Morton Deutsch: Celebrating His Theorizing and Research

This tribute to Morton Deutsch celebrates his unique contributions to social psychological theory, research, cross-cultural applications to business and organizational settings, and cross-species applications. Mort's theorizing progressed from cooperation and competition to trust to conflict resolution to distributive justice, and finally to oppression. As a researcher, Mort was remarkably creative and innovative. His ability to think of ways to study experimentally complex social phenomena created a revolution in social psychology research. Mort's theories and research is being used to understand the nature of effective leadership and organization functioning in business and industry in Asia and other parts of the world. The strong cross-cultural validation of Mort's theorizing and research is unusual in the social sciences. Finally, Mort's cooperation and competition theory operationalizes the dynamics between cooperative and competitive processes in a variety of species and accounts for the mechanisms (e.g., goal structures) that underlie different evolutionary processes.