[5] 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.
He was also tasked with instructing introductory psychology classes to undergraduate students, in which he undertook an experiment comparing cooperative and competitive grading processes.
[12] While at MIT Deutsch also met his future wife Lydia Shapiro when he was assigned to supervise her work under Lewin.
[13][14] 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.
[15] 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.
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.
"[16] Modern commentators have accredited Deutsch's research as a valuable contribution to the end of segregation policies in the United States.
[17] 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.
[3] While at Bell one of the more prominent experiments he conducted was the Acme-Bolt Trucking game,[5] 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.
[22] In 1963 he made what would be his final move between institutions, when he started at Teachers College, Columbia University after being invited to found a new social psychology doctoral program.
[24] The impact of his work was seen both in theory and in practice—for example, in 1989 both Janusz Grzelak (a leading figure of the Solidarity movement in Poland) and Janusz Reykowski (a leading figure of the Communist Party of Poland) cited Deutsch's work as part of the infrastructure for the peaceful transfer of power from the Communists to the people.
[25] Deutsch was appointed Edward Lee Thorndike Professor of Psychology and Education in 1981, and delivered his inaugural address on April 22, 1982.
[28] For example, in 1987 the Center was involved in training teachers in Long Island and New Jersey to deal with inter-student and gang violence in lower-income communities.
His Crude Law as well as his research into distributive justice expanded the breadth of his body of work in the field of conflict resolution.
[3] In 2005 the ICCCR inaugurated the annual Morton Deutsch Award, provided to both a scholar-practitioner in the field of social justice and also to the winner of a student paper competition.
[40] The Columbia University Libraries house the Morton Deutsch Collection, which consists of a print and online archive of his work.