Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [266]
Although students at Berlin flocked to Lewin’s lectures and research programs, like many another Jewish scholar he made little progress up the academic ladder. But his brilliant writing about field theory, particularly as applied to interpersonal conflicts and child development, brought him an invitation in 1929 to lecture at Yale and another in 1932 to spend six months as a visiting professor at Stanford. In 1933, shortly after Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Lewin resigned from the University of Berlin and with the help of American colleagues got an interim appointment at Cornell and later a permanent one at the University of Iowa.
In 1944, realizing a long-held ambition, he set up his own social psychology institute, the Research Center for Group Dynamics, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and there assembled a first-rate staff and a group of top-notch students. It became the primary training center for mainstream American social psychology. In 1947, only three years later, Lewin, then fifty-seven, died of a heart attack; the Research Center for Group Dynamics soon moved to the University of Michigan, and there and elsewhere his former students continued to promulgate his ideas and methods.
Lewin’s boldly imaginative experimental style, going far beyond that of earlier social psychologists, became the most salient characteristic of the field. A study inspired by his experience of Nazi dictatorship and passionate admiration of American democracy illustrates the point. To explore the effects of autocratic and democratic leadership on people, Lewin and two of his graduate students, Ronald Lippitt and Ralph White, created a number of clubs for eleven-year-old boys. They supplied each club with an adult leader to help with crafts, games, and other activities, and had each leader adopt one of three styles: autocratic, democratic, or laissez-faire. The boys in groups with autocratic leaders soon became either hostile or passive, those with democratic leaders became friendly and cooperative, and those with laissez-faire leaders became friendly but apathetic and disinclined to get things done. Lewin was unabashedly proud of the results, which confirmed his belief in the deleterious effect of autocratic leadership and the salutary effect of democratic leadership on human behavior.16
It was topics and experiments like this that account for Lewin’s powerful impact on social psychology. (Field theory enabled him to conceive of such research, but it never became central to the discipline.) Leon Festinger (1919–1989), Lewin’s student, colleague, and intellectual heir, has said that Lewin’s major contribution was twofold. One part was his gifted choice of interesting or important problems; it was largely through him that social psychology began exploring group cohesiveness, group decision making, authoritarian versus democratic leadership, techniques of attitude change, and conflict resolution. The other part was his “insistence on trying to create, in the laboratory, powerful social situations that made big differences” and his extraordinary inventiveness of ways to do so.17
Despite Lewin’s catalytic influence, for some years social psychology gained a foothold only in a handful of large metropolitan universities. Elsewhere, behaviorism was still king, and its adherents found social psychology too concerned with mental processes to be acceptable. But during World War II the needs of the military gave rise