The effectiveness of pacifist strategies.

The question of the power of pacifist behavior to produce cooperative responses in conflict situations has recently been raised by several researchers and has been the subject of a number of comments. The researches that have been reported to date are best described as exploratory in nature. The majority of the investigations have been directed toward the development of a standardized experimental situation and the empirical exploration of a number of possible relationships. Although the experiments demonstrate that it is possible to investigate pacifist behavior under controlled laboratory conditions and that certain naive expectations about the effects of pacifist strategies are incorrect, their results are of only limited value in the analysis of pacifist behavior as a strategy in conflict situations. There are two reasons for this. The first is that no attempt has been made to generate a theoretical analysis of the strategy which leads to predictions that may be empirically investigated. Lacking such an analysis, the experiments cannot be evaluated as a set of investigations which all bear on a theory and hence each result must be considered independently, with the consequence that each is of diminished value. The second reason is that it happens to be the case that the particular line of research that is currently being pursued, focuses on those aspects of the pacifist strategy which are of relatively little importance to the question of the strategy's power.