Kurt Lewin And His Theory Of Interpersonal Relationships
Kurt Lewin was one of the most influential psychologists in history. He is considered the father of the psychological social and organizational psychology. His approaches and his theory are now applied in many fields, especially in the organizational world.
Kurt Lewin was born in a small Prussian village called Mogilno, in 1890. His family moved to Berlin (Germany) when he was very young. Lewin studied medicine and then biology in Munich. He was also interested from an early age in philosophy and psychology, fields he began to formally study in 1911.
He was also an ardent political activist for socialism. He believed that psychology could be very helpful in achieving more justice and fairness in the world. Kurt Lewin obtained his doctorate in philosophy. He was nevertheless sent to the front as an artilleryman during the First World War. Quickly injured, he soon returned to his normal life.
On his return, he began to study at the Berlin Institute of Psychology. He came into contact with several representatives of Gestalt psychology e t was very interested in this current fashionable.
A new step for Kurt Lewin
Kurt Lewin was of Jewish origin. This is why he knew , with the rise of Nazism in 1933, that he had no choice but to leave Germany. He first tried to take refuge in Jerusalem, but he did not succeed. With the help of a few colleagues, he managed to leave for the United States.
He obtained, thanks to one of his German friends, a post of professor at Cornell University. He was later a professor at the University of Iowa. He then became director of the Research Center for Group Dynamics at MIT in Massachusetts.
Kurt Lewin then concentrated his research on social phenomena. He studied social interaction in detail, as well as the effects of social pressure on behavior and work dynamics in organizations. He thus laid the foundations of what social psychology would be.
A new vision of psychology
The mainstream psychological when Kurt Lewin arrived in the United States was behaviorism. The latter considered that the man was like a black box. He was born like a white sheet. The influence of others was what shaped personality and made everyone who they were. For Lewin, on the other hand, considers that the individual is not passive. Rather, the individual establishes an interaction with his environment .
Kurt Lewin establishes new postulates for understanding human behavior. He borrowed the concept of “field” from physics. In this discipline, this term refers to an area of space having certain properties or factors giving it a specific configuration.
For Kurt Lewin, human behavior is also the result of a field. The latter comprises a set of coexisting events in which the change of one part affects the change of the whole as a whole. The subject therefore perceives these facts and their dynamics in a particular way. All of this constitutes what Kurt Lewin called “living space”.
The variables that operate in this dynamic field, or living space, are basically three. It is about tension, strength and necessity. It is the latter that gives a specific purpose to behavior.
Great contributions to social psychology
Kurt Lewin’s main contribution was to postulate that the individual and the environment should never be seen as two separate realities. In practice, these are two instances which always interact with each other. Which mutually change, in real time. It happens all the time. Lewin’s field theory calls for studying the individual as a function of these dynamics.
He further emphasizes that in order to understand human behavior we need to take into account all the variables that can affect your living space. This ranges from the degree of illumination of an enclosure to the patterns of socialization that are in its group.
Kurt Lewin therefore considers that it is perfectly justified to introduce changes in this environment to study the reactions of the subjects who interact in him and with him. It was a new research perspective that gave rise to hundreds of such studies around the world. To this day, this so-called research / action method continues to be implemented.
Our thoughts This psychologist created, among other things, field theory, focusing his attention on the interactions of groups with the environment.
