К.Левин теория поля и другие исследования
Курт Левин (9.09.1890) - psychology, social science, philosophy of science, psychological field theory, topological psychology, group dynamics.
Lewin was the creator of psychological field theory, a pioneer of action research in psychological social science, and a founder of group dynamics. He combined thinking from psychology and philosophy of science throughout his career. His aims were to link theoretical insight with empirical research in the study of motivation, child development, and social behavior, as well as to humanize the workplace and the school with the help of social science. To him these tasks were not opposed; as he often said, nothing is as practical as a good theory.
Lewin was born in Mogilno (now Poland), which was then in the Prussian province of Posen. He was the second child and eldest son of a Jewish family, and knew Yiddish and Hebrew as well as German. His father owned a small general store and a farm outside the town. He was sent to Gymnasium in Breslau and studied medicine briefly in Freiburg im Breisgau before transferring to Berlin, where he studied with the philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf and the neo-Kantian philosophers of science Ernst Cassirer and Alois Riehl. He received his doctorate in 1916, while on leave from military service during World War I, and earned the right to teach (Habilitation) in Berlin in 1921. From that time until he resigned for political reasons in 1933, he was Dozent and senior assistant (Oberassistent) in the department of applied psychology at the Psychological Institute of the University of Berlin; he received the title of associate professor in 1927. He married Maria Landsberg in 1917 and had two children with her; after they divorced he married Gertrude Weiss in 1929 and had two children with her. His career after 1933 will be detailed below.
Philosophy of Science . In the 1920s Lewin elaborated a comparative theory of science. Instead of establishing ideal norms for the sciences and humanities according to their subject matter, he based his approach on the concepts scientists actually construct. He was inspired to do this by Cassirer’s comparative and historical treatment of scientific concepts in Substance and Function (1910). His first and most extensive attempt to realize this program was a book on the concept of time series in physics and biology published in 1922. For Lewin, when physicists refer to a particle of matter persisting in a series of instants, this constituted as much a “genetic” (meaning a temporal) series as a reference to the path of energy from a lump of coal to a power plant and thence to a light bulb. In both cases what he called “genidentity” (Genidenität) is attributed to the object in question. Correspondingly, when an egg develops into a chicken, biologists speak of the life history of a single organism, even though egg and chicken might have no molecules in common, except perhaps in the germ cell; moreover, in evolutionary theory biologists construct historical series of species linked by descent, even though there may be no proven material linkages between them. Thus, in physics and biology entities defined as existing continuously over time differ according to the point of view required by the scientific task at hand. In the 1920s Lewin extended this pluralistic, pragmatic analysis to other disciplines, but chose not to publish the resulting texts.
Lewin was in contact with the founders of the logical empiricist movement, particularly Hans Reichenbach, with whom he had been involved in the Socialist youth movement before World War I. When Reichenbach organized the Society for Scientific Philosophy in Berlin in the late 1920s, Lewin participated actively. He shared the logical empiricists’ interest in illuminating the conceptual foundations of science by examining actual scientific concepts, but rejected Rudolf Carnap’s and Otto Neurath’s call for a unified science based on physical language.
Lewin presented his view of psychology’s place in his philosophy of science in two essays: “Law and Experiment in Psychology” (1927), and a paper on the transition from “Aristotelian” to “Galilean” thinking in psychology (1931), which first appeared in the journal Erkenntnis, the organ of the logical empiricist movement. In the 1927 paper he noted that what appears to be a unitary behavioral event may be the result of multiple psychological processes. Though this statement appears to deny the possibility of causal explanation in psychology, it could also be true of physical events and processes. A rolling ball, for example, appears to be a single series of events, yet a complete physical analysis shows it to be the product of multiple forces in interaction. A child’s behavior in a given situation can also be seen as a product of interacting forces. Thus, in Lewin’s view, it is possible to derive causal laws for psychology without reducing psychical phenomena to physical events. Instead, he posited “event types” (Geschehenstypen) as the appropriate explanatory objects for psychology, and hoped that laws for such “event types” would eliminate factors such as previous experience or heredity from psychological explanations.
In the 1931 paper, Lewin opposed the idea that psychology is or ought to be limited to statistical laws. He called such claims “Aristotelean,” because they referred to typological categories such as “the obstreperous three-year-old,” or to specific populations, such as one-year-old children in Vienna and New York in 1928. Modern physics, in contrast, derives universal mathematical laws from concrete, albeit ideal cases. Lewin proposed to create a “Galilean” or dynamic psychology, in which, instead of computing statistical averages from as many given cases as possible, researchers would recreate and analyze ideal-typical person-environment interactions in the laboratory. For him analysis of such interactions was a necessary basis for deriving formal, ultimately mathematical, descriptions of their dynamics. He understood this procedure to be analogous to the way in which Galileo had deduced the laws of free fall and projectile motion from mathematically derived “pure cases.”
