Kurt Lewin citations (48 citations)

Source: 1930s, Principles of topological psychology, 1936, p. 4; partly cited in: Chris Argyris (1952) An introduction to field theory and interaction theory.

“In the psychological fields most fundamental to the whole behavior of living things the transition seems inevitable to a Galileian view of dynamics, which derives all its vectors not from single isolated objects, but from the mutual relations of the factors in the concrete whole situation, that is, essentially, from the momentary condition of the individual and the structure of the psychological situation. The dynamics of the processes is always to be derived from the relation of the concrete individual to the concrete situation, and, so far as internal forces are concerned, from the mutual relations of the various functional systems that make up the individual.”

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Kurt Lewin

Source: 1930s, A Dynamic Theory of Personality, 1935, p. 41; partly cited in: Kay Deaux, Mark Snyder (2012) The Oxford Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology. p. 74

“Any planned social change will have to consider a multitude of factors characteristic for the particular case. The change may require a more or less unique combination of educational and organizational measures; it may depend upon quite different treatments or Ideology, expectation and organization. Still, certain general formal principles always have to be considered.”

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Kurt Lewin

Source: 1940s, Quasi-Stationary Social Equilibria and the Problem of Permanent Change, 1947, p. 39.

“Even if all the laws of psychology were known, one could make a prediction about the behavior of a man only if in addition to the laws, the special nature of the particular situation were known.”

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Kurt Lewin

Source: 1930s, Principles of topological psychology, 1936, p. 11.

“The essential meaning of such an assertion is this: events a and b are necessarily dependent moments of a single unified occurrence. The mathematical formula states the quantitative relations involved in the occurrence. Already in such cases the dependent moment of the occurrence are moments that obtain temporally by side.”

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Kurt Lewin

Kurt Lewin (1927, p. 305) as cited in: K. Mulligan & B. Smith (1988) " Mach and Ehrenfels: Foundations of Gestalt Theory http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/mach/mach.pdf". p. 149.
1920s

“The young mathematical disciple 'topology' might be of some help in making psychology a real science.”

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Kurt Lewin

Source: 1930s, Principles of topological psychology, 1936, p. vii.

“A certain area within a channel may function as a “gate”; the constellation of the forces before and after the gate region is decisively different in such a way that the passing or not passing of the unit through the whole channel depends to a high degree upon what happens in the gate region. This holds not only for food channels but also for the travelling of a news item through certain communication channels in a group, for movement of goods, and the social locomotion of individuals in many organizations.”

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Kurt Lewin

Source: 1940s, Frontiers in group dynamics II, 1947, p. 145.

“The life space… includes both the person and his psychological environment. The task of explaining behavior then becomes identical with (1) finding a scientific representation of the life space (LSp) and (2) determining the function (F) which links the behavior to the life space. This function (F) is what one usually calls a law… The novelist who tells the story behind the behavior and development of an individual gives us detailed data about his parents, his siblings, his character, his intelligence, his occupation, his friends, his status. He gives us these data in their specific interrelation, that is, as part of a total situation. Psychology has to fulfill the same task with scientific instead of poetic means…. The method should be analytical in that the different factors which influence behavior have to be specifically distinguished. In science, these data have also to be represented in their particular setting within the specific situation. A totality of coexisting facts which are conceived of as mutually interdependent is called a field. Psychology has to view the life space, including the person and his environment, as one field.”

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Kurt Lewin

Kurt Lewin (1946) "Behavior and development as a function of the total situation". In K. Lewin (Ed.) Field theory in social science (pp. 238-305). New York: Harper & Row. p. 240 as cited in: John F. Kihlstrom (2013) " The Person-Situation Interaction" http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~kihlstrm/PxSInteraction.htm
1940s

“The research needed for social practice can best be characterized as research for social management or social engineering. It is a type of action research, a comparative research of the conditions and effects of various forms of social action, and research leading to social action. Research that produces nothing but books will not suffice.”

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Kurt Lewin

Source: 1940s, Action research and minority problems, 1946, p. 35.

“The attitude of Aristotelian physics toward lawfulness takes a new direction. So long as lawfulness remained limited to such processes as occurred repeatedly in the same way, it is evident, not only that the young physics still lacked the courage to extend the principle to all physical phenomena, but also that the concept of lawfulness still had a fundamentally historic, a temporally particular, significance. Stress was laid not upon the “general validity” which modem physics understands by lawfulness, but upon the events in the historically given world which displayed the required stability. The highest degree of lawfulness, beyond mere frequency, was characterized by the idea of the always eternal.”

