Cartwright, Dorwin (1915–2008)

Dorwin Cartwright, in his presidential address to the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, noted that social power, long the prerogative of political scientists and philosophers, was a sadly neglected variable in social psychology. As director of the Research Center for Group Dynamics, he encouraged and coordinated his colleagues and other social psychologists in clarifying and exploring the dynamics of social power.

On completing his doctoral studies at Harvard University in 1940, Cartwright accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at Iowa State University with Kurt Lewin, who was well known for his work in field theory. When the United States became an active participant in World War II, Cartwright accepted an appointment from Rensis Likert to move to Washington, D.C., to join Likert's research program in evaluating opinions, attitudes, and behavior related to the war effort. Cartwright's first major assignment was to conduct a series of national surveys evaluating the effectiveness of war bond drives. Related studies of group discussion and group decision indicated that, beyond informational appeals, the power of the group could play an important role in changing food habits, such as encouraging housewives to serve nutritious but less popular cuts of meat to help alleviate the wartime meat shortage. Later research indicated that in similar fashion, work group productivity could also be increased.

After Lewin's untimely death in 1947, Cartwright assumed directorship of the Research Center for Group Dynamics, which Lewin had established at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and coordinated its relocation to the University of Michigan. There, Cartwright edited Field Theory in Social Science, a collection of important articles by Kurt Lewin. Cartwright also edited Studies in Social Power, which opened with his presidential address to the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and included a series of theoretical works and experiments. His concluding chapter proposed a field theoretical conception of social power.

Though the term social power was indeed neglected by social psychologists, many relevant [Page 90]variables had been investigated. This became more clear once social power was defined as the ability or potential of an influencing agent (O) to influence a change in a target (P). A substantial body of research on social influence on attitudes, beliefs, emotions, and behavior could now be examined in terms of the potential for such influence—social power. The studies of group norms and group decisions, as in the studies of food habits, or group decisions affecting level of worker productivity (John R. P. French and Lester Coch), represented the power of the group. Leadership could then be considered in terms of social power—the manner in which a leader might use his or her available resources to affect the beliefs and behavior of followers. Kurt Lewin, Ronald Lippitt, and Ralph White illustrated this conception of power in experiments on effectiveness of democratic, autocratic, and laissez-faire leadership. Field studies of the way behavior patterns spread among boys in a camp setting (Ronald Lippitt, Norman Polanski, and Sidney Rosen) could be also be understood in terms of social power relationships. John R. P. French and Bertram Raven, as part of the Research Center for Group Dynamics program coordinated by Cartwright, developed their widely cited analysis of the bases of social power.

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