Morton Deutsch

Morton Deutsch (February 4, 1920 – March 13, 2017) was an American social psychologist and researcher in conflict resolution.

Deutsch was one of the founding fathers of the field of conflict resolution.

Morton Deutsch was born in 1920 in the Bronx, New York City, the fourth child of Charles and Ida Deutsch, Jewish immigrants from what is now Poland.

By age 15 he was enrolled in university at the City College of New York.

Deutsch started on a path into psychiatry, but switched to psychology after dissecting a guinea pig in a biology class.

He received a B.S. from the City College of New York in 1939 and his M.A. in 1940 from the University of Pennsylvania.

After his M.A. degree, Deutsch held a rotating internship that cycled between three New York State institutions: Letchworth Village (for the mentally incompetent), Warwick (for delinquent boys), and Rockland State Hospital (for mentally disturbed children and adults).

Deutsch joined the US Air Force after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, where he initially acted as a psychologist, then as a navigator flying in thirty bombing missions over Nazi Germany.

During active combat Deutsch was honored with a Distinguished Flying Cross (and cluster) and an Air Medal (with three clusters).

After his tour of duty was completed he served as a clinical psychologist in an Air Force convalescent hospital until his discharge.

They married on June 1, 1947, a year and a half after they met, and have remained together ever since.

One of the first projects of Deutsch's academic career was a study of group tension and racial attitudes as a part of the Commission on Community Interrelations of the American Jewish Congress.

The goal of the Commission's work was to break through the Apathy that the American society of the time had against religious or racial prejudice.

Subsequently, he studied at MIT under Kurt Lewin, where he was graduated with a Ph.D. in 1948.

He wrote his dissertation comparing the psychological effects and productivity of cooperative groups and competitive groups.

Deutsch worked as a part of Lewin's Research Center for Group Dynamics, and his early research was largely tinged by the growing global concern with nuclear weapons.

He was also tasked with instructing introductory psychology classes to undergraduate students, in which he undertook an experiment comparing cooperative and competitive grading processes.

This led to the major theoretical contribution Deutsch made during his early career; the "Theory of Cooperation and Competition", which studies interdependence among goals (cooperative versus competitive) and types of actions taken (effective versus bungling).

The study uses three concepts to develop their implications for the social processes and personal relations that occur in groups: substitutability (how a person's actions are able to satisfy the intentions of another), cathexis (an individual's disposition to evaluate themselves or their surroundings), and inducibility (the readiness of an individual to accept the influence of another person).

The theory was first presented in a paper published in 1949.

While at MIT Deutsch also met his future wife Lydia Shapiro when he was assigned to supervise her work under Lewin.

In 1951, Deutsch and coauthor Mary Evans Collins, working out of the Research Center for Human Relations at NYU (where Deutsch had started working in 1949), produced a study comparing racially integrated housing in New York with racially segregated housing in Newark, New Jersey.

Up until their study it was the norm for housing projects to follow a policy of segregation.

The results of their study led to a reversal of policy in publicly held residential developments and to the belief that segregated housing was undemocratic.

The study was published under the title Interracial Housing by the University of Minnesota Press in May of that year.

In a 1951 newspaper interview with Louis Danzing, the Director for the segregated housing projects stated that, "The study has served as a catalyst to the re-examination of our basic interracial policies in housing and as a stimulus to their change. Many of us have long felt that artificial separation of colored and white families was an unwholesome procedure. However until the study of Dr. Deutsch and Mrs. Collins, we had no scientific evidence to substantiate our feelings."

Modern commentators have accredited Deutsch's research as a valuable contribution to the end of segregation policies in the United States.

In 1951 Deutsch also published the textbook Research Methods in Social Relations with coauthors Marie Jahoda and Stuart W. Cook, a book that would go on to three editions over the following twenty-five years.

In 1954, Deutsch began studying at the Postgraduate Center for Psychotherapy, where he graduated as a professionally trained psychoanalytic psychotherapist in 1957.

In 1956, he joined the staff of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he did research on interpersonal bargaining and small group processes.

While at Bell one of the more prominent experiments he conducted was the Acme-Bolt Trucking game, which concluded that when an individual has the opportunity to apply threat to another in competition they will use it and that this threatening behavior does not lead to cooperation.

Deutsch also co-edited the book Preventing World War III in 1962.

This work continued from his initial concerns with nuclear warfare, including the idea of nuclear deterrence.

As an expert in social psychology, he began appearing on television to discuss the developing field.

In 1963 he made what would be his final move between institutions, when he started at Teachers College, Columbia University after being invited to found a new social psychology doctoral program.

However he also published the book Theories in Social Psychology (1965) and Applying Social Psychology (1975) during this same period.

Deutsch was the first psychologist to use the Prisoner's Dilemma to study trust between small groups or pairings of individuals.

The two major works that resulted of his studies during this period are considered to be The Resolution of Conflict (published in 1973) and Distributive Justice (published in 1985).

In addition to his work as a social psychologist, he conducted a small practice as a psychotherapist until his retirement in the late 1980s.

A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Deutsch as the 63rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.