Lewin, Kurt, and Power

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) was one of a number of distinguished scientists who emigrated from Nazi Germany and Austria in the 1930s and 1940s and who had great impact on social science in the United States. Lewin particularly affected the direction of social psychology, making important contributions to theory, research, and applications to social influence processes and social power.

Lewin's name is most closely associated with field theory in social psychology. In contrast with psychoanalytic theory and behaviorism or reinforcement theories that dominated American psychology and social psychology during the first half of the 20th century, Lewinian field theory focused on a psychological definition of the individual's life space, which he analyzed in terms of tensions within the person (his or her needs, values, and desires) and the consequent forces or vectors that pressed that person to engage in some behaviors and to avoid others.

The person might experience conflict when an activity region has both positive and negative valence or when two opposing regions have positive valence. By representing such situations in topological drawings, Lewin and his students found they could productively examine psychological and social situations that were both interesting and relevant, situations ranging from (a) a child who is attracted to the waves at a seashore but frightened by them as he or she gets too close, to (b) the conflicting pressures of a member of a minority group in adapting to a majority culture. In examining social influence processes, Lewin distinguished between a person's own forces, which emanate directly from that person's desires and wishes, and induced forces, which are imposed on that person by another person or group. A major question, then, concerned the process by which induced forces are accepted and internalized as own forces. Such considerations played an important role in the classic experiment by Lewin, Ronald Lippitt, and Ralph White on the effectiveness of autocratic, democratic, and laissez-faire leadership.

In later years, Lewin and his coworkers focused much of their attention on the power of the group. Group cohesiveness was defined by his students Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and Kurt Back as the total field of forces that act on members to remain in the group. Festinger then continued with theory and research on pressures toward uniformity, such pressures being greater in highly cohesive groups. Thus, during World War II, groups of housewives were more likely to serve unpopular cuts of meat if, following discussions, they made a group decision to that effect. Lester Coch and John R. P. French Jr. later found that group discussion and decision could effectively increase the productivity level of a work group.

Out of such considerations, a whole field of theory and research on group dynamics developed, and indeed the Research Center for Group Dynamics was established under Lewin's direction at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, later moving to the University of Michigan, where it was directed by Dorwin Cartwright. In the 1950s, the Center collectively focused attention on the psychology of social power, resulting in the publication Studies in Social Power. One chapter, “The Bases of Social Power,” by John R. French and Bertram H. Raven, continues to be widely cited. Expanding on that chapter, Raven later presented an all-encompassing power/interaction model of interpersonal influence.

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