Kurt Lewin: Field Theory and the Roots of Group Dynamics

Kurt Zadek Lewin was born in 1890 into a Jewish family in Mogilno, and studied mathematics, physics and psychology in Berlin, graduating under Carl Stumpf. When Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, Lewin realized that staying in Germany was no longer safe for him or his family: he already had ties to the United States, a congress at Yale in 1929 and a visiting professorship at Stanford in 1932, and in 1933 he left the country for good. He spent two years at Cornell University, then settled at the University of Iowa, where he stayed from 1935 to 1944. He became a US citizen in 1940.

In 1944 he was invited to open his own institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he founded a research center devoted to group dynamics. He died three years later, on February 11, 1947, of a heart attack, not yet fifty-seven.

After his death, the center merged into the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan.

Field theory

Lewin’s central idea is that understanding or predicting a person’s behavior takes more than looking at their character alone, and more than looking at the situation alone: it takes both together. Textbooks on scientific psychology usually sum this up with the formula B = f(P, E), behavior (B) as a function of the person (P) and the environment (E). Lewin arrived at this position by expanding on behaviorist stimulus-response models: classic behaviorism looked mainly at what comes in from outside, while Lewin added the “field” the person moves through.

To describe this field he used the concept of the life space, everything that can influence a person’s behavior at a given moment: the physical and social surroundings around them, and also imagined states that do not yet exist in reality. It is an idea close to certain intuitions later developed by cognitivism: behavior does not depend on the world as it is, but on how that person represents it to themselves at that moment.

The leadership-style experiments

To study group dynamics experimentally, Lewin and his collaborators organized four groups of ten-year-old boys, each supervised by an adult and engaged in a series of craft activities. Each adult adopted a different style of guidance: authoritarian, deciding every choice for the group alone; democratic, encouraging the boys to discuss decisions together; laissez-faire, leaving the group completely free to choose, without stepping in.

Practical example: in one of the groups led with an authoritarian style, the leader alone decided who did what and how; in the democratic group, the boys discussed the activities together before starting; in the laissez-faire group, the adult stayed available but did not guide, and the boys were left to organize themselves.

Lewin described the declared purpose of these experiments as giving insight into how group dynamics actually work beneath the surface. And this is where one of his most cited insights comes in: it is not similarity or difference between people that makes a group, but interdependence of fate among its members, the fact that they share the same circumstances. A school class, a sports team, a family remain a group even when their members are very different from one another, as long as what happens to one ends up affecting the others too.

Action research

In 1946 Lewin coined the term “action research” in a paper describing a method that combines empirical study of social phenomena with practical intervention on them. The method proceeds in cycles: an action is planned, carried out, and then the results are checked before planning the next step, in a spiral that repeats. It differs from the approach of a scholar who observes from the outside without intervening: someone doing action research steps into the problem, acts, and uses what they observe to correct the next step.

Around the same time, Lewin also described the phases a group passes through when moving from one state of equilibrium to another, an idea later picked up and developed into organizational change management.