Useful Research

FIVECommentaryWalking on Three Legs

J. RICHARD HACKMAN

HERB KELMAN, one of the most distinguished social psychologists of his generation and now an emeritus professor at Harvard, has devoted the last several decades to developing and testing strategies for ameliorating intergroup conflict. He has not been shy about taking on the hardest problems—the Mideast and Northern Ireland, for example—and he has learned a lot about what it takes to reverse, or at least to contain, the escalation of such conflicts. As much as anyone I know, Herb works productively right at the intersection of theory and practice. So it brings a smile when one reads what he has posted on the door of his William James Hall office:

Theory is when you know everything but nothing ...