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1890–1947 Germany
Kurt Zadek Lewin (September 9, 1890 – February 12, 1947) was a German-American psychologist, known as one of the modern pioneers of social psychology, organizational psychology, and applied psychology. He is often recognized as the "founder of social psychology" and was one of the first to study group dynamics and organizational development.
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A business man once stated that there is nothing so practical as a good theory.
It is not the similarity or dissimilarity of individuals that constitutes a group, but interdependence of fate.
Kurt Lewin (1939)
A goal can play an essential role in the psychological situation without being clearly present in consciousness.
Only by the concrete whole which comprises the object and the situation are the vectors which determine the dynamics of the event defined.
The study of the conditions for change begins appropriately with an analysis of the conditions for “no change,” that is, for the state of equilibrium.
A conflict is to be characterized psychologically as a situation in which oppositely directed, simultaneously acting forces of approximately equal strength work upon the individual.
The young mathematical disciple 'topology' might be of some help in making psychology a real science.
We no longer seek the “cause” of events in the nature of a single isolated object, but in the relationship between an object and its surroundings.
Do not in any way 'prove the rule,' but on the contrary are completely valid disproofs, even though they are rare, indeed, so long as one single exception is demonstrable.
The valence of an object usually derives from the fact that the object is a means to the satisfaction of a need, or has indirectly something to do with the satisfaction of a need.
Even if all the laws of psychology were known, one could make a prediction about the behavior of a man only if in addition to the laws, the special nature of the particular situation were known.
[Conflict can be defined] as the opposition of approximately equally strong field forces.
[Satiation may spill over outside the specific task to structurally similar tasks) and may end up in an early] exhaustion of the occupational will.
Kurt Lewin (1928)
For Aristotelian physics the membership of an object in a given class was of critical importance, because for Aristotle the class defined the essence or essential nature of the object, and thus determined its behavior in both positive and negative respects.
p. 143 Donald P. Spence (1994)
[Lewin formally defines a Gestalt as:] a system whose parts are dynamically connected in such a way that a change of one part results in a change of all other parts.
The research needed for social practice can best be characterized as research for social management or social engineering. It is a type of action research, a comparative research of the conditions and effects of various forms of social action, and research leading to social action. Research that produces nothing but books will not suffice.
For any type of social management, It is of great practical importance that levels of quasi-stationary equilibria can be changed in either of two ways: by adding forces in the desired direction, or by diminishing opposing forces.
[Gestalt is] a system whose parts are dynamically connected in such a way that a change of one part results in a change of all other parts.
In psychology one can begin to describe the whole situation by roughly distinguishing the person (P) and his environment (E). Every psychological event depends upon the state of the person and at the same time on the environment, although their relative importance is different in different cases.
The objective of social change might concern the nutritional standard of consumption, the economic standard of living, the type of group relation, the output of a factory, the productivity of an educational team. It is important that a social standard to be changed does not have the nature of a “thing” but of a “process.”.
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