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The Development of Interactive Problem Solving: In John Burton's Footsteps

I first learned about the new approach to unofficial diplomacy that John Burton was developing when I met him on his visit to the University of Michigan in the summer of 1966. He called it controlled communication at the time (see Burton, 1969) and had first applied it in an exercise on the conflict between Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore earlier that year. The approach immediately resonated with me. I saw it as a way of putting into practice the social-psychological approach to international conflict that I had been exploring at the theoretical level. When Burton invited me to come to London in the fall of 1966 as a member of the third-party panel in an exercise (what we now call a problem-solving workshop) on the Cyprus conflict that he was planning, I accepted with enthusiasm. My meeting with Burton and participation in the Cyprus exercise represented a major turning point in my work and in my life. It is important to note that I was well into midcareer at the time I met Burton. I was 39 years old and well-established in my field of social psychology. I had received my Ph.D. at Yale University in 1951, and in 1956 I was awarded the Socio-Psychological Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for my theoretical and experimental work on social influence (Kelman, 1956). I was a full professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Michigan, with a joint appointment at the Center for Research on Conflict Resolution. I was also one of the founders of the peace research movement in the United States, starting in 1951, and of the Journal of Conflict Resolution—the first journal in the field. I had even acquired some respectability within the IR field—despite my origins in psychology—especially with the publication of International Behavior: A Social-Psychological Analysis (Kelman, 1965a). Thus, my growing engagement in the type of endeavor pioneered by John Burton represented a significant change in my professional agenda—although, as I shall spell out in this article, a change that has drawn extensively on my earlier work and is directly continuous with it. The change in my endeavors as of 1966 has not been immediate and certainly not complete. I have done research, writing, and teaching in areas other than conflict resolution over the years. I have continued work in some of my earlier areas of concern. I initiated one major line of research—starting with a study in 1971, in collaboration with V. Lee Hamilton, of public reactions to the My Lai massacre and the trial of Lt. Calley, and culminating in a book entitled Crimes of Obedience (Kelman & Hamilton, 1989). But, increasingly over the years, my work came to center on activities that derived directly from John Burton’s pioneering contributions to theory and practice (Burton, 1969, 1979,