Although he is probably best known as a social psychologist, Dean Pruitt has long been associated with interesting research and thoughtful publications in the field of conflict resolution and peace studies. Possibly this combination is the result of his Quaker background or his early intellectual experience as part of the group of social scientists that began their career at the University of Michigan and at Northwestern University. However, even while finishing his doctorate at Yale, Pruitt took the opportunity to join the informal group founded as the “Research Exchange for the Prevention of War” and to write for its Bulletin. As a young postdoctoral fellow in the Psychology Department at Michigan between 1957 and 1959, he was part of the pioneering team that launched the Journal of Conflict Resolution.
Dr. Pruitt continued to pursue both his interests during his appointments at the University of Delaware and later at the State University of New York in Buffalo, where he taught for over 40 years, ending as an Emeritus Professor there in 2001. Both of his academic interests were reflected in his early publications, including his study of decision-making at the Department of State in 1964, and his pioneering collection on Theory and Research on the Causes of War which he published in 1970 with his colleague, political scientist, Richard Snyder. Initially, however, his main role as a teacher involved the study of psychological aspects of negotiation processes which later broadened into the analysis of third parties and mediation. His 1980s classic, Negotiation Behavior was part of the wave of scholarly interest in this up-to-then neglected aspect of the field, which resulted from the efforts of scholars such as Jeff Rubin, Dan Druckman, Bill Zartman, Max Bazerman, and Pruitt himself, all of whom later became members of the informal college known as WIN -- the Washington Interest in Negotiation Group.
One currently neglected aspect of Dean Pruitt’s work resulted from his experience of the student unrest during the late 1960s and early 1970s. He and his students carried out a fascinating, in-depth study of the conflicts and occupations on their own campus at SUNY Buffalo. The result was one of the best and most carefully researched case studies of a complex conflict in a small community, and one that was much used in the early teaching at CCAR (the Center for Conflict Analysis and Resolution).
Although Dean Pruitt is probably most famous in the field of conflict studies for his widely used introductory textbook, Social Conflict, initially written with Jeff Rubin, and in its third incarnation with his colleague, Sung Hee Kim, he has never moved far from the real world in trying to see whether ideas from field work and the laboratory could be used to understand the dynamics of human conflict. While writing theoretically about risky shift (a fashionable theory in the field of group decision-making in the 1970s and 1980s), integrative bargaining, coalition formation, or escalation processes, he has also written about the Berlin Crisis at the end of the 1950s, and about Henry Kissinger as mediator. Since becoming a distinguished Visiting Professor at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (S-CAR), he has written about the ending of such apparently intractable conflicts as South Africa and Northern Ireland. His career is in many ways an exemplar of the use of theory to help explain a confusing real world.
JB/CRM