Research and Theory on Volition and Motivation . Lewin’s early research challenged associationist theories of volition. Narziss Ach had suggested in 1910 that “determining tendencies” stimulated by an experimenter’s instruction inhibit subjects’ ability to recall associative connections they had already learned; the resulting delay in carrying out the instruction would thus be a measure of will. In his dissertation (published 1917) Lewin set out to improve this measure by asking observers to learn lengthy series of meaningless syllables, then instructing them either to reverse or rhyme the syllables. The prediction was that they would either take longer to complete the second task or give wrong answers. To his surprise, there was generally no inhibitive delay, and only a few errors. In further studies, using different instructions (for example, to rhyme syllables in a specific way), he found that subjects made few errors even with only a few repetitions during the training period. Lewin concluded that Ach’s associationist view of will was untenable, because the predicted effects failed to occur even under optimal conditions, and decided that more work was needed on the relation of motivation and volition. Lewin’s subsequent studies of motivation and action during the 1920s combined affiliation with and independence from the Berlin school of Gestalt theory, whose leading thinkers Wolfgang Köhler and Max Wertheimer were Lewin’s colleagues at the time. In papers titled “Preliminary Remarks on the Structure of the Mind” (author’s translation) and “Intention, Will, and Need” (both 1926), Lewin accepted the Gestalt theorists’ claim that actions, like acts of perception, are structured wholes (his term was “action wholes”), but he enriched their conception of behavior in two respects. First, he focused on the way situations appear to the actor at a given time, which he called their “psychological reality”; he suggested, further, that the psychical person is itself a complex, “layered” whole. The needs that influence a person’s interaction with the (perceived) environment can come from more superficial or deeper layers of the self. Thus, the totality of forces present in the psychical field at a given time controls the direction of action; and this totality is not limited to perceived objects and their relations to an actor, but can include objects and needs of which the actor is not conscious.
Lewin did not call this approach “field theory” at this time, but the expression “field forces” is ubiquitous in his German work. A frequently cited example of the impact of such forces is what he called the “demand character” of objects. The roots of this concept are already visible in an essay called “Kriegslandschaft” (1917; Warscape), written while he was at the front. That a house might appear to someone as a source of firewood, for example, would be barbarous in peacetime, but quite normal and maybe even necessary in war. The example he used in 1926 was a “peace thing”: a mailbox has a different relation to me when I have a letter in my hand than when I do not. In the former case, the mailbox seems almost to jump out of the environment and announce its presence.
Lewin attributed such phenomena to what he called “quasi-needs,” contending that objects related to them exert greater psychological “force” at particular times than at others. To account for these he suggested that “tension systems” emerge in specific “regions” of the self; these function in the same way as the tensions caused by real needs, transforming the psychical environment in accordance with a person’s current intentions. The satisfaction of such needs reestablishes personal equilibrium at a lower level of tension. Of course, the “tension” in such systems is not directly measurable, as is the tension in a coiled spring.
Lewin’s students in Berlin elaborated these ideas in empirical studies published in the journalPsychologische Forschung, in a series he edited entitled “Studies on the Psychology of Action and Emotion” (author’s translation). Among the studies were Bluma Zeigarnik’s investigation of memory for completed and uncompleted tasks (1927), the work of Anitra Karsten on “psychical satiation” in repetitive tasks (1928), Tamara Dembo’s study of the dynamics of anger (1931), and Ferdinand Hoppe’s work on the role of “level of aspiration” in task completion. These studies contained richly detailed descriptions of motivated actions, achievement, and task interruption, derived with the help of an interactive methodology of Lewin’s invention. Dembo’s experimental design, for example, involved an actual struggle between subject and experimenter, who deliberately frustrated subjects’ efforts to complete the assigned task, then prevented them from leaving the room.
Psychology in Practice . Lewin’s choice of topics clearly indicated his desire to connect scientific psychology with practical issues. He expressed that wish as early as 1920, in an essay entitled “The Socialization of the Taylor System” (author’s translation), published just after the abortive German revolution in a series entitled “Practical Socialism” (author’s translation), edited by his friend and independent Marxist thinker Karl Korsch. Lewin did not object in principle to Taylorism’s attempt to discover quantitative laws of performance that could rationalize production and thus increase output. Instead he criticized capitalism’s use of that effort to maximize profit rather than workers’ well-being. Under socialism, he argued, workers could be assigned to jobs according to their abilities in a cooperative effort involving management, workers, and psychologists; thus both productivity and job satisfaction would be enhanced. Humanizing the workplace and the school remained Lewin’s aim throughout the 1920s and beyond, and his choice of basic research topics was clearly related to this purpose. In a 1928 essay, for example, Lewin suggested on the basis of Karsten’s study of “satiation” that the psychological meaningfulness of a task to a worker can vary significantly even if productivity in output remains the same. This can have significant impact on the quality of performance, and even on physical fatigue. Thus, monotonous factory or school work alone does not cause psychological satiation; the decisive difference is the involvement of the person’s self or ego. In the same year, in a paper on the textile industry published together with applied psychologist Hans Rupp, Lewin elaborated an analysis of work as a process, an “action whole” (Geschehensganze) that constitutes man and machine as a dynamic unity. In his view, it was important to consider the work process as a whole and not only to measure results or the times of individual motions of workers, because the purpose is to reshape that process itself.
