Kurt Lewin And Field Theory: The Birth Of Social Psychology
In the history of psychology there are few figures as important and influential as Kurt Lewin This researcher was not only one of the promoters of Gestalt psychology, but is also considered the father of social psychology and organizational psychology.
Kurt Lewin was also the creator of the Field Theory, which has served as a basis for developing research on group dynamics, very applicable in the organizational and business environment. Next, to understand his legacy, we will go back to the years in which Kurt Lewin developed his ideas.
Kurt Lewin was born in 1890 into a Jewish family living in Mogilno, a town that at that time belonged to the kingdom of Prussia and is now part of Poland.
After he and his family moved to Berlin, Kurt Lewin began studying medicine at the University of Freiburg but shortly afterwards moved to Munich to undertake a biology career. Back in Berlin, and without having finished his training, he became more interested in psychology and philosophy, a discipline that he began to study in 1911. By that time he had already begun to participate in initiatives linked to socialism, Marxism and the struggle for women’s rights, and believed that applied psychology could be helpful in promoting reforms in favor of equality.
Forging Gestalt psychology
With the outbreak of World War I, Kurt Lewin was sent to the front to serve as a gunner. However, he was immediately wounded, so he remained convalescing for several days. At that moment he began to make a description of the battlefield using topological terms that were reminiscent of what would be done from the Gestalt theory, which was being forged at that time, and which also recalled the topological theory that he himself would create something later.
Once he had returned to Berlin, In addition to earning a doctorate in philosophy, Kurt Lewin began working at the Berlin Psychological Institute It is there where he came into contact with two other great representatives of Gestalt psychology: Wolfgang Köhler and Max Wertheimer The exchange of ideas between them allowed the ideas belonging to the Gestalt movement to be consolidated and, at the same time, served as a breeding ground for the laboratory to be a place where young promises of European psychology were to be trained. , like Bluma Zeigarnik.
Kurt Lewin in the United States
In 1933, when Hitler and the Nazis rise to power, Kurt Lewin decides to immediately move to another country. He ends up emigrating to the United States after trying unsuccessfully to obtain a position as a university professor in Jerusalem, and thanks to Wolfgang Köhler’s contacts he manages to go to work at Cornell University and later move to Iowa. In 1944 he went to to be director of the Group Dynamics Research Center at MIT in Massachusetts.
During this time, Kurt Lewin worked especially on social phenomena that have to do with social interaction, and investigated everything from the effects that social pressure has on children’s eating habits to the work dynamics that are most effective in organizations. Therefore, the areas touched by Kurt Lewin went far beyond what was usually associated with the repertoire of activities of a psychologist, whether from the Gestalt movement or any other school.
When Kurt Lewin died in 1947, had already left open a door that would give way to the new branch of psychology: social psychology
In the years in which Kurt Lewin lived in North America, behaviorism was the prevailing paradigm in the United States. Behaviorists understood that human behavior is the result of the way in which the environment influences individuals, but Lewin started from a very different vision of psychology from this. He, like the representatives of the Gestalt in Europe, understood that people are not a simple passive agent that reacts to stimuli, but that They act according to the way in which they perceive that they themselves interact with the environment Interaction was, therefore, the fundamental element from which Kurt Lewin started in his analysis.
Field Theory is his way of expressing the idea that psychology should not focus on the study of the person and the environment as if these were two pieces to be analyzed separately, but rather we must see the way in which they affect each other. yes in real time. That is why Kurt Lewin worked with categories such as “vital space” or “field”: what was interesting for him were the dynamics, the changes, and not the static images of what happens at each moment, which he understood were only useful for describe what happens in each phase of a process, and not to explain.
To describe the change processes, Kurt Lewin was inspired by physics studies and borrowed the idea of a force field For him, group or individual behavior can be understood as a process of change that leads from an initial situation to a different one. Thus, Lewin’s Field Theory establishes that what happens while this process of change develops happens within a dynamic field in which the state of each part of this force field affects all the others.
The most important variables that are acting in the fields or “vital spaces” are, for Kurt Lewin, tension, force and necessity, thanks to which behavior has a purpose.
Kurt Lewin and action research
Kurt Lewin understood that, since in a force field all the parts affect each other, To understand human behavior, we must take into account all the variables that are intervening in real time in the actions of people and groups, from the space in which they are located to the temperature, the way in which they socialize with each other, etc. Furthermore, these elements cannot be analyzed in isolation, but rather we must focus on studying their interactions to have a holistic view of what is happening.
But from this an idea emerges that at that time was revolutionary: since what is studied is not something isolated but rather the interaction, we should not be afraid of affecting the object of study as researchers. What’s more, intervening in the field of forces allows us to introduce dynamics that will help us understand the mechanisms that operate in it.
In short, according to Kurt Lewin, influencing these dynamics helps to have a faithful image of what is happening. This was crystallized in one of this psychologist’s most famous phrases: To understand a system, you have to change it. This is the principle of action research that Kurt Lewin proposed as an effective method to understand and improve social dynamics.
