.  However, (obviously?), not all negotiations are verbal.  “Negotiation” has to do in general with any kind of manuveuring.  You negotiate pedestrians on a busy New York City sidewalk.  You negotiate cars and tractor trailers on the highway.  You negotiate for age as you make health choices.

Some of the archetypal games outlined in game theory–like Chicken, Prisoner’s Dilemma, and others not coming to mind at the moment–outline common negotiations.  I had forgotten that.  I had struggled for a long time with forgetting that bargaining meant (to me) negotiation, and as a result, I forgot the meaning of “game” and the meaning of “bargaining” that I used in my teaching.  “What’s a game?  What’s bargaining?  Well, it’s (essentially a) negotiation.”

I’m hoping I’ve arrived back at understanding.  Stay tuned: I hope to write more on negotiation in the near future.

See also: bargaining-situation, chicken, game, game-theory, negotiation, prisoners-dilemma, the-strategy-of-conflict, thomas-schelling