Kurt lewin biography

It had been said by skeptics that the actions of groups were nothing more than those of its members considered separately. Given his background in Gestalt psychologyLewin justified group existence using the dictum "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts". He theorized that when a group is established it becomes a unified system with supervening qualities that cannot be understood by evaluating members individually.

This notion — that a group is composed of more than the sum of its individual members — quickly gained support from sociologists and psychologists who understood the significance of this emerging kurt lewin biography. Many pioneers noted that the majority of group phenomena could be explained according to Lewin's equation and insight and opposing views were hushed.

The study of group dynamics remains relevant in today's society where a vast number of professions e. The most notable [ according to whom? Lewin and his associated researchers shifted from the pre-existing trend of individualist psychology and then expanded their work to incorporate a macro lens where they focused on the "social psychology of small group communication" Rogers Lewin is associated with "founding research and training in group dynamics and for establishing the participative management style in organizations".

In his Berlin research, Lewin utilized "group discussions to advance his theory in research. In addition to group discussions, he became increasingly interested in group membership. He was curious as to how perspectives of an individual in relation to the group were solidified or weakened. He tried to come up with the way identity was constructed from standpoint and perspectives.

These were the beginnings of what ended up developing into "groupthink". Lewin started to become quite interested in how ideas were created and then perpetuated by the mentality of a group. Not included in this chapter is how important this became in looking at group dynamics across disciplines — including studying John F Kennedy and the way he tried to interact with his advisors in order to prevent groupthink from occurring.

Lewin conceived the Peach v Coconut cultural distinction. Peach cultures included India, the U. Peaches tend to be soft and friendly on the surface, even with strangers, but have a hard protective inner core. Coconut cultures include China, Russia and most of Europe except the south. Folk from coconut cultures have a soft inner core, but a tough exterior than can lead to a perception of unfriendliness with strangers.

Yet once a person has gained their trust, they can be loyal friends for life. The Peach v Coconut kurt lewin biography was later popularised by Fons Trompenaarswho said it "explains all sorts of animosities that bedevil cross-cultural friendships, business dealings and diplomacy. InLewin married Maria Landsberg. Inthe couple had a daughter Esther Agnes, and intheir son Fritz Reuven was born.

They divorced aroundand Maria immigrated to Palestine with the children. InLewin married Gertrud Weiss. Their daughter Miriam was born inand their son Daniel was born in His wife died in Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikidata item.

German-American psychologist. NewtonvilleMassachusettsU. Group dynamics action research Force-field analysis T-groups. Maria Landsberg. Gertrud Weiss. Dorwin Cartwright Leon Festinger. Rudolf Arnheim Morton Deutsch. Early life and education [ edit ]. Career [ edit ]. Academia [ edit ]. Force-field analysis [ edit ]. Kurt was born on September 9,into a Jewish family in Mogilno, Poland.

He was one of the four kids born in this middle-class family. Inthis family moved to Berlin and inKurt enrolled at the University of Freidburg to study medicine. However, he changed and attended the University of Munich so he could study biology. He worked under Carl Stumpf, a renowned psychologist, between and Kurt Lewin was initially involved with different institutions of behavioral psychology just before he changed direction in research.

He decided to work with other psychologists, such as Max Wertheimer and W. Lewin also joined the Psychological Institute at the University of Berlin. Here, he taught and even gave seminars on psychology and philosophy. In most cases, he associated with the early Frankfurt School in Germany. The group's first action step was to stop a lawsuit against the four boys, who were then placed under the supervision of their parish priest and a group of Catholic Big Brothers.

Lewin's group then made a survey of community attitudes, interviewing as many local people as they could. The researchers found that the boys were not angry at Jews in particular but felt angry and frustrated about life in general. The neighborhood as a whole felt that better housing, transportation, and recreational facilities would help ease tensions among the different racial and religious groups.

The task force's findings were reported to the Mayor of New York, who earmarked some kurt lewin biographies for the needed improvements. One member of the CCI staff was assigned to work closely with the four boys. A year later, CCI was able to report to the mayor that the gang members had virtually stopped their street fights and bullying of other people.