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Kurt Lewin

Source: 1930s, The conflict between Aristotelian and Galileian modes of thought in contemporary psychology, 1931, p. 147.

“At the present we have no adequate scientific method for representing the psychological life span. In accord with the general methods of psychology, the study of environmental influences began with classification and statistics… they gave us excellent descriptions of the home environment. The method of representation is partly akin to that of the novelist i. e., one trying to make as lifelike picture of the situation as possible by choosing expressive words and bringing out significant traits with examples. In general, the descriptions that have been made valuable to science have not been those made by scientific methods. Where theoretical concepts have been introduced with the concrete description, they often stand out as something alien. In stead of scientific descriptions they are nothing more than speculative interpretation.”

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Kurt Lewin

Source: 1930s, Principles of topological psychology, 1936, p. 12-13.

“[Life space was defined as] the totality of facts which determine the behavior (B) of an individual (or group/organization) at a certain moment. The life space (L) represents the totality of possible events. The life space includes the person (P) and the environment (E). B = f(L) = f”

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Kurt Lewin

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Source: 1930s, Principles of topological psychology, 1936, p. 216 as cited in: David Boje, Bernard Burnes, John Hassard (2012) The Routledge Companion to Organizational Change. p. 34.

“One can ask two different kinds of questions with regard to the topics of study in psychology as well as in other sciences. One can ask for the phenomenal characteristics of psychological units or events, for example, how many kinds of feelings can be qualitatively differentiated from one another or which characteristics describe an experience of a voluntary act. Aside from this are the questions asking for the why, for the cause and the effect, for the conditional-genetic interrelations. For example, one can ask: Under which conditions has been a decision made and which are the specific psychological effects which follow this decision? The depiction of phenomenal characteristics is usually characterized as “description”, the depiction of causal relationships as “explanation.””

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Kurt Lewin

Kurt Lewin (1927). "Gesetz und experiment in der Psychologie" [Law and experiment in psychology]. in: Symposion, Vol 1, p. 375-421. Translated by and cited in: Kurt Kreppner " On the Generation of Data in the Study of Social Interaction1 http://www.scielo.br/pdf/ptp/v17n2/7871.pdf" in: Psicologia: Teoria e Pesquisa Vol 17, nr. 2, p. 109.
1920s

“A business man once stated that there is nothing so practical as a good theory.”

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Kurt Lewin

Lewin (1943, 118), as cited in Karl E. Weick, "Theory and practice in the real world." in: The Oxford Handbook of Organization Theory, Tsoukas et al. (eds.), ‎Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 460; Also in Lewin, K. (1951). Field theory in social science: Selected theoretical papers (D. Cartwright, Ed.). New York, NY: Harper & Row
1940s

“[Satiation may spill over outside the specific task to structurally similar tasks) and may end up in an early] exhaustion of the occupational will.”

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Kurt Lewin

Kurt Lewin (1928) "Die Bedeutung der “psychischen Sättigung” für einige Probleme der Psychotechnik" [Significance of “mental satiation” for some problems of psychotechnics]. in: Psychotechnisches Zeitschrift, Vol 3, p. 186. as cited in: E. Demerouti et all. (2002) " From mental strain to burnout http://www.beanmanaged.com/doc/pdf/arnoldbakker/articles/articles_arnold_bakker_79.pdf"
1920s

“The choice between two pleasant things is generally easier than that between two unpleasant unless questions are involved which cut deeply into the life of the individual. Such a conflict situation can upon occasion also lead to an oscillation between two attractions. It is of considerable importance that in these cases a decision between two attractions. It is of considerable importance that in these cases a decision or one goal alters its valence in such a way as to make it weaker than that of the renounced goal.”

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Kurt Lewin

Source: 1930s, A Dynamic Theory of Personality, 1935, p. 123.

“A goal can play an essential role in the psychological situation without being clearly present in consciousness.”

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Kurt Lewin

Source: 1930s, Principles of topological psychology, 1936, p. 19.

“[Conflict can be defined] as the opposition of approximately equally strong field forces.”

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Kurt Lewin

Source: 1930s, The conflict between Aristotelian and Galileian modes of thought in contemporary psychology, 1931, p. 109 as cited in: Man Cheung Chung, Michael E. Hyland (2012) History and Philosophy of Psychology. p. 107.