Daniel Bar-Tal is an Israeli academic, author and Branco Weiss Professor of Research in Child Development and Education at School of Education, Tel Aviv University.
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Bar-Tal was born in Stalinabad, USSR in 1946, but lived his childhood in Szczecin, Poland until his immigration to Israel in 1957. In Israel he completed his undergraduate studies at Tel Aviv University.
Bar-Tal has pursued his graduate training in social psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, where he completed his doctoral dissertation in 1974. He stayed at Pittsburgh for postdoctoral studies in 1975.
In 1975, Bar-Tal returned to Tel Aviv University. His teaching career has been at Tel Aviv. He served as a Director of the Walter Lebach Research Institute for Jewish-Arab Coexistence through Education from 2002 through 2005. He was a Co-editor in Chief of the Palestine Israel Journal from 2001 through 2005. He also served as the President of the International Society of Political Psychology from 1999 through 2000.
In 1991, his paper "The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict; A Cognitive Analysis" won the Otto Klineberg Intercultural and International Relations Prize of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI). In 2002, his paper, titled, Why does Fear Override Hope, won the second place in the same competition.
In 2009, his paper “Reconciliation as a foundation of culture of peace” won again the Otto Klineberg Intercultural and International Relations Prize of SPSSI.
The Golestan Fellowship permitted him to spend the 2000-2001 academic year at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS).
In 2006, Stereotypes and Prejudice in Conflict, received the Alexander George Award of the International Society of Political Psychology for the best book in Political Psychology. In 2006 he also received Peace Scholar Award of the Peace and Justice Studies Association.
In 2011 he received the Lasswell Award of the International Society of Political Psychology for “distinguished scientific contribution in the field of political psychology.”
Since the early eighties his interest has shifted to political psychology. First, he was interested in shared beliefs in groups and societies, in general studying their formation, function and change. Later he directed most of his attention to the study of the socio-psychological foundations of intractable conflicts and peace building, including reconciliation. In the latter area, he studied how socio-psychological infrastructure evolve in times of intractable conflict. This infrastructure was found to consist of shared societal beliefs of the ethos of the conflict, collective memory, and emotional collective orientations. Bar-Tal has examined the contents, acquisition, functions, of societal mechanisms, as well as their contribution to the crystallization of social identity and development of the culture of a society in conflict during the conflict. Bar-Tal has also studied socio-psychological barriers to peacemaking and ways to overcome them. He also examined the required changes in this socio-psychological repertoire for conflict resolution and reconciliation. Specifically, he proposed a conceptual framework allowing for reconciliation, peace education and eventually peace culture to evolve. In addition, in order to understand maintenance of conflicts Bar-Tal studied acquisition of the conflict repertoire of children and adolescents.
Bar-Tal developed with his collaborators theoretical frameworks for concepts like siege mentality, intractable conflict, security, patriotism, delegitimization, collective victimhood, ethos of conflict, collective emotional orientation, socio-psychological infrastructure, culture of conflict, coping psychologically with occupation, acquisition of intergroup psychological repertoire, transitional context, collective identity, reconciliation, culture of peace, barriers to peace making, and peace education.
In 1999 Bar-Tal has founded a learning community dedicated to the research of conflicts and their resolution. The community consists of ten to fifteen graduate and post-graduate students, mostly for doctoral degree, who have excelled in their studies. The students, arrive from leading universities in and outside Israel and study for various related degrees, carry their studies regarding conflicts and their resolution. The learning community serves as a framework for learning, reflecting, debating, and developing; carrying conceptual and empirical studies; socialization for academic career and societal involvement; and for social support.
Bar-Tal has published twenty books and over two hundreds articles and chapters in major social and political psychological journals, books and encyclopedias.
Through the years he has lectured widely on his work in many different countries, and worked as Visiting Professor at Vanderbilt University, Nashville; Brandeis University, Boston; Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris; University of Muenster, Germany, University of Maryland, College Park, Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw and University of Palermo.
In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Daniel Bar-Tal, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 40+ works in 120+ publications in 4 languages and 5,000+ library holdings.[1]