Lewin, Kurt (18901947)

Lewin's Paradigm Shift in Social Psychology

Lewin epitomizes Thomas Kuhn's description of a scientific revolutionary. He was acutely aware of the gaps in our understanding of human behavior and our ability to predict and change relations [Page 534]among people. In 1914, shortly after he completed his PhD, World War I began. As his biographer and daughter, Miriam Lewin, has written, he had a “strong revulsion” to militarism, but joined the military and served in an artillery unit. He was seriously wounded and spent nearly a year recovering in a hospital. Although we do not know precisely how his time on the front lines of this conflict between groups affected his outlook, it is not surprising that his subsequent theorizing and empirical studies focused on intergroup relations. His experience was exacerbated by the discrimination he experienced as a Jew, which in 1934 led him to flee Nazi Germany and immigrate to the United States.

No doubt, other psychologists and social theorists were similarly affected by the tumultuous events of the first part of the 20th century. What made Lewin unique and led to his enormous influence on modern thinking about group behavior is that he developed a broad theoretical framework that was linked to experimental methods. In Kuhnian terms, he created a paradigm that enabled us to think differently about human behavior and gave us the tools to study the complexity of social interaction. He was committed to developing psychology as a science but also mindful of the ways in which a science of the mind had to differ from physical science. His lasting contribution was reframing how we think about groups and the relationship of individuals to groups.

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