Kurt Lewin's field theory

• TYPE OF PSYCHOLOGY: Personality

Kurt Lewin’s field theory maintains that behavior is a function of the life space, or psychological reality, of the individual. Individuals are motivated to reduce tensions that arise in this life space. Lewin’s theory can be used to understand a wide range of everyday behavior and to suggest strategies for addressing social problems such as the reduction of prejudice and the resolution of social conflicts.

Introduction

Kurt Lewin was a theorist of everyday life. His field theory attempts to explain people’s everyday behavior, such as how a waiter remembers an order, what determines the morale and productivity of a work group, what causes intergroup prejudice, how a child encounters a new environment, or why people eat the foods they do.

For Lewin, what determines everyday behavior is the life space of the individual. The life space represents the psychological reality of the individual; it is the totality of all psychological facts and social forces that influence an individual at a given time and place. For example, the life space of a child entering a novel domain is, for the most part, undifferentiated and thus results in exploration on the part of the child. On the other hand, the life space of an employee at work may be well differentiated and populated with demands from the employer to produce more goods, from coworkers to follow a production norm, and from home for more income. There might, additionally, be physical needs to slow down.

Evolution of Lewin’s Theory

Field theory was born on the battlefields of World War I. Lewin served as a soldier in the German army. His first published article was titled “The War Landscape,” and it described the battlefield in terms of life space. The soldier’s needs determined how the landscape was to be perceived. When the soldier was miles from the front, the peaceful landscape seemed to stretch endlessly on all sides without direction. As the war front approached, the landscape took on direction, and peaceful objects such as rocks and trees became elements of battle, such as weapons and places to hide.

After the war, Lewin took an academic appointment at the Psychological Institute of Berlin, where he served on the faculty with Gestalt psychologists Wolfgang Köhler and Max Wertheimer. While at the institute, Lewin further developed his field theory and conducted the first program of experimental social psychological research exploring topics such as memory for interrupted tasks, level of aspiration, and anger. His work derived as much from field theory as it did from his curiosity about the social world. For example, research on memory for interrupted tasks began when he and his students wondered why a waiter could remember their rather lengthy order but would forget it immediately after the food was served. In field theory terms, noncompleted tasks (such as the waiter’s recall before delivering the order) were recalled better because they maintained a tension for completion compared to completed tasks, for which this tension is resolved.

As the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany, Lewin correctly perceived that his own Jewish life space and that of his family were becoming progressively more threatened and intolerable. Like many Jewish intellectuals of the time, Lewin emigrated to the United States; he obtained several visiting appointments until he established the Center for Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1944. Lewin’s American research was much more applied than his work in Europe, and it concentrated particularly on social problems such as prejudice and intergroup conflict—perhaps as a result of his own experience of prejudice as a Jew in Germany.

Before his early death in 1947, Lewin helped train the first generation of American students interested in experimental social psychology, including such notables as Leon Festinger, Harold Kelley, Stanley Schachter, and Morton Deutsch. As a result, Lewin’s intellectual legacy has pervaded the field of experimental social psychology. Lewinian social psychologists have continued to carry on his research legacy by investigating topics of long-standing interest to Lewin, such as prejudice, achievement, organizational behavior, , and the reduction of cognitive tensions or , and by attempting to explain how individuals construe their environments and how those environments affect behavior.

Life Space Regions

The concept of life space is usually divided into two parts: person and environment. These two parts can be differentiated further into regions. A region is any major part of the life space that can be distinguished from other parts and is separated by more or less permeable boundaries. For example, regions differentiated within the person might consist of needs, goals, hopes, and aspirations of the individual, whereas the differentiation of the environment might consist of profession, family, friendships, social norms, and taboos.

Locomotion, or behavior and change in the life space, is determined by the differentiation of regions in the life space and by the forces for change emanating from each region. Often, in any given life space, there are opposing or conflicting forces. For example, the boss may want to increase productivity as much as possible, whereas coworkers may seek to limit production to levels obtainable by all workers. According to Lewin, these tensions, or opposing social forces, provide the motivation for behavior and change in the life space. Tension can be resolved by any number of activities, including reconfiguring the life space either physically (for example, getting a new job) or mentally (for example, devaluing either the boss’s or coworkers’ opinions); performing a substitute task that symbolically reduces tension (for example, performing different tasks of value to the boss); or finding the “quasi-stationary equilibrium,” or position where all opposing forces are equal in strength (for example, performing at a level between boss’s and coworkers’ recommendations).

