Daniel Bar-Tal

Daniel Bar-Tal (Hebrew: דניאל בר-טל‎‎; born 1946) is an Israeli academic, author and Branco Weiss Professor of Research in Child Development and Education at School of Education, Tel Aviv University.

Bar-Tal was born in Stalinabad, Tajikistan, 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 Learning Research and Development Center for postdoctoral studies during 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.

Since the early 1980s 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.

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