Morton Deutsch - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Morton Deutsch (1920 - ) was born in New York City into a family with three other children. By age 15 he was enrolled in university at the City College of New York. Deutsch started on a path into psychiatry, but switched to psychology after dissecting a guinea pig in a biology class. He received a B.S. from the City College of New York in 1939 and his M.A. in 1940 from the University of Pennsylvania. After his M.A. degree, Deutsch held a rotating internship that cycled between three New York State institutions: Letchworth Village (for the mentally incompetent), Warwick (for delinquent boys), and Rockland State Hospital (for mentally disturbed children and adults).

Deutsch joined the US Air Force after the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor, where he initially acted as a psychologist, then as a navigator flying in thirty bombing missions over Nazi Germany. During active combat Deutsch was honored with a Distinguished Flying Cross (and cluster) and an Air Medal (with three clusters). After his tour of duty was completed he served as a clinical psychologist in an Air Force convalescent hospital until his discharge. Subsequently, he studied at the MIT under Kurt Lewin, where he was graduated with a Ph.D. in 1948. He wrote his dissertation comparing the psychological effects and productivity of cooperative groups and competitive groups. Deutsch worked as a part of Lewin's Research Center for Group Dynamics, and his early research was largely tinged by the growing global concern with nuclear weapons. He was also tasked with instructing introductory psychology classes to undergraduate students, in which he undertook an experiment comparing cooperative and competitive grading processes.

This led to the major theoretical contribution Deutsch made during his early career; the "Theory of Cooperation and Competition", which studies A) interdependence among goals (cooperative versus competitive) and B) types of actions taken (effective versus bungling). The study uses three concepts to develop their implications for the social processes and personal relations that occur in groups: substitutability (how a person's actions are able to satisfy the intentions of another), cathexis (an individual's disposition to evaluate themselves or their surroundings), and inducibility (the readiness of an individual to accept the influence of another person). The theory was first presented in a paper published in 1949.

While at MIT Deutsch also met his future wife Lydia Shapiro when he was assigned to supervise her work under Lewin. They married on June 1, 1947, a year and a half after they met, and have remained together ever since.