Abstract
Reflecting on his career as a social psychologist, Morton Deutsch guides us through a remarkable number of significant events that have shaped the field. He begins with his experience under the leadership of Kurt Lewin and the impact of the intellectual atmosphere that prevailed at the Research Center for Group Dynamics, which shaped not only his dissertation but also his entire value orientation as a social psychologist. He tells of his later work within the more applied atmosphere of the National Training Laboratory led by Ron Lippitt, describing his own particular research and many of the indelible contributions he has made to the field. Deutsch observes that his career as a social psychologist has centered on two continuing themes: cooperation, competition, and conflict on the one hand and distributive justice on the other. He concludes his reflections with the hope that future social psychologists will achieve a successful integration of three of the intellectual heroes of his youth: Freud, Marx, and Lewin.
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Notes
- 1.
This text was first published as: “A personal perspective on the development of social psychology in the twentieth century. In Rodriguez, A. and Levine, R.V. (Eds.), Reflections on 100 Years of Experimental Social Psychology (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1999): 1–34. Permission to republish this text was granted by Ms. Isabelle Bleecker, Director, International Rights, Perseus Books Group, Boston, MA 02210 on 10 November 2014.
- 2.
Lewin was widely admired by other psychologists. In the summer of 1947, after his death, there was a meeting of the Topological Circle at Smith College. At this meeting there were such eminent psychologists as Fritz Heider (the host), Edward Chace Tolman, and David Rappaport, as well as many of the faculty and students of the RCGD. At that meeting Heider presented the ideas that are the core of his subsequently published book. Heider was a shy and somewhat inarticulate public speaker, but the profundity of his ideas gripped us all. The meeting also provided us the opportunity to have lively informal discussion with Tolman and Rappaport (who offered me a job at Austen Riggs).
- 3.
One sour note in connection with my dissertation: For it, I had developed an observation schedule and manual describing the “function of participation” for characterizing the behavior of group members. It included a description and detailing of various task, group, and individual functions. I also used this material in analyzing observational data in connection with the research done on the first NTL. Much to my surprise, shortly before my dissertation defense in the summer of 1948, an article by Kenneth Benne and Paul Sheats entitled “The Functional Role of Group Members” appeared in the Journal of Social Issues. This article was mainly a reprint of my manual with some elaborations; my authorship received no acknowledgement. When I brought this to the attention of Benne and Sheats, they acknowledged that their article was based on my manual, but since it did not have my name on it, they thought it was some impersonal product of NTL. They apologized for their error, but when the article was widely reprinted in books, there was no attempt to undo their error. When I published my dissertation, I included a footnote indicating that some of my dissertation material had been published in “The Functional Role of Group Members.”.
- 4.
In 1968 I also gave this address at a meeting of social psychologists from the West (the United States and Western Europe) and from Eastern Europe. We met in Prague shortly after the Soviet Union had sent its troops into Czechoslovakia to squash an incipient rebellion against Soviet domination. Despite our misgivings, we came at the strong urging of our Czech colleagues who wanted to maintain their contacts with the West.
My paper included a section on what strategies and tactics were available to “low-power” groups when confronting “high-power” groups. The Czechs loved it and widely circulated a tape recording they made of it.
Leon Festinger, in contrast, asked me, “Is this science?” I replied, “Leon, you and I have a different conception of the nature of science.” My conception, I believe, was more inclusive than his. Leon and his followers were always puzzled by me: They thought I did fine theoretical and experimental work, but they did not understand my willingness to apply the best available social science knowledge to important social issues even when that knowledge was not firmly rooted in experimental research.
The meeting in Prague was sponsored by the Transnational Social Psychology Committee of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). Leon was its chair, and under his leadership it did much to stimulate the development of social psychology in Western Europe.
However, Leon was very much annoyed and harshly criticized Henry Tajfel for his manuscript “Experiments in a Vacuum” and Serge Moscovici for his “Society and Theory in Social Psychology,” both of which were critical of American social psychology. This occurred during a committee meeting in West Germany in 1971.
The committee also exerted some efforts to develop social psychology in Latin America. We held a seminar in Chile for Latin American social psychologists during the tumultuous period just prior to Salvador Allende’s coming to power. After Leon resigned as the committee chairman, I was asked to take on this role. We had another East-West meeting in Hungary, in a small resort village about 20 miles from Budapest. We also held a conference in Majorca that led to the book Applying Social Psychology (Deutsch/Hornstein 1975). About this time, SSRC decided to end its financial support for the committee (it had had a rather extended life by SSRC’s usual standards for committees). The committee, however, was not quite ready to quit. Martin Irle hosted a small meeting in Mannheim, Germany. I hosted an even smaller one in my beach house in East Hampton, New York, and Jujuji Misumi hosted an even smaller one in Japan.
This traveling committee, which met mainly outside the United States (so as to stimulate the development of social psychology elsewhere), included—at different times—such people as Leon Festinger, John Lanzetta, Stanley Schachter, Harold Kelley, Henry Riecken, and myself from the United States, as well as Serge Moscovici, Henry Tajfel, Jaap Kookebacker, Martin Irle, Ragnar Rommetveit, Jujuji Misumi, and Jaromir Janousek from other parts of the world. Throughout much of its existence, Jerome Singer was the committee’s witty and tolerant administrator for SSRC.
During much of the same time, there was another traveling committee funded by the Office of Naval Research, through Luigi Petrullo, which met to discuss research on conflict. About half of its members were from the United States and the other half from Western Europe. Its U.S. members included Harold Kelley, Gerald Shure, John Thibaut, John Lanzetta, Dean Pruitt, and myself. Among the European were Serge Moscovici, Henry Tajfel, Claude Faucheux, Claude Flament, and Josef Nuttin Jr. We met about twice a year, alternating locales between Europoe and the United States. We had many good discussions, excellent wine and food, and formed some lasting friendships. We also did a cross-national experiment and bargaining that has rarely been cited. It was a wonderful period to be a social psychologist.
- 5.
Among the many students who contributed directly to this book were Rebecca Curtis, Michelle Find, Sandra Horowitz, Ivan Lansberg, Brian Maruffi, Louis Medvene, Dolores Mei, Marilyn Seiler, Janice Steil, Bruce Tuchman, Janet Weinglass, William Wench Jr., and Cilio Ziviani. Other students in my work groups on justice who have contributed indirectly to this volume include Lorinda Arella, Adrienne Asch, Susan Boardman, Ellen Brickman, Ellen Fagenson, Martha Gephart, Cheryl Koopman, Jay Kantor, Eric Marcus, Susan Opotow, Jorge da Silva Ribeiro, Rony Rinat, Shula Shichman, and Rachel Solomon.
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Deutsch, M. (2015). Autobiography of Morton Deutsch: A Personal Perspective on the Development of Social Psychology in the Twentieth Century. In: Morton Deutsch: A Pioneer in Developing Peace Psychology. SpringerBriefs on Pioneers in Science and Practice, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15440-4_1
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