[B = f(P, E)] = The Lifespace
1936
Kurt Lewin (1890–1947)
What is the best way to understand human personality and behavior? Is it by studying individual differences? Or should we think of a person in the context of his or her total life? Kurt Lewin chose the latter, stating that behavior (B) is function (f) of the person (P) and the environment (E): B = f(P, E). In 1936, influenced by German psychologist Martha Muchow, he published a paper in which he called this equation the formula for the lifespace. Lewin was trained in the Gestalt tradition—that is, he was trained to always consider the parts in the context of the whole. He is well known for his statement that “there is nothing so practical as a good theory.”
Lewin was at the University of Berlin until he left for the United States in 1933 (because of the Nazis). In Berlin, he and his students conducted an impressive and influential body of research, such as Bluma Zeigarnik’s research on memory for completed and uncompleted tasks. Many women found places as graduate students with Lewin, which may have reflected a desire from early in his career, when he wrote that he wanted to liberate “women from the conventional restrictions on their freedom.”
After two years in the United States, at Cornell, Lewin moved to the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station at the University of Iowa, where he studied group behavior. His studies of children working together under different leadership types—authoritarian, democratic, and laissez-faire—found that the democratic group was the most productive. His interest in group behavior took on new importance after he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to set up the Research Center for Group Dynamics. He coined the term group dynamics to describe the active processes of groups in action. The studies of leadership in the context of groups led to the first encounter groups (small groups of individuals brought together to problem-solve and gain self-awareness), based on what Lewin called sensitivity training.
Lewin’s legacy—the study of group dynamics, the field of organizational behavior, and social justice research and action—used psychology to make a more humane world.
SEE ALSO Gestalt Psychology (1912), Zeigarnik Effect (1927), Psychological Lifespace (1935), Conformity and Independence (1951)
A dense crowd of concertgoers presents a unique environment for the study of group dynamics.