Pioneers in U.S. Peace Psychology: Morton Deutsch

Offers a biographical account of the life of Morton Deutsch. Deutsch was born in 1920 in New York City into a Jewish middle-class family, the last of four sons. Mort was antiwar, but not a pacifist, so when the United States entered World War II (WWII) he enlisted in the Air Force. Assigned to a psychological research unit, he ultimately volunteered for combat and served as a navigator on bombing missions over Europe. Following his discharge from the Air Force, Mort was accepted into all three psychology doctoral programs to which he applied: Yale University, the University of Chicago, and MIT. He was determined to "establish a program that would attract tough-minded and tender-hearted graduate students" who, as he wrote, "would be as knowledgeable and expert in theory and research as the best of the 'pure' experimental social psychologists and also socially concerned with developing and applying social psychological knowledge to the urgent and important social problems of our time." He worked on dynamics of conflict, cooperation, and justice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)