The final measure of the project's success was that the gang members did not return to their former behavior even after CCI's consultancy ended. Main points Lewin was interested in group processes for both theoretical and practical reasons. On the theoretical level, he thought that a solid body of knowledge, once collected, would allow him to form a general theory that would fit any group—marriages, nuclear and extended families, workplace groups, religious congregations, and community organizations.

He understood group behavior as a function of both individual members and social contexts. From a historical perspective, Lewin was in the right place at the right time, as specialists in such fields as industrial management, group psychotherapyand education were convinced by the mids that they needed to do more studies of group functioning.

Lewin's first use of the term "group dynamics" appeared in a article called "Experiments in Social Space," in which he said that the purpose of his experiments was "to give insight into the underlying group dynamics. Two key concepts regarding group process emerged from Lewin's field theory, namely interdependence of fate and task interdependence.

As was mentioned in the preceding section, Lewin regarded interdependence in general as an essential feature of individual as well as group maturity. Interdependence of fate was a concept that Lewin used to explain the existence of groups that come into being "when people in [the group] realize that their fate depends on the fate of the group as a whole.

It is not similarity or dissimilarity of individuals that constitutes a group, but interdependence of fate It is easy enough to see that the common fate of all Jews makes them a group in reality A person who has learned to see how much his own fate depends upon the fate of his entire group will be ready and even eager to take over a fair share of responsibility for its welfare.

Other examples of interdependence of fate would include groups of people engaged in dangerous activities, such as the members of mountain climbing expeditions or space shuttle crews. Lewin recognized, however, that interdependence of fate by itself does not form strong bonds among the members of most groups. He regarded task interdependence as a stronger "glue" in keeping the members of a group together.

Using the concept of tension systems from his field theory, Lewin argued that the tension within group members created by desires for a common goal resulted in interdependence in order to achieve the goal. He was not convinced by the psychoanalytical explanation of group activity as the result of aggressive drives in some individuals belonging to the group.

Rather, Lewin concluded that groups provide a setting for their individual members' sense of identity and social reality. It differs with the group to which the individual belongs. Lewin's theoretical understanding of group dynamics had practical applications in terms of social change. As World War II drew to a close, psychologists as well as researchers in other fields were concerned about rebuilding the social as well as the economic structures of the defeated Axis powers.

Lewin's understanding of group dynamics was directly relevant to such issues as reintroducing democratic values in Germany and Japan, and doing it in such a way that these nations would not return to dictatorial political systems. Lewin believed that the democratic government of the United States depended on a certain "social atmosphere" more than pure reason or logic, and that this social atmosphere had to be protected and maintained by each successive generation.

The social climate in which a child lives is for the child as important as the air it breathes. It seems to be 'natural' for people living in a thoroughly democratic tradition like that of the United States to believe that what is scientifically reasonable should finally become accepted everywhere. However, history shows. Lewin's research in group dynamics led him to conclude that social change must be brought about in and by groups rather than forced on people as individuals.

One of his most famous psychological experiments involved two groups of schoolchildren who were asked to complete a task making masks for a school play ; one group in a democratic atmosphere and the other group directed by an autocratic adult.

Kurt lewin biography

The results of the experiment convinced Lewin that democracy not only requires voluntary participation in groups, but is best learned through such participation. In "Cultural Reconstruction," an article that Lewin published inhe observed:. It is a fallacy to assume that people, if left alone, follow a democratic pattern in their group life In democracy, as in any culture, the individual acquires the cultural pattern by some type of "learning.

Attempting to answer the question of reconstructing German culture after the war, Lewin proposed to focus on the country's teenagers, with that age group's typical enthusiasm and interest in group activities. The adolescent is at that age level which determines what the cultural pattern will be in the immediately following generation. Explanation One factor that helps to explain Lewin's conviction that groups are more significant than individuals in bringing about and maintaining social change is that he saw groups as the molds of individual character.

In an important essay on "Conduct, Knowledge, and Acceptance of New Values"Lewin maintained that the processes by which an individual learns bad or deviant behavior are the same as those that shape normal behavior. Given this position, Lewin argued that reeducation in any society is essentially a process of cultural change. He saw this change as having three major aspects or levels:.

