KURT LEWIN(1890 - 1947)

-Unnati Shah

INDEX1. BIOGRAPHY• INTODUCTION• EDUCATION• KNOW FOR• FAMOUS WORKS• SOME CENTRAL IDEAS2. LEWIN’S EQUATION3. CHANGE MANAGEMENT

PROCESS• FORCE FIELD ANALYSIS • ACTIVE RESEARCH

4. THE STRUCTURE OF PERSONALITY

• FIELD THEORY• THE LIFE-SPACE a) DIFFERENTIATIONb) CONNECTIONS BETWEEN

REGIONSi. NEARNESS-REMOTNESSS

DIMENSIONii. FIRMNESS-WEAKNESS DIMENSIONiii. FLUIDITY-RIGIDITY DIMENSION

5. DYNAMICS OF PERSONALITY• ENERGY• TENSION• NEED• VALANCE• VECTOR• LOCOMOTION6. DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY7. TYPES OF CONFLICTS8. OTHER CONCEPTS• EINSTELLUNG • LEVEL OF ASPIRATION

• German-American psychologist

• Known as the modern pioneers of

social, organizational, and applied psychology.

• Recognized as the "founder of social

psychology" • first to study

group dynamics and organizational development

.

• Kurt Lewin left Germany as the Nazis consolidated their power.

• He adapted and applied the Gestalt perspective to personality theory and social dynamics and called it "Field Theory."

• He was also responsible for the founding of the National Training Laboratories in Bethel Maine, best known for "sensitivity training" for corporate leaders.

EDUCATION• In 1909, he entered the University of

Freiburg to study medicine, • Transferred to University of Munich to

study biology.

• He became involved with the socialist movement and women's rights .

• He served in the German army when World War I began.

• Due to a war wound, he returned to the University of Berlin to complete his Ph.D.

Known for-• Group Dynamics• Action Research and• T-Groups. ( in which the learners

use feedback, problem solving, and role play to gain insights into themselves, others, and groups. The goal is to change the standards, attitudes and behavior of individuals.)

Influenced by-• Gestalt Psychologists• Kurt koffka• Jacob L. Moreno

Famous Works• Lewin coined the notion of genidentity. (Two objects

are not identical because they have the same properties in common, but because one has developed from the other.

• He also proposed a perspective as an alternative to the nature versus nurture debate.

• Lewin suggested that neither nature (inborn tendencies) nor nurture (how experiences in life shape individuals) alone can account for individuals' behavior and personalities, but rather both nature and nurture interact to shape each person.

SOME CENTRAL IDEAS:

• An interest in intergroup conflict, and in conflict between individual and group wishes.

• We always exist in relation to a social context. Gestalt ideas can be applied to understand our place in our social and environmental situation.

• We are culturally taught how to see, look, and act. Changing these is in a real sense changing the perceived culture within which we life.

• Change can be carried out in ways that respects and humanizes our opponents as well as ourselves. If carried out in violent, dehumanizing ways, it is self-defeating.

Lewin's Equation• The Lewin's Equation, B=ƒ(P,E), is a

psychological equation of behavior. • It states that behavior is a function of the

person in their environment.• When first presented in Lewin's book

Principles of Topological Psychology, published in 1936.

• It gave importance to a person's momentary situation in understanding his or her behavior, rather than relying entirely on the past.

Change process/ change management process

Lewin described change as a three-stage process.

Stage 1- "unfreezing"• The Unfreezing stage is probably one of

the most important stages to understand the world of change we live in today.

• This stage is about getting ready to change.

• It involves getting to a point of understanding that change is necessary, and getting ready to move away from our current comfort zone.

• This first stage is about preparing ourselves, or others, before the change

• Unfreezing and getting motivated for the change is all about weighing up the 'pro's' and 'con's' and deciding if the 'pro's' outnumber the 'con's' before you take any action.

• This is the basis of what Kurt Lewin called the Force Field Analysis.

Force field analysisThere are lots of different factors (forces) for and against making change that we need to be aware of. If the factors for change outweigh the factors against change we'll make the change. If not, then there is low motivation to change.

Stage 2: Change - or Transition• According to him change is not an event, but

rather a process. He called that process a transition. Transition is the inner movement or journey we make in reaction to a change. This second stage occurs as we make the changes that are needed.

• Example- Imagine bungee jumping or parachuting. You may have convinced yourself that there is a great benefit for you to make the jump, but now you find yourself on the edge and get scared. But when you do it you may learn a lot about yourself.

