1890-1947
Kurt Lewin was a psychologist with wide-ranging interests in psychological theory, child development, personality, social psychology, and social issues. He was born on September 9, 1890, to a Jewish family in Prussia. His family moved to Berlin in 1905 to provide access to better educational institutions for their children. Lewin entered the University of Berlin in 1910 and completed requirements for the PhD in 1914, under the direction of Carl Stumpf (1848-1936), director of the psychology laboratory since 1894. Lewin then enlisted in the kaiser’s army as a private, rose to the rank of lieutenant, was wounded in combat and awarded the Iron Cross. After discharge from the military, he returned to the university and began lecturing and conducting research, receiving an appointment as privatdozent in 1921. He was promoted to Aussenordenlicher Professor in 1927. In 1932 Lewin accepted an appointment as visiting professor at Stanford University. His sojourn allowed him to form friendships with a number of American psychologists who assisted him in immigrating to the United States after Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) and the Nazis took control of Germany in 1933. Lewin held a two-year appointment at Cornell University, moved to the University of Iowa from 1935 to 1944, and then to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1944 until his death, from a heart attack, on February 12, 1947.
While in Berlin, Lewin began to study psychological issues considered too complex by the experimental psychologists of the time. He was interested in child development, human motivation and emotion, and personality. He considered the development of theories about these processes to be critical, and the use of experiments to test theory-based hypotheses as essential to progress in psychology. Lewin’s overarching theoretical approach was field theory, which asserted that human behavior was a function both of the person and the environmental forces acting on the person at the time, giving rise to his famous equation fi(behavior) = f(function)[P(person), £(environ-ment)]. He and his students designed experiments in which theoretically defined variables were manipulated by complex changes in the social and physical environment. Theories focusing on complex intrapsychic processes and equally complex experimental manipulations were Lewin’s unique contributions to the psychology of his time, as well as his legacy in the psychology that would develop after his death. Two books, A Dynamic Theory of Personality (1935) and Principles of Topological Psychology (1936), provide systematic treatments of his approach. His many experimental reports display his innovations in research methods. Early criticisms of Lewin’s work focused on the difficulty and unfamiliarity of the concepts he employed, as well as the complexity of the experimental protocols he used. Over time, these criticisms faded as the psychological issues he explored became important research topics, while the details of his theoretical work received less and less attention. His style of experimentation was adopted by his students and colleagues, notably Leon Festinger (1919-1989), and became a robust tradition in social psychology.
Lewin had a lifelong dream of establishing a research institute that would conduct applied research focused on social issues such as prejudice, intergroup conflict, and social change. He succeeded in establishing the Research Center for Group Dynamics at MIT in 1944, and the Commission on Community Interrelations for the American Jewish Congress in 1945 in New York. An outgrowth of this work was the development of the National Training Laboratories, within which the T-group, or sensitivity training, was created.
Lewin is regarded by many social psychologists as the father of their discipline. He is certainly one of the field’s towering ancestral figures, for two reasons. His unique combination of theory with bold experimentation provided the conceptual and methodological tools to study complex human social interaction. And, from his days in Berlin until his death in Massachusetts, he attracted and inspired dozens of students who used those tools to develop many of the central theories and findings in social psychology, including group dynamics, level of aspiration, social comparison processes, and action research.
