Kurt Lewin and his theory of interpersonal relationships

Kurt Lewin was one of the most influential psychologists in history. He is considered the father of psychology social and organizational psychology. His approaches and his theory are applied to a multitude of areas today, mainly in the organizational world.

Kurt Lewin was born in a small town in Prussia, called Mogilno, in 1890. At an early age his family moved to Berlin (Germany). There Lewin studied medicine and then biology in Munich. From a very young age he was also interested in philosophy. and psychology, areas that he began to study formally in 1911.

He was also an ardent political activist for socialism. In fact, I thought that psychology could be very useful to achieve greater justice and equity in the world. He earned his doctorate as a philosopher, but during the First World War he was sent to the front lines as an artilleryman. He was soon wounded and he then returned to his normal life.

When Kurt Lewin returned home, he began studying at the Berlin Psychological Institute. There he came into contact with several representatives of Gestalt psychology. and he became very interested in this trendwhich was in vogue.

A new stage for Kurt Lewin

Kurt Lewin was of Jewish descent. That’s why, with the rise of Nazism In 1933, he knew he had no choice but to leave Germany.. He first tried to take refuge in Jerusalem, but was unsuccessful. With the help of some colleagues he was able to go to the United States.

Thanks to one of his German friends, he got a job as a professor at Cornell University. Later he taught at the University of Iowa. A few years later he became the director of the Group Dynamics Research Center at MIT in Massachusetts.

At that time, Kurt Lewin focused his research on social phenomena. He studied social interaction in detail, as well as the effects of social pressure in behavior and work dynamics in organizations. Thanks to all this he laid the foundations of what would become social psychology.

A new vision of psychology

When Kurt Lewin arrived in the United States, the prevailing psychological current was behaviorism. This stated that man was like a black box. He was born as a blank page. The influence of others was what shaped personality and made each person who they were. For Lewin, on the other hand, each individual is not passive, but rather establishes an interaction with his environment..

Kurt Lewin designed new postulates to understand human behavior. He borrowed the concept of “field” from physics. In that discipline, this term refers to an area of ​​space that has certain properties or factors that give it a specific configuration.

In the same way, for Kurt Lewin, human behavior is the result of a field. This comprises a set of coexisting facts, in which the change in one part affects the change of the whole as a whole. At the same time, The subject perceives these facts and their dynamics in a particular way. All of this makes up what Kurt Lewin called “living space.”.

The variables that are operating in that dynamic field, or vital space, are fundamentally 3: tension, strength and need.. Thanks to the latter, the behavior establishes a specific purpose.

Great contributions to social psychology

Kurt Lewin’s main contribution was to postulate that the individual and the environment should never be seen as two separate realities.. In practice, they are two instances that are always interacting with each other and modify each other, in real time. It happens all the time. Lewin’s field theory calls for studying the individual based on these dynamics.

In addition, points out that when you want to understand human behavior you must take into account all the variables that may be affecting your living space. This includes everything from the degree of lighting in an enclosure to the socialization patterns in your group.

Based on all this, Kurt Lewin suggests that it is perfectly valid to introduce changes in that environment to study the reactions of the subjects who interact in it and with it. This was a new perspective on research that gave rise to hundreds of similar studies around the world. To this day, this method, called action research, continues to be applied.

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