At this stage, Lewin confined himself to the behavior of individuals in simply structured environments. This was true also of the film of a small child’s problem-solving behavior, with which he introduced himself to American colleagues at the International Congress of Psychology in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1929. However, he always made it clear that other people are important parts of such environments. In the late 1920s and the early 1930s, he extended his thinking to pedagogy, speaking, among other things, of the importance of the “social atmosphere” of a school for educational success. He also described the behavior of children in conflict situations in ways that included relations with significant other people such as parents and teachers within the (subjective) field of children’s action. However, he did not investigate social psychological questions or have the idea of working with groups as units before leaving Germany.
After 1933 . Because Lewin had served at the front during World War I, he was nominally exempt from the provisions of the Nazi civil service law of 7 April 1933, which mandated the dismissal of persons of Jewish descent from state employment. His institute head, the Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler, wished to retain him in Berlin, but Lewin recognized the danger for Jews who remained in Germany. In a moving letter to Köhler dated 20 May 1933, which he never sent but which was discovered in his papers after his death, he wrote, “Everything within me rebels against the idea of leaving Germany despite all logical arguments,” and yet,
The actual loss of civil rights of the Jews has not abated, (but) is increasing daily and will no doubt be carried out completely in the peculiarly systematic German way, whether slowly and methodically, or in periodic waves … I cannot imagine how a Jew is supposed to live a life in Germany at the present time that does justice to even the most primitive demands of truthfulness.
Shortly after he left his position in Berlin, Lewin received a stipend at Cornell University, where he worked on children’s eating habits with support from the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars and the Rockefeller Foundation. Lawrence K. Frank, a foundation official who had met Lewin in Berlin and had been impressed by his experiments with children, then obtained a new grant in 1935 that sent Lewin to the Child Welfare Research Station at the University of Iowa. There he soon received a tenured appointment, rose to the rank of full professor in 1939, and remained until 1944. Both the Cornell center and the Iowa station were participants in a large-scale research program in child development that had been maintained with Rockefeller funding since the mid-1920s Because of his rapid integration into this network, Lewin refused the offer of a professorship from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which, as a Zionist, he would have preferred to accept. For this position he devised an ambitious research program, including, for example, studies of the relations between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. But the Jerusalem offer included no laboratory facilities, and Lewin’s efforts to raise money for these from private donors failed Nonetheless, Lewin took up the problems of minorities soon after his emigration. In a 1935 paper on social-psychological problems of a minority group, the topic was clearly the Jews. Here, Lewin extended the concept of “life space,” which he had already employed before 1933 to describe the subjective location of human-environment interactions, to human-human relationships under the heading “social space.” He argued that precisely Jews who wished to assimilate to a predominant culture had difficulty in forming clear identities, because their location on the boundary between groups did not allow them to develop a feeling of belonging to either group. Roots of the concept of “marginal man,” later articulated by Seymour Martin Lipset and others, can be seen here. After moving to Iowa, Lewin took up the topic of cultural differences in education. This issue had obvious relevance in a research center for child welfare, but biographical factors plainly contributed to the choice: His younger children were reaching school age and the international situation literally demanded such comparisons. In this context, what he called the “range of free movement” became the fundamental feature of educational systems. The presence of hierarchical structures even in the “democratic” educational style of the United States, and the reliance of American teachers on externally mandated teaching plans and techniques gave American children, in Lewin’s opinion, the support they needed to act independently in a heterogeneous social system, while rigidity and strict obedience were the educational norms in the comparatively homogeneous German social system. From such considerations, and also on the basis of conversations that Lewin had with American collaborators in Iowa, came the studies of “democratic” and “authoritarian” leadership styles in children’s play groups that made Lewin famous in America. In the “authoritarian” group both the task-making theater masks-and the way it was to be accomplished were defined step by step by the group leader, who intervened only to criticize the children’s work. In the “democratic” group, the leader participated as a fellow group member, for example in decisions about how and with what materials to make the masks; he was allowed to give technical advice, but only when asked and then only in the form of presenting alternatives from which the group then chose. In this work Lewin transferred the approach he had called “Galilean” in the early 1930s-the construction of ideal-typical person-environment interactions-to the behavior of groups. The “Lewin, Lippitt, and White” study, as it came to be known, acquired an almost mystical aura as the first group experiment in the history of social psychology. To visualize their approach, Lewin and his collaborators made a demonstration film that presented the behavior of the children’s groups in often amusing scenes and was soon much in demand. The ideological resonances of this research were obvious in the late 1930s; one reason for the rapid success of the Iowa group’s work was the support it seemed to provide for the hope that “democratic” leadership is indeed possible.
