The world lost an intellectual giant this year when Morton Deutsch—an eminent psychologist, Columbia University professor, mentor extraordinaire, and one of the founders of the field of conflict resolution—passed away in March at the age of 97. Throughout his long and illustrious career, Deutsch remained committed to promoting a more just, peaceful and sustainable world. In honor of his life and legacy, our Director Peter T. Coleman has selected a series of ten of Deutsch’s most significant scientific to highlight in a series of weekly blog posts, running on Psychology Today and Huffington Post.
The first of these weekly posts was published on Thursday, August 10, and a new blog will be posted each week through Thursday, October 12. Below you can find the link to this week’s blog—you can also check back here for links on future blogs, and remember to follow us on social media for more of our updates!
Finally to read more about Deutsch’s life and work, please visit: http://icccr.tc.columbia.edu/founder-morton-deutsch/
Social psychology has long suffered from split-personality disorder. From its early roots, the discipline has been alternately conceptualized from a sociological perspective, emphasizing the role of the environment on human interaction, or from the perspective of personality psychology, privileging the instincts, sentiments, and character of the individual. Of course, this division merely reflected the debate raging within the broader domain of science regarding the relative importance of nature versus nurture in our understanding of the world. Darwin addressed this divide initially in 1859 when he introduced the evolutionary concepts of individual-environmental fit and adaptation. Later, Kurt Lewin took up this issue in psychology, suggesting that neither instincts nor situations account wholly for human behavior, but rather that behavior (B) is a function of both the person (P) and the environment (E) as they interact. More formally, Lewin offered: Bf(P x E). Read the full article here at Psychology Today—A Grand Theory of Personality and Environment