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# Dynamic models of segregation

## Details

**Authors** Schelling, Thomas C.

**Year** 1971

**Publisher** Journal of Mathematical Sociology

**Kind of work** article

**Discipline** Economics

**Secondary disciplines** Sociology

**Applied** false

[Read it at the publisher](https://doi.org/10.1080/0022250X.1971.9989794) 
10.1080/0022250X.1971.9989794

## In authors' words

### What they set out to do (purpose)

To study the interactive dynamics of discriminatory individual choices and how they produce segregation.

### Who or what was studied (sample)

A simulation in which members of two groups arrange themselves in neighborhoods defined by their own locations, and an analytic model of compartmented space.

### How they did it (methods)

Simulation and analytic modeling, with a final section applying the analysis to neighborhood tipping.

### What they found (results)

Systemic effects are very strong, with no simple link between individual incentives and collective outcomes. Movement produces exaggerated separation and patterning, individual motives usually cannot be inferred from aggregate patterns, and unexpected phenomena such as density and vacancy emerge.

## Commentary

### In short

The models show a whole whose pattern cannot be read off its parts. Individual choices interact through neighbors' positions, and the aggregate differs in kind from the motives of its members.

**Patterns it shows** S, R

Formal proof or model

**Added** 2026-10-09

**How to cite this** Schelling, Thomas C. (1971). Dynamic models of segregation. Journal of Mathematical Sociology.