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 MaxWertheimer. 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 a number of 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 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 pervades the field of experimental
social psychology. Today, first-, second-, third-, and even fourthgeneration
Lewinian social psychologists continue to carry on his research
legacy by investigating topics of long-standing interest to Lewin, such as prejudice,
achievement, organizational behavior, social cognition, and the reduction
of cognitive tensions or dissonance and by attempting to explain
how individuals construe their environments and how those environments
affect behavior.