Kurt Lewin was one of the most influential psychologists in history, considered the father of social psychology and organizational psychology, his explanations and theory apply to the most diverse fields of today, mainly in the organizational world.
Kurt Lewin was born in a small Prussian village called Mogilno in 1890, during his childhood his family moved to Berlin, Germany.
- There.
- Lewin studied medicine and later biology in Munich.
- And from a very young age he also became interested in philosophy and psychology.
- Areas he began to study formally in 1911.
“If you really want to understand something, try to change it. ” Kurt Lewin?
He was also a strong political activist for socialism. In fact, he believes psychology can be very useful in achieving greater justice and equity in the world. He did a PhD, in philosophy, but during World War I he was sent to the front, injured early, and then returned to his normal life.
When Kurt Lewin returned home, he began his studies at the Berlin Institute of Psychology, where he contacted several representatives of Gestalt psychology and became very interested in this booming trend.
Kurt Lewin was of Jewish descent. Thus, with the rise of Nazism in 1933, he knew that he would have no choice but to leave Germany. First, he tried to take refuge in Jerusalem, but he failed. With the help of some colleagues, he was able to reach the United States.
Thanks to one of his German friends, he obtained a professorship at Cornell University and was later a professor at the University of Iowa. A few years later, he became director of the Group Dynamics Research Center at MIT, Massachusetts.
At that time, Kurt Lewin focused his research on social phenomena, studied in detail social interaction, as well as the effects of social pressure on behavior and work dynamics in organizations, through which he laid the foundations for what social psychology would be. .
When Kurt Lewin came to the United States, the main psychological current was conductism. This school thought the man was like a black box. It was born like a blank sheet. The influence of others shaped personality and made each person what it was. For Lewin, on the other hand, each individual is not passive, but establishes an interaction with his environment.
Kurt Lewin has designed new assumptions to understand human behavior. He borrowed the concept of “field” of physics. In this discipline, this term refers to an area of space that has certain properties or factors that give you a specific configuration.
Similarly, for Kurt Lewin, human behavior is the result of a field, which includes a set of coexisting facts, where change in one part influences the change of the whole, in turn, the subject perceives these facts and his dynamics in All This configures what Kurt Lewin called “living space”.
The variables involved in this dynamic field, the living space, are basically three: tension, strength and need, the latter sets a specific goal.
Kurt Lewin’s main contribution was to postulate that the individual and the environment should never be regarded as two distinct realities, in practice these are two instances that always interact and change in real time, happens all the time. Lewin’s field theory calls us to study the individual in terms of these dynamics.
Thus, it indicates that when we want to understand human behavior, we must consider all the variables that can affect your living space, this includes everything from the degree of illumination in an enclosure to the socializing patterns that exist in your group.
From all this, Kurt Lewin explains that it is perfectly valid to introduce changes in this environment to study the reactions of subjects interacting with him and with him, a new research perspective that resulted in hundreds of such studies around the world. Today, this method, called research-action, continues to be applied.