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/
Mort Deutsch liked to say that he was a grandiose theorist – that he was interested in studying questions relevant to both cave people of the past and to space people of the future. So while studying martial conflict when he was working at Bell Labs, Deutsch and colleagues Myron Wish and Susan Kaplan decided to tackle the ambitious task of identifying the fundamental dimensions of people’s perceptions of interpersonal relations. In other words, they set out to map the most consequential aspects of all human social relationships that would distinguish between people’s experiences of different types of relations – from parents and children and merchants and customers to guards and prisoners and kings and subjects. Read the full article here at Psychology Today—What are the Fundamental Dimensions of Social Relationships?