Everyone experiences conflict, and we could all do better resolving our conflicts. INP is committed to spreading the ideas and skills developed through research to students, faculty, policy-makers, and practitioners around the world. To meet this goal, INP is focused on four educational streams: undergraduate education, curriculum development, keynotes, and Evolutionary Psychology Initiative (“homo negotiander”).
Undergraduate Education. To provide Harvard College students with critical tools of negotiation to support their current and future leadership roles, we have cultivated a strong and growing undergraduate program in negotiation. Professor Shapiro’s negotiation course launched 5 years ago with 16 students in the class, and this year more than 240 students sought entry.
Additionally, through our close collaboration with the undergraduates, there is now an official undergraduate International Negotiation Program club at Harvard College. This group of motivated students is working with INP to bring workshops, information, and other opportunities to students across the College and around the world. This group also serves as a platform for INP to mentor a next generation of negotiation scholars and practitioners; the group assists INP with research, workshops, and event planning, giving students an up-close perspective on the processes of negotiation and conflict resolution.
There are already concrete outputs from this group. For example, members of the Undergraduate INP have worked with Professor Shapiro and associates to bring negotiation tools to the international Model United Nations program. Professor Shapiro delivered a plenary speech to 2000 high school students at the UN General Assembly, and also worked with Harvard undergraduates to provide tailored negotiation workshops for Model UN faculty advisors in New York City during the conference, thus spreading the tools of negotiation to thousands of young leaders around the world.
Curriculum Development. Professor Shapiro published his newest book this year, Negotiating the Nonnegotiable: How to Resolve Your Most Emotionally Charged Conflicts, and to advance the book’s ideas within universities and other institutions, INP has launched a curriculum development initiative. INP faculty, staff, and student research associates are building pedagogical materials to help students better understand the key ideas and tools of the book. The team is currently working on a semester-long training curriculum, industry-specific curricula materials, and a guidebook for facilitating the Tribes Exercise that Shapiro presents in the book.
Keynotes to Spread Ideas. Professor Shapiro has keynoted a variety of conferences to spread the ideas in Negotiating the Nonnegotiable. These presentations have been for organizations as wide-ranging as the World Economic Forum, 6th & I in Washington, DC, and the United Nations, as well as bookstores, college campuses, and psychology, mediation and legal centers.
Homo Negotiander Initiative. INP faculty affiliate Steve Nisenbaum and colleagues have continued to pursue development of a new evolutionary model of human nature, which Dr. Nisenbaum calls “Homo Negotiander,” alluding to the notion that the core to evolution may be our capacity to negotiate with one another and with our environment. To further this initiative, Dr. Nisenbaum has successfully launched the newest iteration of an INP-affiliated annual event, “Hollywood Scriptures,” a partnership with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the William James College. This program showcases conflict-related movies as well as post-movie panel discussions to capture key insights and wrestle with moral and ethical dilemmas of conflict resolution.