Lewin observed, however, that "acceptance of the new set of values and beliefs cannot usually be brought about item by item. The chances for [successful] reeducation seem to be increased whenever a strong we-feeling is created. It is basic for reeducation that this linkage between acceptance of new facts or values and acceptance of certain of certain groups or roles is very intimate and that the second frequently is a prerequisite for the first.

Examples Lewin's work with organizational change and the first experimental T-groups is a good example of his lasting influence on later psychologists as well as his work with group dynamics. He is often referred to as the "grandfather" of organizational change for the studies he conducted in the early s, and for his insistence that any theory of change had to take into account not only the organization, but also the individuals in the organization and its surrounding environment.

Lewin argued that none of these factors can be understood in isolation from the others. One of his most frequently quoted remarks has to do with changing organizations: "If you want truly to understand something, try to change it. He drew on field theory to explain his three steps, which he called "unfreezing," "moving the group to a new level," and "refreezing," or making the changes permanent.

Unfreezing refers to changing the force field within the organization. Lewin had pointed out that stability in any group is the result of a balance between driving forces for change and restraining forces against changeall of which can be represented by kurt lewin biographies and mathematical symbols. Trying to change an organization by adding more driving forces usually results in a counterforce that maintains the status quo.

Lewin had the insight that it is generally easier to unfreeze an organization's internal balance by removing restraining forces than by adding driving forces. Lewin's three-step model of organizational change—particularly the notion of unfreezing—became an important part of the training groups, or T groups, that grew out of his experimental work with the Connecticut State Interracial Commission in the summer of As was mentioned earlier, Lewin and three of his associates at MIT had been asked to conduct a two-week workshop for 41 community leaders in dealing with racial prejudice; including learning skills in dealing with people and more reliable ways to change social attitudes.

The workshop was held on the campus of a teachers' college in New Britain, Connecticut. Some of the participants lived nearby and went home in the evenings, while others remained on the campus. Since the trainers held nightly sessions in which they discussed their observations of the trainees, the trainees who were staying at the college asked if they could attend these meetings.

Most staff members were reluctant to allow the trainees to join the meetings, but Lewin saw no reason why they should not hear the observers discuss their behavior. The observers' feedback—a term that Lewin had borrowed from electrical engineering —was eye-opening to the trainees. The second development during the evening came when one of the female trainees disputed a staff member's observations about her behavior.

Her disagreement led to a four-way conversation that involved the trainer, another observer, the trainee, and Lewin himself. The new data that emerged from this conversation as well as the open discussion of different opinions changed the format of the evening meetings. After that night the evening meetings became the most significant learning sessions of the workshop.

Although Lewin died before the first National Training Laboratory in Group Development was held in the summer ofhis theories formed the basis of the NTL's work, particularly its so-called laboratory method. The laboratory method was intended to provide "basic skills training," conducted in small discussion groups usually 10 participants with an observer who reported his observations to the group members from time to time.

The skills had to do with becoming an effective "change agent. In the process, however, Lewin's original vision of the laboratory as a setting for basic research in social dynamics was gradually deemphasized, and replaced with a focus on individual and personal growth. In the process, NTL also acquired a business rather than a research mindset, to the point where it has itself become a large business as of the early s.

Lewin's influence was clearly evident, however, in what are still considered the four basic elements of T-group training:. The kurt lewin biography important intellectual influence on Kurt Lewin was Gestalt psychology, a German school of thought that developed in the late nineteenth century in opposition to associationist and behaviorist views.

Psychologists in both these groups broke down psychological events into separate parts and then proceeded to analyze the parts without reference to the whole. The Gestaltists insisted that psychological events had to be interpreted as integral wholes. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant — is regarded as a forerunner of Gestalt psychology.

Kant argued in his Critique of Pure Reason that human perception by its nature organizes data received from the body's sense organs into unities or wholes that the person can understand. Although Max Wertheimer — is usually regarded as the founder of Gestalt psychology, the term "Gestalt" was first used by the philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels — in a paper on "form qualities" Gestalt Qualitaten in German in music.

