Kurt Lewin Quotes

If you want truly to understand something, try to change it.

Experience alone does not create knowledge

Nothing is more practical than a good theory.

In a wartime survey conducted by a team of food-habits researchers, only 14 percent of the students at a women’s college said they liked evaporated milk. After serving it to the students sixteen times over the course of a month, the researchers asked again. Now 51 percent liked it. As Kurt Lewin put it, “People like what they eat, rather than eat what they like.

Every psychological event depends upon the state of the person and at the same time on the environment, although their relative importance is different in different cases

A successful individual typically sets his next goal somewhat but not too much above his last achievement. In this way he steadily raises his level of aspiration.

We all need each other. This type of interdependence is the greatest challenge to the maturity of individual and group functioning." Kurt Lewin

Don’t be surprised if you open up one of these references and find your eyes crossing at the site of what appears to be a completely separate language: “transformative enculturation through legitimate peripheral situated participation in a practice community…” It may inspire you to reject it all outright. But also don’t forget the words of Kurt Lewin: “There’s nothing more practical than a good theory!” And know that whatever happens in a given educational situation, it’s following someone’s theories and beliefs, conscious or not. Thus, it’s better to think about it and make sure it makes sense. Then get back to the tinkering.

There is nothing as practical as good theory. —KURT LEWIN

To account for this complexity, I borrow from Kurt Lewin’s (1951) work in the early 1950s, his expression B  =  f(P, E) which says that behavior is a function of the person in interaction with his or her environment.

FORCE FIELD ANALYSIS In an interdependent situation, synergy is particularly powerful in dealing with negative forces that work against growth and change. Sociologist Kurt Lewin developed a “Force Field Analysis” model in which he described any current level of performance or being as a state of equilibrium between the driving forces that encourage upward movement and the restraining forces that discourage it. Driving forces generally are positive, reasonable, logical, conscious, and economic. In juxtaposition, restraining forces are often negative, emotional, illogical, unconscious, and social/psychological. Both sets of forces are very real and must be taken into account in dealing with change.

If you truly want to understand something, try to change it" - Kurt Lewin -

Niebuhr [Oden's Doctoral adviser at Yale and leading 20th century Christian theological ethicist] wanted all of his graduate students to have some serious interdisciplinary competence beyond theology, so I chose to be responsible for the area of psychology of religion. I hoped to correlate aspects of contemporary psychotherapies with a philosophy of universal history. The psychology that prevailed in my college years was predominately Freudian psychoanalysis, but my clinical beginning point in the late 1950's had turned to Rogerian client-centered therapy. The psychology that prevailed in my Yale years was predominantly the empirical social psychologists like Kurt Lewin and Musafer Sherif. I gradually assimilated those views in order to work on a critique of therapies and assess them all in relation to my major interest in the meaning of history.

In 1931 German psychologist Kurt Lewin proposed what would come to be known as Lewin’s equation: B = f (P, E)—that is, human behavior is a function of a person and his or her environment. This

En 1936, el psicólogo Kurt Lewin escribió una simple ecuación que implica una poderosa declaración: la conducta (C) es una función (f ) de la persona (p) dentro de su ambiente (a) o C = f(p,a).3

La discriminazione contro i gruppi di minoranza non verrà meno fino a quando non verranno mutate le forze che determinano le decisioni dei guardiani. Le loro decisioni dipendono in parte dalla loro ideologia - ovvero dal sistema di credenze e di valori che determina ciò che essi considerano "bene» o «male». ... Pertanto se ci proponiamo di ridurre la discriminazione all'interno di fabbrica, di una scuola o di qualsiasi altra istituzione organizzata, dovremmo considerare la vita sociale che ivi si svolge come qualcosa che scorre attraverso certi canali. Vediamo allora che vi sono dirigenti o uffici che decidono chi fa parte dell'organizzazione o chi è escluso, chi è promosso, e cosi via. Le tecniche di discriminazione in queste organizzazioni sono strettamente connesse a quelle meccaniche che incanalano la vita dei membri di un'organizzazione in particolari direzioni. Pertanto la discriminazione è fondamentalmente connessa con i problemi della direzione, con le azioni dei guardiani che determinano ciò che deve essere fatto e ciò che non si deve fare.

In 1936, psychologist Kurt Lewin wrote a simple equation that makes a powerful statement: Behavior is a function of the Person in their Environment, or B = f (P,E).

Danny explained, “Reforms always create winners and losers, and the losers will always fight harder than the winners.” How did you get the losers to accept change? The prevailing strategy on the Israeli farms – which wasn’t working very well – was to bully or argue with the people who needed to change. The psychologist Kurt Lewin had suggested persuasively that, rather than selling people on some change, you were better off identifying the reasons for their resistance, and addressing those. Imagine a plank held in place by a spring on either side of it, Danny told the students. How do you move it? Well, you can increase the force on one side of the plank. Or you can reduce the force on the other side. “In one case the overall tension is reduced,” he said, “and in the other it is increased.” And that was a sort of proof that there was an advantage in reducing the tensions. “It’s a key idea,” said Danny. “Making it easy to change.

Kurt Lewin was not the only scholar (or Kurt) from the Gestalt school to gift us subtractive wisdom. Kurt Koffka, in between being married four times to the same two women, originated the cliché about high-performing systems: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The focus had been entirely on characteristics of the person. Life situations had been ignored. I recalled the first principle of social psychology, laid out by the field’s founder, Kurt Lewin, in a simple formula: B = f(P, E): Behavior is a function of a Person in his or her Environment. Characteristics of a person—things like genes and personality—stay the same.5 Environments change. Both must be considered together for a full explanation.