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in the 1930s when Muzafer Sherif (1906–1988), a Turk who took graduate training in psychology at Harvard and Columbia, studied the influence of other people on one’s judgment, not on one’s performance. Sherif had his subjects, one at a time, sit in a dark room, stare at a tiny light, and tell him when it started to move and how far it moved. (They were unaware that the apparent movement is a common visual illusion.) Sherif found that each person, when tested alone, had a characteristic impression of how far the light moved, but when exposed to the opinions of others tended to be swayed by the group norm.12 His experiments strikingly showed the vulnerability of individual judgment to social opinion and pointed the way for hundreds of conformity experiments in the following two decades. (Asch’s famous length-of-lines conformity experiment, described above, came nearly twenty years later.)

An even more significant expansion of the domain of social psychology was a result of the rise of Nazism in Germany. A number of Jewish psychologists immigrated to America in the 1930s, among them some who had broader views of social psychology than those in the American tradition. Among the refugees was the man generally acknowledged to be the real father of the field, Kurt Lewin, of whom we heard earlier; he was the Gestaltist at the University of Berlin whose graduate student, Bluma Zeigarnik, conducted an experiment to test his hypothesis that uncompleted tasks are remembered better than completed ones. (He was right.) Although Lewin’s name never became familiar to the public and is unknown today except to psychologists and psychology students, Edward Chase Tolman said of him after his death in 1947:

Freud the clinician and Lewin the experimentalist—these are the two men whose names will stand out before all others in the history of our psychological era. For it is their contrasting but complementary insights which first made psychology a science applicable to real human beings and real human society.13

Lewin, heavily bespectacled and scholarly looking, was a rarity: a genius who was extremely sociable and friendly. He loved and encouraged impassioned, free-wheeling group discussions of psychological problems with colleagues or graduate students; at such times his mind was an intellectual flintstone that cast off showers of sparks—hypotheses that he freely handed to others and ideas for intriguing experiments that he often was happy to have them carry out and take credit for.

Lewin was born in 1890 in a village in Posen (then part of Prussia, today part of Poland), where his family ran a small general store.14 He did poorly in school and showed no sign of intellectual gifts, perhaps because of the anti-Semitism of his schoolmates, but when he was fifteen his family moved to Berlin, and there he blossomed intellectually, became interested in psychology, and eventually earned a doctorate at the University of Berlin. Much of the course work in psychology, however, was in the Wundtian tradition. Lewin found the problems it dealt with petty, dull, and yielding no understanding of human nature, and he hungered for a more meaningful kind of psychology. Shortly after he returned to the university from military service in World War I, Köhler became head of the institute and Wertheimer a faculty member, and Lewin found what he was looking for in the form of Gestalt theory.

His early Gestalt studies dealt with motivation and aspiration, but he soon moved on to apply Gestalt theory to social issues. Lewin conceived of social behavior in terms of “field theory,” a way of visualizing the total Gestalt of forces that affect a person’s social behavior. Each person, in this view, is surrounded by a “life space” or dynamic field of forces within which his or her needs and purposes interact with the influences of the environment. Social behavior can be schematized in terms of the tension and interplay of these forces and of the individual’s tendency to maintain equilibrium among them or to restore equilibrium when it has been disturbed.15

To portray