The German word Gestalt does not have an exact English equivalent; it has been variously translated as "form," "shape," or "figure. He observed that such terms as "major" or "minor" are characteristics of full chords or musical phrases rather than isolated notes. Later, in studying the phenomenon of apparent motion in which two alternately flashing lights are perceived as one light moving back and forthWertheimer maintained that the apparent movement of the lights cannot be reduced to simpler physical stimuli.

He defined what came to be called the Gestalt law of minimum principle—people do not perceive what actually exists in the external world as much as they tend to organize their sensory experiences in the simplest possible way. Wertheimer also formulated several laws of organization to explain how people organize sense experiences into simple and coherent wholes.

Lewin's life was affected by anti-Semitism on the professional as well as the personal level. The close and affectionate bond that he had with his parents is reflected in the fact that they continued to support him financially as well as emotionally when he changed his course of study from medicine to philosophy of science and psychology. The reason that their approval was significant is that Lewin was risking his future employment by preparing for a university professorship.

Although he kurt lewin biography have had no difficulty in finding work as a country doctor, he faced the same strong discrimination against Jews in the German universities that Freud had confronted. Lewin's parents knew that his chances of obtaining a full professorship with a decent salary were very low; nevertheless they supported their son's decision.

After Lewin moved to the United States, he recognized that anti-Semitism existed in his new country, even though it was much less organized and murderous than the state-sanctioned anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Many American universities had admission quotas for Jewish students in the s and s, particularly at the graduate and professional school level.

In addition, some of the most prestigious hotels in the United States openly identified themselves as "restricted," which meant that they did not accept Jewish guests. There is a striking scene in Gentleman's Agreement, a movie released in the year of Lewin's death, in which an undercover reporter pretending to be a Jew in order to do research on anti-Semitism finds that the exclusive resort where he has made a vacation reservation refuses to honor it.

Lewin understood that much of American anti-Semitism had to do with the aftermath of World War I and the Communist revolution in Russia. The Immigration Act ofwhich sharply reduced the number of immigrants from Eastern Europeshut the primary escape route for Jews from those countries trying to escape the anti-Semitic policies of Stalin and Hitler.

In addition, the economic hardships resulting from the Great Depression of led many unemployed Americans to look for scapegoats for their anger. The Midwest, in which Lewin and his family had settled inwas a relatively isolated part of the country with a small Jewish population, and many of Lewin's new neighbors did not question conspiracy theories regarding the role of "East Coast Jews" in controlling the United States' money supply.

The significance of Lewin's work in this area is threefold. First, the effects of cultural prejudice on individuals allowed him to explore both the connections and the differences between his social theories and Freudian psychoanalysis. Although Lewin disagreed with Freud's emphasis on childhood experiences and his neglect of social factors in emotional disorders, Lewin allowed that individual differences do influence a person's response to prejudice directed against him or her.

In an article entitled "Personal Adjustment and Group Belongingness"Lewin observed, "It is clear that not all maladjustments of Jewish individuals stem from their being Jewish. Jewish maladjustment has the same source as that of non-Jews. In Lewin's view, the relative openness of American society created a situation of "unclarity," in which a Jew could not be sure whether being rejected for a job or club membership resulted from personal failure or anti-Semitism.

He or she therefore would not be able to decide whether to work on overcoming personal shortcomings or to work on changing the social environment. Lewin thought that the unclear situation would cause the person to become "disoriented. The second significance is that Lewin's experience of anti-Semitism led him to extend his insights to the problems of other minority groups.

As has already been mentioned, he regarded the struggle of Jewish citizens for equal rights as part of the struggle of all disadvantaged minorities. Many of Lewin's action research projects were undertaken with the desire to understand the nature of prejudice in order to create ways to overcome it. One major limitation of Lewin's work, however, is that he did not distinguish between discrimination against groups that can be clearly identified by external bodily features race, sex, age, physical deformity, etc.

It was left to such later researchers as Erving Goffman to study the differences among various forms of prejudice. The third significance of Lewin's response to anti-Semitism is that it provided a model for other social scientists seeking to bring their research to bear on real-life social problems. Chris Argyris, who was influenced by Lewin's example even though he was not one of his students, has said:.

