Profiles in Social Justice Research Morton Deutsch

Transcription

1 Social Justice Research, Vol. 19, No. 1, March 2006 ( C 2006) DOI: /s Profiles in Social Justice Research Morton Deutsch John T. Jost 1 Morton Deutsch has been a leading figure in the social psychological study of social justice for more than 50 years. His experimental and field research on such pivotal topics as conformity, intergroup relations, cooperation and competition, trust and suspicion, conflict resolution, and distributive justice has profoundly influenced several generations of social scientists and practitioners. I am delighted to publish in this issue a new article by Morton Deutsch (2006) in which he outlines A Framework for Thinking about Oppression and Its Change as well as several new articles written by prominent justice researchers, including former students and colleagues who have been inspired by Deutsch and his work (see also Bunker & Rubin, 1995). The contributors to this special issue were gathered together for a conference on Interrupting Oppression and Sustaining Justice that was held at Teachers College, Columbia University on February 27 28, As Deutsch (1999) notes in an autobiographical essay, he was born (prematurely) on February 4, 1920 as the fourth son in a Jewish middle-class family in New York City (see also Frydenberg, 2005). He enrolled in the City College of New York at age fifteen and received his bachelor s degree in psychology in His first laboratory experiment made use of Sherif s paradigm for using the autokinetic effect to investigate social influence. At City College, Deutsch also developed a life-long interest in the themes addressed by members of the Frankfurt School and inspired by Brown (1936) the possibility of integrating the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and social psychologists such as George Herbert Mead and Kurt Lewin (see Deutsch, 1999). He also earned a reputation as a social activist, union organizer, and someone who was quick to criticize racial and other injustices in everyday life. After he obtained a master s degree in clinical psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1940, Deutsch s academic career was put on hold following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of Deutsch joined the air force 1 All correspondence should be addressed to John T. Jost, Department of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, Room 578, New York ; john.jost@nyu.edu /06/ /0 C 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.

2 2 Jost and, after requesting training as a navigator, later flew in thirty bombing missions against the Germans. Looking back on the experience, he wrote that, Although I had no doubt of the justness of the war against the Nazis, I was appalled by its destructiveness (Deutsch, 1999, p. 6). His abiding interest in conflict resolution was no doubt informed by first-hand knowledge of the tragic costs of war. After the end of World War II, Deutsch entered the doctoral program at the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied with Kurt Lewin and received his Ph.D. in He found Lewin to be a brilliant, enthusiastic, effervescent, youthful, middle-aged man who inspired others by fostering open and vigorous conflict about ideas and methods (Deutsch, 1999, pp. 7 9). At M.I.T., Deutsch not only ignited his research career but also encountered his wife-to-be, Lydia Shapiro, who was then working for Lewin as an interviewer in a study of self-hatred among Jews. Witnesses at the 1947 wedding included fellow Lewin students and Deutsch roommates, Stanley Schachter and Albert Pepitone, both of whom were also to become eminent social psychologists. Deutsch s dissertation research on the effects of cooperation and competition resulted in the publication of a ground-breaking article (Deutsch, 1949). In 1949 Deutsch joined the faculty at New York University, where he engaged in enormously fruitful collaborations with Mary Evan Collins on the subject of Interracial Housing (Deutsch and Collins, 1951), with Marie Jahoda and Stuart Cook on a textbook on Research Methods in Social Relations (Jahoda et al., 1951), and with Harold Gerard on normative and informational routes to social influence (Deutsch and Gerard, 1955). Deutsch also developed an early interest in the Prisoner s Dilemma and other experimental approaches to suspicion, trust, and conflict dilemmas. Exhibiting tremendous intellectual breadth, Deutsch also sought psychoanalytic training at the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health, where he received a Certificate in Psychoanalysis in By that time, Deutsch had accepted Carl Hovland s invitation to join the basic research group in psychology at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. The reasons for leaving his academic post were both financial and political. Deutsch (1999, p. 15) wrote that: During my tenure at New York University, most of my salary was paid out of soft money, from research grants or other monies from outside sources. As McCarthyism developed increasing strength in the early 1950s, social science and social scientists became targets of attack, being labeled as radical, fellow travelers, communist sympathizers, and the like. If your personal library contained books by Karl Marx, if you had participated in interracial groups challenging segregation, if a friend was or had been a member of the Communist Party, and so on, you were suspect and might be purged from your position. During the height of the McCarthy period, many funding agencies no longer were willing to support research dealing with prejudice or interracial relations, and there was much talk of reducing federal support for social science research. The post at Bell Labs was a good one, and Deutsch was able to work closely with Robert Krauss on ingenious studies of interpersonal bargaining using the

