Kurt Lewin and Field Theory: the birth of social psychology

Kurt Lewin's ideas were the genesis of social and organizational psychology.

In the history of psychology there are few figures as important and influential as Kurt Lewin. Kurt Lewin. This researcher was not only one of the driving forces behind Gestalt psychology, but is also considered the father of social psychology and organizational psychology.

Kurt Lewin was also the creator of the Field Theorywhich has served as the basis for developing research on group dynamics, very applicable in the organizational and business environment. In order to understand his legacy, we will now go back to the years in which Kurt Lewin developed his ideas.

The early years

Kurt Lewin was born in 1890 into a Jewish family living in Mogilno, a village 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 soon after moved to Munich to pursue a career in biology. Munich to pursue a career in biology. Back in Berlin, and without having completed his training, he became more interested in psychology and philosophy, a discipline he began to study in 1911. By that time she 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 of help 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 that he remained convalescent for several days. At that time he began to make a description of the battlefield using topological terms reminiscent of the one that would be made from the theory of Gestalt, which at that time was being forged, and also reminiscent of the topological theory that he himself would create somewhat 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 was there that he came into contact with two other great representatives of Gestalt psychology: Wolfgang Köhler y Max Wertheimer. The crossing of ideas between them allowed the consolidation of ideas belonging to the Gestalt current and, at the same time, served as a breeding ground for the laboratory to become a place where young promises of European psychology, such as Bluma Zeigarnik, were to be formed.

Kurt Lewin in the United States

In 1933, when Hitler and the Nazis came to power, Kurt Lewin decided to move immediately 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 the contacts of Wolfgang Köhler he manages to enter to work in the University of Cornell to later pass to the University of Iowa. In 1944 he became director of the Group Dynamics Research Center at MIT in Massachusetts.

During this period, Kurt Lewin worked especially on social phenomena having to do with social interaction, and investigated everything from the effects of social pressure on children's eating habits to the work dynamics that are most effective in organizations. Thus, 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 school or any other school.

When Kurt Lewin died in 1947, he had already left open a door to open, he had already left open a door that would give way to the new branch of psychology: social psychology..

The Force Field Theory

In the years in which Kurt Lewin lived in North America, behaviorism was the prevailing paradigm in the United States. The behaviorists understood that human behavior is the result of the way in which the environment influences individuals, but Lewin started from a very different view of psychology. He, like the representatives of Gestalt in Europe, understood that people are not simply passive agents reacting to stimuli, but that they act according to the way they are influenced by the environment. act according to the way they perceive themselves interacting with the environment.. Interaction was, therefore, the fundamental element from which Kurt Lewin started 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 they were two separate pieces to be analyzed separately, but rather on the way in which they affect each other in real time. That is why Kurt Lewin worked with categories such as "living 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 only served to describe what happens in each phase of a process, and not to explain.

To describe the processes of change, Kurt Lewin was inspired by studies in physics and borrowed the idea of the force field.. For him, group or individual behavior can be understood as a process of change leading from an initial situation to a different one. Thus, Lewin's Field Theory states that what happens as this process of change unfolds takes place 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 "living 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, as in a force field, all parts affect each other, in order to understand human behavior it is necessary to take into account all the variables that are intervening in real time in the actions of individuals and groups, from the space in which they are acting to the space in which they are acting.From the space in which they are located to the temperature, the way they socialize with each other, etc., to understand human behavior, all the variables that are intervening in real time in the actions of individuals and groups must be taken into account. Moreover, these elements cannot be analyzed in isolation, but must be focused on studying their interactions in order to have a holistic view of what is happening.

But from this follows an idea that was revolutionary at the time: since what we study is not something isolated but interaction, we should not be afraid to affect the object of study as researchers. Moreover, intervening in the field of forces allows us to introduce dynamics that will help us to understand the mechanisms at work in it.

Ultimately, according to Kurt Lewin, influencing these dynamics helps to get a true picture of what is going on. This was crystallized in one of the most famous phrases of this psychologist: to understand a system, you have to change it. This is the principle of action research that Kurt Lewin proposed as an effective method for understanding and improving social dynamics.