Morton Deutsch - Early Career

Early Career

One of the first projects of Deutsch's academic career was a study of group tension and racial attitudes as a part of the Commission on Community Interrelations of the American Jewish Congress. The goal of the Commission's work was to break through the apathy that the American society of the time had against religious or racial prejudice. In 1951, Deutsch and coauthor Mary Evans Collins, working out of the Research Center for Human Relations at NYU (where Deutsch had started working in 1949), produced a study comparing racially integrated housing in New York with racially segregated housing in Newark, New Jersey. Up until their study it was the norm for housing projects to follow a policy of segregation. The results of their study led to a reversal of policy in publicly held residential developments and to the belief that segregated housing was undemocratic. The study was published under the title Interracial Housing by the University of Minnesota Press in May of that year. In a 1951 newspaper interview with Louis Danzing, the Director for the segregated housing projects stated that, "The study has served as a catalyst to the re-examination of our basic interracial policies in housing and as a stimulus to their change. Many of us have long felt that artificial separation of colored and white families was an unwholesome procedure. However until the study of Dr. Deutsch and Mrs. Collins, we had no scientific evidence to substantiate our feelings." Modern commentators have accredited Deutsch's research as a valuable contribution to the end of segregation policies in the United States.

In 1951 Deutsch also published the textbook Research Methods in Social Relations with coauthors Marie Jahoda and Stuart W. Cook, a book that would go on to three editions over the following twenty-five years. In 1954, Deutsch began studying at the Postgraduate Center for Psychotherapy, where he graduated as a professionally trained psychoanalytic psychotherapist in 1957. In addition to his work as a social psychologist, he conducted a small practice as a psychotherapist until his retirement in the late 1980s. In 1956, he joined the staff of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he did research on interpersonal bargaining and small group processes. While at Bell one of the more prominent experiments he conducted was the Acme-Bolt Trucking game, which concluded that when an individual has the opportunity to apply threat to another in competition they will use it and that this threatening behavior does not lead to cooperation. Deutsch also co-edited the book Preventing World War III in 1962. This work continued from his initial concerns with nuclear warfare, including the idea of nuclear deterrence. As an expert in social psychology, he began appearing on television to discuss the developing field.