Kurt Lewin
Kurt Zadek Lewin or Kurt Tsadek Lewin was a German-American psychologist, known as one of the modern pioneers of social, organizational, and applied psychology in the United States. During his professional career, Lewin's academic research and writings focuses on applied research, action research, and group communication.
Lewin is often recognized as the "founder of social psychology" and was one of the first to study group dynamics and organizational development. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Lewin as the 18th-most cited psychologist of the 20th century. During his career, he was affiliated with several U.S. and European universities, including the University of Berlin, Cornell University, MIT, Stanford University, and the University of Iowa.
Early life and education
Lewin was born in 1890 into a Jewish family in Mogilno, County of Mogilno, Province of Posen, Prussia in present-day Poland, a small village with then about 5,000 residents, about 150 of whom were Jewish. Lewin received an orthodox Jewish education at home. He was one of four children born into a middle-class family. His father owned a small general store, and the family lived in an apartment above the store. His father, Leopold, operated a farm jointly with his brother Max; however, the farm was legally owned by a Christian because Jews were not permitted to own farms at the time.In 1905, Lewin moved with his family to Berlin, so Lewin and his brothers could receive a better education. From 1905 to 1908, Lewin studied at the Kaiserin Augusta Gymnasium, where he received a classical humanistic education. In 1909, he entered the University of Freiburg to study medicine, but transferred to the University of Munich to study biology. At the University of Munich, he became involved with the socialist and women's rights movements around this time.
In April 1910, Lewin transferred to the Royal Friedrich-Wilhelms University of Berlin, where he was still a medical student. By the Easter semester of 1911, his interests had shifted toward philosophy. By the summer of 1911, the majority of his courses were in psychology. While at the University of Berlin, Lewin took 14 courses with Carl Stumpf.
When World War I began, he served in the Imperial German Army, during which he sustained a war wound and returned to the University of Berlin to complete his PhD. Lewin wrote a dissertation proposal asking Stumpf to be his supervisor, and Stumpf assented. Even though Lewin worked under Stumpf to complete his dissertation, their relationship did not involve much communication. Lewin studied associations, will, and intention for his dissertation, but he did not discuss it with Stumpf until his final doctoral examination.
Career
Academia
Lewin was originally involved with schools of behavioral psychology before changing directions in research and undertaking work with psychologists of the Gestalt school of psychology, including Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler. He also joined the Psychological Institute of the University of Berlin, where he lectured and gave seminars on both philosophy and psychology. He served as a professor at the University of Berlin from 1926 to 1932, during which time he conducted experiments about tension states, needs, motivation, and learning.In 1933, Lewin had tried to negotiate a teaching position as the chair of psychology and creating a research institute at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Lewin often associated with the early Frankfurt School, originated by an influential group of largely Jewish Marxists at the Institute for Social Research in Germany. But when Adolf Hitler came to power in Nazi Germany in 1933, the Institute members disbanded, and moved to England and then to the United States. The same year, he met with Eric Trist, of the London Tavistock Clinic. Trist was impressed with his theories and went on to use them in his studies on soldiers during World War II.
In August 1933, Lewin immigrated to the U.S., where, in 1940, became a naturalized citizen. A few years after relocating to the U.S., Lewin began asking people to pronounce his name as "Lou-in" rather than "Le-veen" because the mispronunciation of his name by Americans had led to many missed phone calls. However, shortly before his death, he began requesting students and colleagues to use the correct pronunciation because that is the one he preferred. Earlier, in 1930, he spent six months as a visiting professor at Stanford University. After his immigration to the U.S., Lewin worked at Cornell University, the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station at the University of Iowa, and as director of the Center for Group Dynamics at MIT.
Following World War II, Lewin was involved in the psychological rehabilitation of former occupants of displaced persons camps with Dr. Jacob Fine at Harvard Medical School. When Trist and A T M Wilson wrote to Lewin proposing a journal in partnership with their newly founded Tavistock Institute and his group at MIT, Lewin agreed. The Tavistock journal, Human Relations, was founded with two early papers by Lewin entitled "Frontiers in Group Dynamics". Lewin taught for a time at Duke University.
Lewin coined the notion of genidentity, which has gained some importance in various theories of space-time and related fields. For instance, he introduced the concept of hodological space or the simplest route achieved through the resolution of different field of forces, oppositions, and tensions according to their goals.
Lewin also proposed Herbert Blumer's interactionist perspective of 1937 as an alternative to the nature versus nurture debate. Lewin suggested that neither nature nor nurture alone can account for individuals' behavior and personalities, but rather that both nature and nurture interact to shape each person. This idea was presented in the form of Lewin's equation for behavior, B = ƒ, which means that behavior is a function of personal characteristics, and environmental characteristics.
Scholars in the 1930s reveled in fear that, by devoting themselves to applied research, they would distract the discipline from basic research on scholarly problems and create a false binary on whether research was developed for the perpetuation of their respective discipline or for practical application. Despite this debate within the social sciences at the time, Lewin argued that "applied research could be conducted with rigor and that one could test theoretical propositions in applied research." The root of this particular binary seemed to stem from the epistemological norms present within the hard sciences – where the distinction was much more pronounced; Kurt Lewin argued that this was contrary to the nature of the social sciences. With the help of scholars, including Paul Lazarsfeld, there was a method through which money could be acquired for research in a sustainable manner. Lewin has encouraged researchers to develop theories that can be used to address important social problems.
To demonstrate his dedication to applied research and to further prove that there was value in testing his theoretical propositions, Lewin became a "master at transposing an everyday problem into a psychological experiment". Lewin, in his beginnings, took a seemingly banal moment between himself and a waiter and turned it into the beginnings of his field research, which Lewin reasoned that the "intention to carry out a specific task builds a psychological tension, which is released when the intended task is completed" in tandem with when Sigmund Freud theorized that "wishes persist until they are satisfied." This happenstance observation started the demonstration of the "existence of psychic tensions", fundamental to Lewin's field theory.
While applied research helped develop Lewin into a practical theorist, what further defined him as an academic and a forerunner was his action research, a term he invented himself. Lewin was increasingly interested in the concepts of Jewish migration and identity. He was confused by the concept of how while an individual distanced themselves from performing the Jewish identity in terms of religious expression and performance, they were still considered Jewish in the eyes of Nazis. This concept of denying one's identity and the promotion of self-loathing as a form of coping with a dominant group's oppression represented the crisis of Lewin's own migration to the United States. Lewin, as his student and colleague Ron Lippitt described, "had a deep sensitivity to social problems and a commitment to use his resources as a social scientist to do something about them.
In the early 1940s, he drew a triangle to represent the interdependence of research, training, and action in producing social change." This diagramming of an academic's interests and actions within this triangulation yields an interesting part of accessing Lewin and his contributions. Rather than noting social justice as the beginning or the end, it was ingrained in every single academic action that Lewin took. It was this particular world view and paradigm that furthered his research and determined precisely how he was going to utilize the findings from his field research. Furthermore, it all reflected upon Lewin the man and his way of coping with the events of his time period. This devotion to action research was possibly a way of resolving a dissonance of his own passage to America and how he left his own back in present-day Poland.
Prominent psychologists mentored by Lewin included Leon Festinger, who became known for his cognitive dissonance theory, environmental psychologist Roger Barker, Bluma Zeigarnik, and Morton Deutsch, the founder of modern conflict resolution theory and practice.