Lewin's work inspired me because it suggested a model that combined theory, empirical research, and relevance to reality Lewin had the skill to integrate scientific rigor with reality and for this reason became the first major model of social scientist-activist of the highest quality. Lewin and his students were frequently criticized for publishing studies based on a relatively small number of subjects.

Hoppe's study of aspiration, which is described below, used only 10 subjects, and the studies of leadership models and frustration in children, also described below, used only 20 and 30 subjects respectively. Lewin did not deny that studying a larger number of subjects would have improved the reliability of his findings, and added that "additional confirmation is always desirable.

But he mentioned on another occasion, "I do not expect ever to live down the misunderstandings created by my attack on some ways in which statistics have been used in psychology. Lewin's colleagues blamed his use of topology to illustrate his theories for the fact that his work was underestimated during his lifetime. When he published Principles of Topological Psychology inthe book received a number of harsh reviews.

Some reviewers maintained that Lewin's diagrams were distractions that led readers away from his theories to his mathematical representations of them. He replied in an article on "Formalization and Progress in Psychology" that his main interest was not "formalization or mathematization. A related criticism of Lewin's use of topology and mathematical formulae is that they do not add any new insights to the behavior they supposedly explain.

In addition, they cannot be used to predict a person's behavior before it occurs; rather, Lewin's diagrams are after-the-fact representations of his data. Lewin admitted that this line of criticism had some validity:. It is true, however, that it is a clearer test of the adequacy of the theory if one can make predictions from it and prove these predictions experimentally.

The reason for this difference seems to be that empirical data generally allow for quite a range of different interpretations and. The diagram reproduced earlier as an example of Lewin's use of topology may also serve here to illustrate his critics' point. It is difficult to see what the mathematical formulae add to a verbal description of a situation of indecision.

Moreover, the diagram has no predictive value. In order to indicate the child's decision, one of the two vectors would have to be measurably larger or longer than the other—which would imply that the outcome of the child's decision is already known to the psychologist drawing the diagram. Lewin's field theory was criticized from the early s onward for its tendency to make the life space a closed psychological system without any clear.

Lewin's best-known series of experiments was conducted with Ronald Lippitt and Ralph White at the University of Iowa in the late s. Known as the "Leadership and Group Life" study, it involved groups of children doing arts and crafts activities under different leadership styles. Lewin and his colleagues organized four groups of year-old boys, with four adult leaders and a wide range of craft activities.

All the boys in these studies were volunteers, and the groups were carefully matched for patterns of interpersonal relationships, intelligence, socioeconomic status, and a few other variables. The groups were led by an authoritarian leader, a democratic leader, or leader with laissez-faire style. Each group received a new leader every six weeks with a different leadership style.

This second experiment lasted a total of five months. The findings from both experiments were striking. Lewin summarized them in an article published in Lewin was pleased with the outcome of the study in that it confirmed his convictions about the superiority of democratic systems of government. It also reinforced his belief that democracy must be reaffirmed anew in each generation, as he noticed that the change in the children's behavior from autocratic to democratic groups took longer than the reverse.

Edward Tolman — argued that Lewin's field theory does not account for the ways in which the outside world produces changes in a person's life space or the ways in which the life space changes the outside world. Tolman himself attempted to add to Lewin's field theory by proposing three types of psychological variables: dependent variables the behaviors or actions of a personindependent variables the person's age, sex, genetic makeup, and present physical functioning; conditions of drive arousal; and stimuli from the external environment ; and intervening variables, which connect the dependent and independent variables.

In other words, the intervening variables explain how a stimulus from the external world and a person's emotional and physical condition interact to produce behavior. A somewhat different version of Tolman's criticism of Lewin was made by Floyd Allport in Allport argued that Lewin's field theory confuses physical realities the outside world and psychological realities the life space because Lewin used his terms ambiguously.

For example, Lewin often speaks of locomotions as mental movements, but he also refers to some locomotions as physical movements. With regard to barriers, Lewin sometimes describes them as internal constraints on a person's behavior—such as fear of other people's reactions to an intended behavior—but in other instances he is clearly thinking of physical obstacles as barriers.

