A Pioneer's Legacy: the Influence of Morton Deutsch

Running head: THE INFLUENCE OF MORTON DEUTSCH 1 A Pioneer’s Legacy: The Influence of Morton Deutsch Daniel Druckman Daniel Druckman is professor emeritus of government and politics at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia. He is also an honorary professor at Macquarie University in Sydney and at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. His e-mail address is [email protected]. Morton (Mort) Deutsch had a long life and productive career. I was one of many who had the good fortune to know him and benefit from his advice and contributions. In this tribute, I recount many of these experiences with an emphasis on the substantive contributions that Mort made to my work including a debate that we had on sources of conflict. Always a source of inspiration, Mort pioneered the study of social-psychological aspects of conflict with his original laboratory experiments, theoretical innovations, and practical advice. Never have we needed his proposal on preventing World War Three more than at this difficult moment in international relations (see Wright, Evan, and Deutsch 1962). He was the last of the illustrious band of students of Kurt Lewin, considered by many to be the founders of modern social and organizational psychology; others included Leon Festinger (the theory of cognitive dissonance), Stanley Schachter (the psychology of affiliation), Harold Kelley and John Thibaut (the social psychology of groups), Kurt Back (on the dynamics of group processes), and Roger Barker (founder of ecological psychology). Their collective influence on social psychologyAuthor Manuscript has been monumental. This is the author manuscript accepted for publication and has undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of record. Please cite this article as doi:10.1111/nejo.12218. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. Although trained in the Lewinian field theory tradition, Mort understood a variety of other theoretical approaches as evidenced in the book, Theories in Social Psychology, that he wrote with Robert Krauss (1965). These included Gestalt psychology, reinforcement theories, psychoanalytic theory, and role theory. The first social psychology text book I ever used as an undergraduate was the highly readable first edition of Research Methods in Social Relations that Mort co-authored (Selltiz et al. 1959). It had the laudable quality of not scaring prospective students off from becoming social scientists. In my case it served the function of helping to encourage me to enter the field myself. Mort has been a continuing source of influence for my entire career. My recent research with Cecilia Albin and Lynn Wagner on justice in peace agreements to end civil wars extended Mort’s laboratory findings on the importance of equality in negotiation outcomes, which he presented in his 1985 book Distributive Justice. He discovered that equality was the preferred distributive principle among his laboratory students. Similar to his results, but in an entirely different setting, my colleagues and I found that more durable peace agreements occurred when the distributive principle of equality was emphasized in the signed agreements (e.g., Albin and Druckman 2012). A larger reward for me was being listed in Distributive Justice as one of the scholars who influenced Mort’s work – a list that appeared long before we embarked on the justice research. And, I was only 45 years old! He was always generous in his praise. Many other encounters with Mort remain firmly vivid in my memory. In his role as discussant for a complex conflict systems modeling paper presented at an American Psychological Association panel in the 1970s, he provided needed clarification for arguments Author Manuscript that Richard Rozelle and I put forth. In that paper we explored questions and developed This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. alternative models about the roles of values (or ideologies), interests (or utilities) and power in making decisions about distributing resources to various projects (Druckman and Rozelle 1974). We reversed roles when I served as a discussant in the early 1980s for Mort’s address at George Mason University’s new Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (which has since become a school). I was critical of his “inside” approach to understanding motives for conflict. He attributed cause to individual motives, a view influenced perhaps by his training as a psychoanalyst; I looked to context for explanations (see the debate in Sandole and Sandole 1987). Our joint participation in the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) Committee on International Relations, chaired by Tom Milburn, gave me another opportunity to observe and appreciate Mort’s quiet reasoned advice about war prevention. I also recall spirited discussions with him about the value of social science contributions to practical problems at a meeting held at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research headquarters in New York. Mort and I also participated together in a 1975 conference at the Center for Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina. Mort and J. Stacy Adams, creator of the famed “equity theory,” debated spiritedly over the various roles of the equity and equality principles of distributive justice. The laboratory and field research discussed above provide strong support for Mort’s argument that equality is the stronger principle. He also made the point, however, that preferences for one or the other may be contingent on the framing of the situation: a preference for equality is likely in less hierarchical, more horizontal organizational settings; a preference for equity occurs in more hierarchical, power-differentiated organizations (for more on these differences see Kabanoff 1991). Author Manuscript This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. During the same year as the North Carolina conference, I published an article with Robert Mahoney in which we compared Mort’s theoretical approach to studying deterrence with that taken by Richard Brody (Mahoney and Druckman 1975). Mort and his co-author, Robert Krauss, were trying to develop a general theory of deterrence that would apply to a wide range of situations (Deutsch and Krauss 1962). Brody, on the other hand, was working with a more bounded theory that applies to a particular type of international system in which several nations have nuclear capabilities (Brody 1963). Our article explored the relative merits of these two approaches to simulation design. Few, if any, discussions of Mort’s research have uncovered this feature of his theoretical approach. We are pleased to have presented the arguments to readers of the deterrence and simulation literatures. In 1977, we also participated in a particularly intense conference on experimental economics held in Germany that featured hour-long presentations from each participant. Mort and Paul Kotik presented their work on altruism and bargaining (Deutsch and Kotik 1978) and I presented mine on the monitoring function in negotiation (Druckman 1978). Reinhard Selten, a 1994 Nobel laureate in economics, was one of the organizers of these conferences, and I remember that Mort and I discussed Selten’s contributions to a report in the early 1960s that provided an intellectual foundation for the new U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. The report applied game theory to issues of arming and disarming. We wondered whether and how these formal theoretical arguments would influence policy makers at the new agency, a question I asked again several years later, in 1985, when I conducted a project for the agency on strategies for getting the Soviet Union back to the negotiating table at the START nuclear disarmament talks. Author Manuscript This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. Our group benefited as well from his sage advice on publication strategies as a reviewer of our George Mason conflict analysis and resolution program. He advised that faculty and students co-author publications that result from dissertations, which he predicted would bolster the reputation of the institute and improve the job opportunities for our graduates. Indeed, we acted on this advice and as a result increased our collective production. The last time I saw Mort was at a conference on dynamical systems in Poland in October 2006. Mort was delighted by Andrzej Nowak’s presentation in which he modeled Deutsch’s “crude law of social relations.” And I was delighted when he told me that he would have used my book on research methods (Druckman 2005) if he were still teaching at the time. Through the years, we had spirited discussions about the sources of influence on conflict. As I noted above, his psychoanalytically inspired emphasis on “internal” factors contrasted with my “outside” contextual views. His 1958 Journal of Conflict Resolution (JCR) article on trust was seminal and inspired other articles that followed in the same journal. James Wall and I (2017) featured this research stream in an article we wrote this past year for JCR’s sixty-year- anniversary issue of that journal. His work on trust has influenced a diverse range of research projects. A small sample includes work on “trust ladders” that go from calculus to knowledge to identity-based trust (Lewicki and Wiethoff 2000), studies of efforts to terminate violent international conflicts (Irmer and Druckman 2009), and an exploration of the distinctions between affective and cognitive trust (Druckman and Olekalns 2013). In 1993, Mort became the first recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Association for Conflict Management (IACM). Although I did not attend that meeting, I was in the audience at Mort’s Kurt Lewin Memorial Address given at the American Author Manuscript Psychological Association meeting in 1968 (see Deutsch 1969). In this address, Morton extended This article is protected by copyright.

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