Kurt Zadek Lewin

Kurt Zadek Lewin was born on 9 September 1890 in Mogilno, in the province of Posen, Prussia (today's Poland), the fourth child of a middle-class Jewish family. His father Leopold ran a small general store with the family living above it. Father and uncle Max jointly farmed nearby land, but Prussian law forbade Jews from owning farmland, so the farm was legally held by a Christian neighbor. This early experience of structural discrimination later shaped Lewin's writing on the marginal man and on Jewish identity. The family moved to Berlin in 1905, where Lewin attended the classical Kaiserin Augusta Gymnasium. He entered the University of Freiburg in 1909 to study medicine, transferred to Munich to study biology, and there became active in socialist and women's rights movements. In April 1910 he moved to the Royal Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin as a medical student, but his interests soon shifted to philosophy and then to psychology. He took fourteen courses with Carl Stumpf. He served in the German army in World War I, was wounded, and returned to complete his PhD under Stumpf, whose communication with Lewin during the dissertation was, by his own account, sparse.

At the University of Berlin from 1926 to 1932 Lewin worked alongside the three Gestalt founders — Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Koehler, and Kurt Koffka — and ran experimental studies on tension, need, motivation, and learning. The Zeigarnik effect, named after his student Bluma Zeigarnik, dates from this period, as does his concept of the marginal man. His field theory rephrased Gestalt holism in terms of a vector field and a force field analogous to physics, depicting the mind as a life space. He introduced the notion of genidentity and the concept of hodological space — the simplest route through a field of competing forces. He was close to the early Frankfurt School at the Institute for Social Research. When Hitler took power in January 1933, the Institute disbanded and Lewin emigrated through England to the United States in August 1933 and naturalized in 1940. In 1933 he had already met Eric Trist at the London Tavistock Clinic.

In America Lewin passed through Cornell, the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, and a six-month visiting professorship at Stanford, then became director of the Research Center for Group Dynamics at MIT. Around 1944 he coined the term action research and in his 1946 paper Action Research and Minority Problems formulated it as a spiral of planning, action, and fact-finding about the result. He argued — against the dominant view in 1930s social science — that applied research could be conducted with rigor and that theoretical propositions could be tested in applied work. In the same period he coined group dynamics, arguing in his 1947 article Frontiers in Group Dynamics that a group is a unified system with supervening properties, not the sum of its members. His most famous equation, B = f(P, E) — behavior is a function of person and environment — became the banner of modern social psychology, replacing the nature versus nurture debate with a theory of person-environment interaction. His characterization of three leadership climates — authoritarian, democratic, and laissez-faire — set the agenda for half a century of leadership research.

In 1946 the Connecticut State Inter Racial Commission asked Lewin to help find ways to combat religious and racial prejudice. The workshop he ran in Bethel, Maine, gave birth to the T-group and to sensitivity training, which Carl Rogers later called perhaps the most significant social invention of this century, and led to the founding of the National Training Laboratories in 1947. His three-step change model — unfreeze, change, refreeze — remains a classic framework in organizational development and change management, although recent scholarship argues that Lewin himself did not publish this exact model and that successors reconstructed it after his death. From his line came Leon Festinger of cognitive dissonance, Roger Barker of environmental psychology, Bluma Zeigarnik, and Morton Deutsch, the founder of modern conflict resolution. Lewin died of heart failure in Newtonville, Massachusetts, on 12 February 1947 at only 56, leaving theories whose experimental measurement remained incomplete but whose legacy underwrites the second half of twentieth-century social, organizational, and management psychology.

Lewin had been married twice. He married Maria Landsberg in 1917 and they had a daughter Esther Agnes in 1919 and son Fritz Reuven in 1922 before divorcing around 1927; Maria later immigrated to Mandatory Palestine with the children. In 1929 he married Gertrud Weiss, with whom he had Miriam (1931) and Daniel (1933). After his immigration to the US, Lewin asked colleagues to pronounce his name Lou-in rather than Le-veen because Americans missed phone calls, then shortly before his death asked again for the correct Le-veen. He is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A 2002 Review of General Psychology survey ranked Lewin the 18th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, an unusually high ranking for someone whose career was cut short. His ideas reach into change management consulting, sensitivity training, group therapy, action research in education, the entire participative management tradition, and modern conflict resolution. The Tavistock journal Human Relations, founded in partnership with his MIT group, ran his Frontiers in Group Dynamics as its early flagship articles. Few psychologists died so young and so changed the shape of an applied discipline.