For example, in the published article on the experiment with frustration and regression in children described below, Lewin repeatedly refers to the screen or partition used to frustrate the children in the second phase of the experiment as a "barrier. Allport maintained that the researcher must separate the two sets of factors conceptually in order to uncover the laws that govern their interactions.

As has already been mentioned, Lewin defined his principle of contemporaneity in opposition to psychoanalytical explanations of a person's life history. As a result, some of his critics argued that he did not pay enough attention to the effects of the past on present behavior. Lewin replied that he did in fact include what he called the "psychological past" in the total field as part of the person's present "time perspective.

The psychological field which exists at a given time contains also the views of that individual about his future and past. His views about his own past and that of the rest of the physical and social world are often incorrect but nevertheless constitute, in his life space, the "reality-level" of the past. The question remains, however, as to whether Lewin's notion of the psychological past is an adequate account of memory.

Researchers who have studied such mental disorders as post-traumatic stress disorder and dissociative identity disorder formerly known as multiple personality disorder would argue that Lewin's theory does not allow for the effects of traumatic experiences on human personality. Since the early s, neurologists studying the formation of memory traces in the human brain have discovered that traumatic memories are formed in a very different way from normal memories.

The types of childhood memories that Lewin listed on occasion as examples of the unimportance of the past in a person's present life space are all pleasant or neutral memories. Traumatic memories are different, and are related to changes in the structure and function of the brain itself. Under normal circumstances, memories are formed when a person's senses register sights, sounds, and other sensory information, and pass on these data to an almond-shaped structure in the temporal lobe of the brain called the amygdala which takes its name from the Greek word for "almond".

The amygdala is the part of the brain that attaches an emotional meaning to the data provided by the senses. A nearby part of the brain called the hippocampus organizes the information relayed through the amygdala and combines it with previous information from similar events. For example, if a person is trying on several different types of perfumes at a cosmetics counter, the hippocampus will organize this memory according to previously established memory patterns of pleasant smells, perfumes, shopping trips, the specific department store, etc.

Under normal circumstances, the hippocampus is able to form memories efficiently according to the emotional significance assigned to them by the amygdala. In traumatic situations, however, this system breaks down; the hippocampus is overwhelmed, shuts down, and cannot process the upsetting memory or combine it in any useful way with other memories.

The result is that traumatic memories are not stored as unified wholes, but as bits and pieces of bodily sensations and sensory images that are not related to other events in the person's life or even localized in time. These memory fragments may resurface whenever the amygdala is triggered by anything in the present that is vaguely related to the original trauma.

Such symptoms of post-traumatic stress as flashbacks, in which the person feels as if he or she is reexperiencing the sights, sounds, smells, or sensations of the traumatic event, represent a chaotic invasion of the present by the past that does not fit Lewin's notion of the psychological past as relevant to the present life space. Although one of Lewin's most famous studies is said to have proven the superiority of democratic leadership to other leadership models, Lewin has also been criticized for not having developed his notion of this type of leadership beyond a rough sketch.

Some of Lewin's colleagues noted that he combined an elitist view of leadership with an element of control. Although Lewin maintained that democracy cannot be forced on individuals, he recognized the existence of "a kind of paradox. The democratic leader does not impose his goals on the group. Still the democratic leader should "lead" Prominent psychologists mentored by Kurt Lewin included Leon Festinger, who became known for his cognitive dissonance theoryand environmental psychologist Roger Barker.

Lewis was an early pioneer of the study of group dynamics and organizational development. His research program focused particularly on the study of prejudice and behavior related to it. Studies included gang behavior and the effect of negro sales personnel on sales. Lewin believed that prejudice caused discrimination, not resulted from it, and altering that behavior could change attitudes.

Lewin's notion of "action research" can change the entire sense of social sciencetransforming it from reflective knowledge about past social practices formulated by a priesthood of experts research Ph. Theories that have developed using Lewin's action research approach include:. Since action research is as much about creating a better life within more effective and just social contexts as it is about discovering true facts and theories, it should not be surprising that it has flourished in Latin America, Northern Europe, Indiaand Australia as much or more than within university scholarship in the U.

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