• Using role models and allowing people to develop their own solutions also help to make the changes.

Stage 3: Freezing

• This stage is about establishing stability once the changes have been made. The changes are accepted and become the new norm. People form new relationships and become comfortable with their routines.

Action Research

ACTION RESEARCH Lewin was especially interested in investigation of how to get people to act in ways that were of benefit both to them

and the larger social body. He was less interested in "pure

research" that had no implications for practical application.

The Structure Of Personality

The first step in defining the person as a structural concept is to represent him or her as an

entity apart from everything else.

Nonpsychological EnvironmentPsyEnvironment

The Structure Of Personality

LIFE SPACE, L= P+E

Person

• As a child develops, the personality system expands and differentiates. His view of the psychological environment becomes better. He does a better job of distinguishing between the real world and the "irreal" world of wishes and fears.

• The child finds new social roles and learns new social norms and codes

Fact

• A fact for lewin is not only an observable thing, it is also something that may not be directly observable but can be inferred from something that is observable.

FIELD THEORY• Behavior must be derived from a

totality of coexisting facts.• These coexisting facts make up a

"dynamic field," which means that the state of any part of the field depends on every other part of it.

• Behavior depends on the present field rather than on the past or the future.

The Life Space• The field is the life space, which

contains the person and his or her psychological environment.

• The psychological environment is the environment as the person perceives and understands it, and as related to his needs.

• The places where you physically go, the people and events that occur there, and your feelings about the place and people.

• One part of this is the places you inhabit every day, or at least regularly. Another part is places you've been to, but go very occasionally or may never go back to again.

• Your life-space , includes the world you travel into through reading, movies, TV, what other people say, etc.

• There is also personal mental life space--the places you inhabit in your mind, your fantasy world, etc..

• When you're planning what to do

tomorrow, your life-space is not the room you're in now but the place where you expect to be tomorrow.

• The person and the psychological environment are divided into regions that undergo differentiation.

• Regions are connected when a person can perform a locomotion between them.

• Locomotion includes any kind of approach or withdrawal--even looking at a pretty object or away from an ugly one, or listening to liked music and avoiding disliked or uninteresting music.

• They are said to be connected when communication can take place between them.

• The region that lies just outside the life-space is the foreign hull.

• The person is a differentiated region in the lifespace, set apart from the psychological environment by a boundary.

• A barrier may block the locomotion called for by vectors.

• A barrier exerts no force until force is exerted on it. Then it may yield, or resist strongly.

DIFFERENTIATION

• Lewin maintained that the structure of the person is heterogeneous and not homogeneous, that is it is subdivided into separate yet intercommunicating and independent parts.

• To represent this state, the area within is divided into ZONES.

• Firstly, divide the person into two parts.

• The outer part – Perceptual-motor region

(P-M)and• Central part- Inner-personal region.

• Secondly, divide Inner- personal region into cells.

• Cells adjacent to Perceptual-motor region are called Peripheral cells and the cells in he center are called Central cells

The concrete representation of a particular person in a concrete psychological situation, at a given moment, the exact number and relative positions of the environmental subregions, as well as the precise number and relative positions of the inner-personal sphere, must be known if one is to understand behavior.

CONNECTIONS BETWEEN REGIONS

• The life-space is now represented as a differentiated person surrounded by a differentiated environment.

• Boundaries are impenetrable barriers that divide the person and the environment into independent and dependent.

ACCESSIBILTY BETWEEN REGIONS

• 3 important ways are1. Nearness-remotness dimension.2. Firmness-weakness dimension.3. Fluidity-rigidity dimension.

• By utilizing these concepts, most of the possible interconnections in the life-space can be represented.

Nearness- Remotness Dimension.-

• When placing the regions close together the influence of one upon the other is great and placing them far apart, the influence is weak.

• Influence decreases as the number of intervening regions increases.

Firmness-weakness dimension-• The resistance of a boundary, or its

permeability, is represented by the width of the boundary line.

• If very thin line- represents weak boundary.• If very thick line- represents strong

impermeable boundary.

Fluidity-rigidity dimension-• Take into account the nature of the

medium.• Fluid medium- Responds quickly.

(flexible)• Rigid medium- Resists change. (inelastic)

Number Of Regions

• The number of regions in the life space is determined by the number of separate psychological facts that exist at any given moment of time.

THE DYNAMICS OF PERSONALITY• A structural representation of life space is

like a road map. A good road map contains all of the information one needs to know to plan any trip, just as a good structural representation of persona and their environment contains all of the facts one needs to know to account for any possible kind of behavior.