3 Profiles in Social Justice Research Morton Deutsch 3 now-famous Acme-Bolt Trucking game (e.g., Deutsch and Krauss, 1962) and an important book on Theories in Social Psychology (e.g., Deutsch and Krauss, 1965). Deutsch moved to Teachers College at Columbia University in 1963, where he has remained for more than 40 years. By obtaining outside funding from the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the National Institute of Mental Health, Deutsch was able to build a formidable graduate program that trained many successful researchers and practitioners, including Adrienne Asch, Barbara Bunker, Peter Coleman, Michelle Fine, Madeline Heilman, Harvey Hornstein, Chick Judd, Kenneth Kressel, Roy Lewicki, Susan Opotow, Jeffrey Rubin, and Janice Steil, among others. In what is probably Deutsch s most influential book, The Resolution of Conflict (1973), he summarized the lessons of his first 25 years of research on, among other things, cooperation and conflict. In this book, which he first delivered as part of the Carl Hovland Memorial Lectures at Yale University, Deutsch articulates his crude law of social relations, according to which the characteristic processes and effects elicited by a given type of social relationship (cooperative or competitive) tend also to elicit that type of social relationship (p. 365, emphasis deleted). The point is that social forms are self-fulfilling, so that coercion, intimidation, deception, distrust, and hostility are both causes and effects of competition, whereas assistance, openness, information sharing, perceived similarity, and friendliness are both causes and effects of cooperation (for a critical review, see Billig, 1975, and the reply by Deutsch, 1975a). Melvin Lerner, a former graduate student at NYU who had joined the faculty at the University of Waterloo, invited Deutsch to participate in a conference entitled Contributions to a Just Society and encouraged him to write what turned out to be two very influential papers. In the first of these, Deutsch (1974) argued that moral outrage and the sense of injustice do not necessarily come automatically to people and must often be awakened (see also Fine, 1979; Jost, 1995). In the second article, Deutsch (1975b) discussed equity, equality, and need as distinctive distributive justice principles that are valuable and appropriate under specifiable conditions (see also Lerner, 1974). Empirical research springing from these and related ideas was summarized in Deutsch s (1985) book entitled Distributive Justice: A Social Psychological Perspective. In 1982 Deutsch became the E. L. Thorndike Professor of Psychology and Education at Teachers College and held that position until his retirement in Deutsch founded the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (ICCCR) in 1986 and was its Director until In 2000, Deutsch and the current Director of ICCCR, Peter Coleman, published The Handbook of Conflict Resolution. Deutsch has continued to work on themes that are central to social justice research and also to political psychology (e.g., Deutsch and Kinnvall, 2002). Deutsch has given immeasurably to the field. He has served, for example, as President of numerous professional societies, including the Society for the

4 4 Jost Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI, ), the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP, ), and several divisions of the American Psychological Association (APA), including Personality and Social Psychology ( ) and Peace Psychology ( ). The award and honors Deutsch has received are too numerous to list here, so I will mention only a smattering: the American Association for the Advancement of Science social psychological prize (1961), the Kurt Lewin Memorial Award (SPSSI, 1968), the Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize (SPSSI, 1973), the Nevitt Sanford Award (ISPP, 1984), the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SESP) Distinguished Scientist Award (1985), the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award (1987), and a William James Fellowship awarded by the American Psychological Society (1988). After having received so many awards and prizes, Morton Deutsch is now willing to lend his name to an award that will recognize important contributions published in this journal. The International Society for Justice Research (ISJR) now offers an annual award in his name for the best article published in Social Justice Research, with preference given to contributions from investigators who are early in their research careers. Given how much Deutsch achieved so early in his own career and how much he has supported students and colleagues in the early stages of their careers, the focus of the ISJR Morton Deutsch Award seems particularly appropriate and, in a word, just. REFERENCES Billig, M. (1975). The resolution of conflict: Constructive and destructive processes, by Morton Deutsch [Book Review]. European Journal of Social Psychology 5: Brown, J. F. (1936). Psychology and the Social Order: An Introduction to the Dynamic Study of Social Fields. McGraw-Hill, New York. Bunker, B.B., and Rubin, J.Z. (eds.). (1995). Conflict, cooperation, and justice: Essays in honor of Morton Deutsch. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco. Deutsch, M. (1949). A theory of cooperation and competition. Human Relations 2: Deutsch, M. (1973). The Resolution of Conflict: Constructive and Destructive Processes. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Deutsch, M. (1974). Awakening the sense of injustice. In Lerner, M., and Ross, M. (eds.), The Quest for Justice. Holt, New York. Deutsch, M. (1975a). A reply to Billig. European Journal of Social Psychology 5: Deutsch, M. (1975b). Equity, equality, and need: What determines which value will be used as the basis of distributive justice. Journal of Social Issues 31: Deutsch, M. (1985). Distributive Justice: A Social Psychological Perspective. Yale University Press, NewHaven,CT. Deutsch, M. (1999). A personal perspective on the development of social psychology in the twentieth century. In Rodrigues, A., and Levine, R. (eds.), Reflections on 100 Years of Experimental Social Psychology. Basic Books, New York, pp Deutsch, M. (2006). A framework for thinking about oppression and its change. Social Justice Research 19: Deutsch, M., and Coleman, P. T. (eds.) (2000). The Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.

5 Profiles in Social Justice Research Morton Deutsch 5 Deutsch, M., and Collins, M. E. (1951). Interracial Housing: A Psychological Evaluation of a Social Experiment. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Deutsch, M., and Gerard, H. B. (1955). A study of normative and informational influences upon individual judgment. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 51: Deutsch, M., and Kinnvall, C. (2002). What is political psychology? In Monroe, K. (ed.), Political Psychology. Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, pp Deutsch, M. and Krauss, R. M. (1962). Studies of interpersonal bargaining. Journal of Conflict Resolution 6: Deutsch, M., and Krauss, R. M. (1965). Theories in Social Psychology. Basic Books, New York. Fine, M. (1979). Options to injustice: Seeing other lights. Representative Research in Social Psychology 10: Frydenberg, E. (2005). Morton Deutsch: A Life and Legacy of Mediation and Conflict Resolution. Australian Academic Press, Brisbane. Jahoda, M., Deutsch, M., and Cook, S. W. (eds.). (1951). Research Methods in Social Relation. Dryden Press, New York. Jost, J. T. (1995). Negative illusions: Conceptual clarification and psychological evidence concerning false consciousness. Political Psychology 16: Lerner, M. J. (1974). The justice motive: Equity and parity among children. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 29: