A chat with a waiter launched Kurt Lewin's study of unfinished tasks
Kurt Lewin, often called the founder of social psychology, had a knack for turning everyday moments into experiments. Watching a waiter who remembered orders until they were paid, he reasoned that an intention creates psychological tension that lingers until the task is done. His students would carry that insight far.
Lewin was born in 1890 in Mogilno, a Prussian town of about 5,000 in today's Poland, where roughly 150 residents were Jewish. His father ran a general store and co-farmed land that had to be registered to a Christian, since Jews could not legally own farms. The family moved to Berlin in 1905 for better schooling. Lewin drifted from medicine to biology to philosophy and psychology, was wounded serving in the German army in the First World War, and completed a doctorate in Berlin.
Working alongside Gestalt psychologists such as Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler, he taught in Berlin from 1926 to 1932, studying needs, motivation and learning. When Hitler took power he emigrated to the United States in August 1933, later working at Cornell, the University of Iowa and MIT, where he directed the Center for Group Dynamics. Because Americans kept mangling his name and he missed calls, he asked people to say Lou-in, though near the end he went back to the original Le-veen.
He offered a simple formula for the nature-versus-nurture debate: behaviour is a function of both the person and their environment. His force-field analysis maps the pressures pushing towards a goal against those holding it back, as the individual perceives them. He also coined the term action research, insisting rigorous theory could be tested on real problems, and sketched a triangle linking research, training and action for social change.
After the Second World War he helped rehabilitate people from displaced persons camps and co-founded the journal Human Relations with London's Tavistock Institute. His protégés included Leon Festinger, of cognitive dissonance fame, Bluma Zeigarnik and the conflict resolution pioneer Morton Deutsch. A 2002 survey ranked him the 18th most cited psychologist of the century. He died in 1947.
Source: Kurt Lewin