The politically progressive psychologists who founded the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues in 1936 shared this hope. Moved in part by impatience with their discipline’s slow response to the problems of the Depression, the organization’s members advocated social research for social change, if necessary by abandoning professional objectivity and distancing methodologies. Lewin was among the founders, and was elected president of the society in 1942-1943. Building on this foundation, Lewin developed an ambitious program in the late 1930s and 1940s that he called “action research,” to be conducted not in laboratories but in factories and communities. Early work along these lines at the Harwood Manufacturing Corporation reflected the roots of this approach in Lewin’s Taylorism study of 1920, but he soon applied it to minority group issues as well. That program, organized within the framework of a Commission on Community Interrelations (CCI) and funded largely by the politically liberal American Jewish Congress, aimed both to study the social psychology of racism and anti-Semitism and at the same time to work toward changing racist and ethnically prejudiced social relations by deriving concrete practical guidelines from observations of group behavior and reflections on that behavior by the group members themselves. In a 1946 paper Lewin himself described all this as “research for social engineering.”
By this time, Lewin had already moved from Iowa to the East Coast. Beginning with a visiting professorship at Harvard in 1939-1940, he expanded his contacts through work on morale research during World War II, including a programmatic essay on transforming Germany after Allied victory. In 1944 he accepted a professorship established for him at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he founded an interdisciplinary Research Center for Group Dynamics. Lewin never gave up hope of unifying theoretical and applied psychology. The means was to be topology, with the aid of which he hoped to achieve a mathematically rigorous representation of psychological dynamics. By the late 1920s, he had begun to transform this abstruse branch of mathematics into a device for the formal representation of psychological field forces and concrete psychological situations as well as the structure and internal dynamics of personality. In Principles of Topological Psychology (1936) he elaborated this approach in detail, with the hope of moving eventually to a process-rather than a performance-oriented concept of psychological measurement.
Impact . After Lewin died from a heart attack in 1947, at the age of fifty-seven, his prestige reached its high point. Edward Tolman went so far as to call him the most important thinker in the history of psychology after Sigmund Freud. Many Lewinian terms, including “level of aspiration,” “life space,” and “marginal affiliation,” and slogans such as “nothing is as practical as a good theory” entered the vocabulary of American psychology, and later returned to Europe via translations into German and other languages. The Research Center for Group Dynamics, which moved from MIT to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor shortly after his death, still existed in the early twenty-first century; Lewin’s reputation as a founder of experimental social psychology seems secure. Nonetheless, his experiments with “authoritarian” and “democratic” groups, though greatly admired, did not become exemplars for research design. Rather than study groups as wholes, mainstream social psychologists generally examine the influence of groups on the behavior of individuals. However, some of Lewin’s collaborators were instrumental in establishing the T-group and group dynamics movements in the 1950s, and others were among the founders of the approach called “ecological psychology” in the 1960s.
Lewin’s idea of a “topological and vector psychology” has come to be regarded as a blind alley. In the 1930s few psychologists outside Lewin’s immediate circle understood what he was talking about, and rivals willingly seized on disparaging remarks by mathematicians about his unsophisticated use of topology. Seen in historical context, his “Galilean” research program paralleled and competed with Yale psychologist Clark Hull’s equally ambitious, and disappointing, effort to derive general laws of behavior deductively in a manner allegedly analogous to Isaac Newton’s system of the natural world. In the 1970s and 1980s Lewin’s program for making psychology an agent of social change was sharply criticized from the left as a reformist project that would not change fundamental power relations. Since the 1990s action research has experienced a comeback as a results-oriented approach to understanding political conflict. Lewin’s fecund metaphors and brilliant individual insights, as well as his ability to inspire talented researchers, made him a success in Berlin, in the United States, and then internationally. He established an independent research base in America, but it was his cogent criticism of predominant styles of thought and practice in American psychology and his effort to develop concrete alternatives that gained him a hearing. At the same time, his support for U.S. democracy and his optimism about the practical potential of social science impressed the progressive segment of his discipline. His early work in the philosophy of science has never been translated into English and thus remains largely unknown outside Germany. For historians of science, his career exemplifies the deep connection of modern social science with social practice and also shows how a Jewish scientist created new science after reflecting on his own persecution under Nazism.