Kurt Lewin was one of the most influential psychologists in history. He is considered the father of social psychology and the psychology of organizations. His approaches and his theory are applied to many areas nowadays, mainly in the organizational world.

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Kurt Lewin was born in a small town in Prussia, called Mogilno, in 1890. From an early age his family moved to Berlin (Germany). There Lewin studied medicine and then biology in Munich. From a very young age he was also interested in philosophy and psychology, areas that he began studying formally in 1911.

"If you really want to understand something, try to change it."

-Kurt Lewin-

He was also an ardent political activist of socialism. In fact, I thought that psychology could be very useful to achieve greater justice and equity in the world. He received his doctorate as a philosopher, but during the First World War he was sent to the battlefront as an artilleryman. He was wounded soon and then returned to his normal life.

When Kurt Lewin returned home, he began studying at the Psychological Institute of Berlin. There he came into contact with several representatives of Gestalt psychology and became very interested in this current, which was in vogue.

A new stage for Kurt Lewin

Kurt Lewin was of Jewish descent. That is why, with the rise of Nazism in 1933, he knew that he had no choice but to leave Germany. First he tried to take refuge in Jerusalem, but he did not succeed. With the help of some colleagues, he was able to leave for the United States.

Thanks to one of his German friends, he got a job as a professor at Cornell University. He later became a professor at the University of Iowa. A few years later he became the director of the Group Dynamics Research Center at MIT Massachusetts.

At that time, Kurt Lewin focused 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. Thanks to all this, he laid the foundations of what social psychology would be like.

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A new vision of psychology

When Kurt Lewin arrived in the United States, the prevailing psychological current was behaviorism. This raised that the man was like a black box. It was born like a blank sheet. The influence of others was what shaped the personality and made everyone what they were. For Lewin, on the other hand, each individual is not passive, but rather establishes an interaction with his environment.

Kurt Lewin designed some new postulates to understand human behavior. He borrowed the concept of "field" from physics. In this discipline, this term refers to an area of space that has certain properties or factors that give it a specific configuration.

In the same way, for Kurt Lewin, human behavior is the result of a field. This comprises a set of coexisting events, in which the change in one part affects the change of the whole as a whole. In turn, the subject perceives these facts and their dynamics, in a particular way. All this makes up what Kurt Lewin called "living space".

The variables that are operating in this dynamic field, or vital space, are fundamentally three: tension, force and necessity. Thanks to the latter, the behavior establishes a specific purpose.

Great contributions to social psychology

The main contribution of Kurt Lewin was to postulate that the individual and the environment should never be seen as two separate realities. In practice, they are two instances that are always interacting with each other and that are mutually modified, in real time. It happens at all times. Lewin's field theory calls to study the individual in terms of these dynamics.

Likewise, he points out that when you want to understand human behavior, all the variables that may be affecting your living space must be taken into account. This includes from the degree of illumination of an enclosure, to the socialization patterns that are in your group.

Based on all this, Kurt Lewin states that it is perfectly valid to introduce changes in that environment to study the reactions of the subjects that interact in it and with it. This was a new perspective on the research that gave rise to hundreds of studies of that style around the world. To this day, this method, called research-action, continues to be applied.

Reference:

https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Lewin

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kurt-Lewin

https://www.goodtherapy.org/famous-psychologists/kurt-lewin.html

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