Kurt Lewin's main contribution is to consider the individual and the environment as two interconnected realities.
Last update: 17 September, 2019
Kurt Lewin he was one of the most influential psychologists in history. He is considered the father of social psychology and organizational psychology. His hypotheses and theories are applied to a multitude of areas, mainly to the world of organizations and services.
Kurt Lewin was born in 1890 in a small village called Mogilno, in the then Prussia. Still a child, he moved with his family to Berlin. He studied medicine and then biology in Munich. From an early age he showed interest in philosophy and psychology, two disciplines that he officially began to study in 1911.
If you really want to understand something, try changing it.
Kurt Lewin
Lewin was also a political activist in socialism. He was convinced that psychology could be useful for achieving equality and justice in the world. He obtained his doctorate in philosophy, but during the First World War he was sent to the front as a gunner. He was wounded and left the war to return to life as usual.
He began studying at the Institute of Psychology in Berlin, where he came into contact with several representatives of Gestalt psychology, very popular at that time.
A new phase for Kurt Lewin
Kurt Lewin was of Jewish origin, so with the rise to power of the Nazi Party he had no alternative but to leave Germany. He first tried to take refuge in Jerusalem, then, with the help of some colleagues, he reached the United States.
Thanks to German friends, he obtained a professorship at Cornell University and then at the University of Iowa. A few years later he became director of MIT's Research Center of Group Dynamics in Massachusetts.
Since then Kurt Lewin focused on social phenomena, deepening social interaction and the effects of social pressure on behavior and work dynamics in organizations. His research forms the basis of social psychology.
A new vision of psychology
When it arrived in the United States, the reigning psychological current was behaviorism: man was born as a blank sheet and the influence of others shaped his personality. According to Lewin, however, the individual was not passive, but established an interaction with the surrounding environment.
Kurt Lewin developed new models for understanding human behavior and borrowed the concept of "field" from physics. In physics the field refers to a zone of space with certain properties or factors that give it a specific configuration.
In this sense, according to Lewin, human behavior is the result of a field. It includes a set of coexisting facts for which a small change affects the totality. The subject perceives these events and their dynamics in a particular way. Lewin defines all of this as "living space".
The variables that come into play in this dynamic field or vital space are basically three: tension, strength and need. The last variable defines the purpose of the behavior.
Great contributions to social psychology
Kurt Lewin's main contribution is to consider the individual and the environment as two interconnected realities. These are two dimensions that interact continuously and mutually modify each other in real time. Lewin's field theory invites us to study the individual as a function of these dynamics.
When we want to understand human behavior, we must take into account all the variables that affect the living space, from the degree of illumination of an enclosure to the socialization patterns at the basis of a group.
With these assumptions, Kurt Lewin believed that it was perfectly valid to introduce changes in the environment to study the reactions of the subjects interacting with it. It was a new research perspective that inspired hundreds of studies around the world. This action research method is still used today.
