Kurt Lewin

Lore & Background

Lewin was born in 1890 into a Jewish family in Mogilno, County of Mogilno, Province of Posen, Prussia in present-day Poland. He received an orthodox Jewish education at home. He was one of four children born into a middle-class family. In 1905, Lewin moved with his family to Berlin.

He studied at the Kaiserin Augusta Gymnasium. In 1909, he entered the University of Freiburg to study medicine, but transferred to the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München to study biology. In April 1910, he transferred to the Royal Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin. By the summer of 1911, the majority of his courses were in psychology.

During World War I, he served in the Imperial German Army, sustained a war wound, and returned to the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin to complete his PhD. He served as a professor at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin from 1926 to 1932. In August 1933, Lewin immigrated to the U.S., where in 1940 he became a naturalized citizen.

He worked at Cornell University, the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station at the University of Iowa, and as director of the Center for Group Dynamics at MIT. Lewin coined the notion of genidentity and introduced the concept of hodological space. He proposed Lewin's equation for behavior: B = ƒ(P, E). He invented the term 'action research'.

Reader's Guide

Lewin is often recognized as the 'founder of social psychology' and was one of the first to study group dynamics and organizational development. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Lewin as the 18th-most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He argued that applied research could be conducted with rigor and that one could test theoretical propositions in applied research. He encouraged researchers to develop theories that can be used to address important social problems.

Did You Know?

• Lewin was originally involved with schools of behavioral psychology before changing to work with Gestalt psychologists including Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler.
• Lewin often associated with the early Frankfurt School.
• Lewin asked people to pronounce his name as 'Lou-in' after moving to the U.S., but shortly before his death he began requesting the correct pronunciation 'Le-veen'.
• Lewin was involved in the psychological rehabilitation of former occupants of displaced persons camps after World War II.