• Just as the map cannot say which trip the person is going to decide, same way neither can a detailed picture of life space tell us how a person is going to behave.

ENERGY

• Person is a complex energy system.• The kind of energy that performs

psychological work is called Psychical energy.

• Psychic energy is released when the psychic system attempts to return to equilibrium from the state of disequilibrium.

• Disequilibrium is produced by increase of tension in 1 part of the system , as a result of external stimulus or internal change.

• When tension throughout the body is equalized, the output of energy is halted and total system comes at rest.

TENSION• Tension is a state of an inner-personal

region related to other inter-personal regions.

• Tension in a particular system tends to equalize itself with the amount of tension in surrounding systems. This is called a process.

• A process may be thinking, remembering, feeling, perceiving, acting etc.

NEED• An increase of tension or the release of energy

in an inter-personal region is caused by the arousal of need.

• It may be a psychological condition or a desire for something.

• Lewin, In the first place he did not give a list of needs because he thought it would be never ending.

• Secondly, the one thing that really matters is to represent those needs that actually exist in the momentary situation.

• Lewin also distinguished between needs and Quasi-needs.

• A need is due to inner state such as hunger.

• Quasi-needs is the specific intention like satisfying ones hunger by eating only at a particular restaurant.

VALANCE

• A system (region) in the person is said to be in a state of tension whenever a need or intention exists.

• A positive valence exists when the person thinks the region will reduce tension by meeting present needs, while a negative valence exists when the person thinks the region will increase tension or threatens injury

VECTOR

• A vector is a force that arises from a need that acts on the person and determines the direction in which he or she moves through the psychological environment.

• For every region with a positive valence, a vector pushes the person in its direction. With a negative valence, a vector pushes the person away from it.

LOCOMOTION

• It is the representation of the specific path that a person will transcribe in moving through his or her psychological environment.

• Often two or more vectors act on the person at the same time, and then the locomotion is some kind of a "resultant."

DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY• Development according to lewin is a

continous process in which it is difficult to recognize discrete stages.

• He also believed that the use of an age scale for describing development is not really adequate for understanding psychological growth.

• It is not enough to say that 6 year old do things 3year old don’t do. One must account for the change using the concepts of field theory.

TYPES OF CONFLICTS

• approach-approach. We want two different things that we like both of (that have "positive valences," in Lewin's terms.

• avoidance-avoidance. We have to pick one or the other alternative, but dislike both. (both have "negative valences."

• approach-avoidance. We can either have, or subject ourselves to, one thing that has both positive and negative qualities.

• double approach-avoidance. We must choose between two things that each have both positive and negative qualities.

EINSTELLUNG (‘person perception’)

• Each of us learned from the people who were important in our lives as we grew up how to perceive events.

• Our mind-set tells us how to look, how to observe. It makes the world intelligible to us within a particular frame of reference.

MIND SET• A dramatic demonstration of Lewin's idea of mind-set was

Harold H. Kelley's classic study on "The Warm-Cold Variable in First Impressions of Persons.“

• A class received a written introduction to a guest lecturer they were about to hear.

• The instructions differed in just one word: Half were told that the lecturer was "a rather warm person who..." and the other half, "a rather cold person who...." They then heard the same lecture. Afterward, the latter group rated the lecturer significantly more negatively.

• Lewin's conception, and Kelley's study, launched the whole “person perception" area of study.

LEVEL OF ASPIRATION• A basic idea: Using your skills at the level

at which they are, you can succeed. • In Lewin's view, level of aspiration is

determined by two factors: • The person's relation to certain values • The person's sense of realism in regard to

the probability of reaching the goal. • A characteristically successful person,will

chose goals that are within his or her capacity to reach, and will raise those goals once having achieved them.

LIMITATIONS

• A limitation of Lewin's method- diagramming the life space, difficulty in representing B's life space as a factor operating in A's life-space.

• Although lewin did not reject the idea that heriditary and mutation play a role in development, nowhere did he discuss their possible influence, nor did he assign them any place in his conceptual representations.

ADVANTAGES• Kurt Lewin, tried to resolve the limitation of behavioral

theories by giving his famous equation: behavior is a function of the person (genetic nature) and the environment.

• First one to give the change theory.• Life space theory well explained.• Tension system well explained.• He had a major impact on appreciation of groups and how to

work with them; • he pioneered action research; • he demonstrated that complex social phenomenon could be

explored using controlled experiments.• first to study • group dynamics and organizational development.

THANK YOU