Comparison with Behaviorism and Psychoanalysis

It is useful to compare Lewin’s field theory with the two other major theories of the time: behaviorism and psychoanalysis. Lewin’s field theory can be summarized by the equation B = f(P,E), or, “behavior is a function of person and environment.” In other words, behavior is a function of the life space of a total environment as perceived by the individual. In psychoanalytic thought, behavior is a function of the history of the individual. For example, past childhood experience is supposed to have a direct impact on current psychological processes. In contrast, Lewin’s theory is ahistorical. Although the individual’s past may influence that person’s approach and construal of the psychological field, its influence is only indirect, as behavior is a function of the current and immediate life space.

Lewin’s field theory differs from behaviorism on at least two key dimensions. First, Lewin emphasized the subjectivity of the psychological field. To predict and understand behavior successfully, a therapist needs to describe the situation from the viewpoint of the individual whose behavior is under consideration, not from the viewpoint of an observer. Second, Lewin’s theory emphasizes that behavior must be understood as a function of the life space or situation as a whole. In other words, behavior is motivated by the multitude of often interdependent forces affecting an individual, as opposed to one or two salient rewards or that may be present.

Role in Social Change

Lewin’s field theory has had many applications, particularly in the area of social change. Lewin’s approach to solving social problems was first to specify, in as much detail as possible, the life space of the individual involved. Next, he would identify the social forces affecting the individual. Finally, Lewin would experiment with changing these social forces or adding new ones to enact social change. Two applications of field theory performed by Lewin and his associates serve as good examples. One deals with changing food preferences, and the other with the reduction of intergroup conflicts and prejudice.

During World War II, there was a shortage of meat, an important protein source, in the United States. As part of the war effort, Lewin was assigned the task of convincing Americans to eat sweetbreads—certain organ meats, which many Americans find unappetizing—to maintain protein levels. Lewin began by first describing the consumption channel, or how food reaches a family’s table. At the time, housewives obtained food from either a garden or a grocery store and then moved it to the table by purchasing it, transporting it home, storing it in an icebox or pantry, and then preparing it. At each step, Lewin identified forces that prevented the gatekeeper—in this case, the housewife—from serving sweetbreads. Such forces might have included the belief that family members would not eat sweetbreads, inexperience with the selection and preparation of sweetbreads, or inherently distasteful aspects of the food.

In attempting to remove and redirect these forces, Lewin experimented with two approaches, one successful and the other not. In the unsuccessful case, Lewin presented housewives with a lecture detailing the problems of nutrition during the war and stating ways of overcoming obstacles in serving sweetbreads; he discussed ways to prepare sweetbreads, provided recipes, and indicated that other women had successfully served sweetbreads for their families with little complaint. Only 3 percent of the housewives hearing this lecture served sweetbreads. From Lewin’s perspective, such a lecture was ineffective because it did not involve the audience and arouse the level of tension needed to produce change. Lewin’s second method was a group discussion. The housewives were asked to discuss how they could persuade “housewives like themselves” to serve sweetbreads. This led to a discussion of the obstacles that the housewife might encounter, along with ways of overcoming these obstacles (just as in the lecture). Such a discussion was effective because it created tension for the housewife: “I just told everyone why they should and how they could eat sweetbreads, and I am not currently serving them myself.” After this group discussion, 32 percent (an almost elevenfold increase) of the housewives involved served sweetbreads.

Conflict and Prejudice

Lewin approached the problems of intergroup conflict and racial prejudice by describing the life spaces of the members of the conflicting parties. For example, Lewin saw the life space of many marginalized group members (such as those in religiously and racially marginalized groups) as full of obstacles and barriers that restrict movement in the life space. The life space of the majority member often consigned the marginalized member to a small and rigidly bounded region (for example, a ghetto). By isolating marginalized group members, majority group members can develop unrealistic perceptions or of the . Such life spaces are very likely to result in intergroup conflict.

The field theory analysis of racial prejudice suggests that one way to reduce intergroup conflict is to remove obstacles and increase the permeability of intergroup barriers. In the later part of his career, Lewin established the Commission on Community Interrelations as a vehicle for discovering ways of removing intergroup barriers. Lewin and his colleagues discovered some of the following techniques for promoting intergroup harmony: enacting laws that immediately removed barriers, such as racial quotas limiting the number of Jews who could attend certain universities; immediate hiring of Black people as sales personnel, thereby increasing the permeability of intergroup boundaries by making contact between group members more likely; responding directly to racial slurs with a calm appeal based on American traditions and democracy to provide a countervailing force to the slur; promoting meetings of warring groups in a friendly atmosphere as a means of breaking down group boundaries; and immediately integrating housing as a successful way of promoting racial harmony.

Applications in Health Care

Field theory originated within the field of psychology and remained of use within that field. Field theory and Lewin's additional theories on change have been used to understand the ways that children respond to change and the ways that a child's life space affects their development. Lewin's theories have also become staples of health-care management, particularly in the ways that hospital management have addressed transitioning to new technological systems to run hospitals.

Bibliography

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