Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [278]
During the 1980s and 1990s, however, the vogue for artful, ingenious, and daring deceptive experiments waned, although deceptive research remains a major device in the social psychologists’ toolbox. Today most social psychologists are more prudent and cautious than were Festinger, Zimbardo, Milgram, Darley, and Latané, and yet the special quality of deceptive experimentation appeals to a certain kind of researcher. When one meets and talks to practitioners of such research, one gets the impression that they are a competitive, nosy, waggish, daring, stunt-loving, and exuberant lot, quite unlike such sobersides as Wundt, Pavlov, Binet, and Piaget.
Ongoing Inquiries
Of the wide variety of topics in the vast, amorphous field of social psychology, some, as we have seen, are closed cases; others have been actively and continuously investigated for many decades; and many others have come to the fore more recently. The currently ongoing inquiries, though they cover a wide range of subjects, have one characteristic in common: relevance to human welfare. Nearly all are issues not only of scientific interest but of profound potential for the improvement of the human condition. We will look closely at two examples and briefly at a handful of others.
Conflict Resolution
Over half a century ago social psychologists became interested in determining which factors promote cooperation rather than competition and whether people function more effectively in one kind of milieu than another. After a while, they redefined their subject as “conflict resolution” and their concern as the outcome when people compete, or when they cooperate, to achieve their goals.
Morton Deutsch, now a professor emeritus at Teachers College, Columbia University, was long the doyen of conflict-resolution research. He suspects that his interest in the subject may have its roots in his childhood.47 The fourth and youngest son of Polish-Jewish immigrants, he was always the underdog at home, an experience he trans-muted into the lifelong study of social justice and methods for the peaceful resolution of conflict.
It took him a while to discover that this was his real interest. He became fascinated by psychology as a high school student when he read Freud and responded strongly to descriptions of emotional processes he had felt going on in himself, and in college he planned to become a clinical psychologist. But the social ferment of the 1930s and the upheavals of World War II gave him an even stronger interest in the study of social problems. After the war he sought out Kurt Lewin, whose magnetic personality and exciting ideas, particularly about social issues, convinced Deutsch to become a social psychologist. For his doctoral dissertation he studied conflict resolution, and continued to work in that area throughout his long career. The subject was congenial to his personality: unlike many other social psychologists, he is soft-spoken, kindly, and peace-loving, and as an experimenter relied largely on the use of games that involved neither deception nor discomfort for the participants.
A particular focus of his research was the behavior of people in “mixed-motive situations,” such as labor-management disputes or disarmament negotiations, where each side seeks to benefit at the other’s cost yet has interests in common with, and does not want to destroy, the other. In the 1950s he studied such situations intensively in the laboratory by means of his own modification of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game.48 In Deutsch’s version, each player seeks