Lewin in Iowa: Socio-psychological experiments and the evolution of style

At the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station (1935–1944) Lewin’s group engaged in experimental re-search in developmental psychology. Mitchell Ash argues that this was mainly an outcome of a financial situation in which significant funds from the Rockefeller Foundation could be secured for research on learning and development.⁴⁷² Both the research centre at Cornell and the Iowa Station were recipients of funding from the large scale research program in child development that the Rockefeller Foundation had maintained since the mid-1920s. It was Lawrence Frank, a Rockefeller Foundation official who had been impressed by Lewin’s experiments with children, who placed Lewin at the Iowa Child Welfare Re-search Station at the University of Iowa. Lewin remained in Iowa until 1944, and rose to the rank of a full professor in 1939.⁴⁷³

Lewin’s micro-network

First, Lewin managed to establish a replica of his micro-network, the Quasselstrippeof Berlin was re-created in Iowa (meanwhile the students translated it as ‘Hot-Air Club’), and met each Tuesday noon at the Round Window Restaurant. In addition to the lunch meetings, students were frequently at Lewin’s home, offices were adjoining, and most people often had lunch together. When Lewin then left Iowa in 1944, theQuasselstrippetravelled with him. Most of his close collaborators tried to copy the conception in the own work environment but ended with establishing a colloquium for presentations of work results.

Second, Tamara Dembo and Jerome Frank, two of Lewin’s former students from Berlin, joined him in Cornell. When Lewin then moved to Iowa, the Rockefeller Fund also provided fellowships for Dembo, Robert Barker from Stanford, and Herbert Wright from Duke to follow him to Iowa.⁴⁷⁴ Additionally, since 1933/34 another network of friends and colleagues grew around Lewin, the so-called Topology Group.

The group met regularly up until 1964/65 (although Lewin died in 1947) and helped a lot to the spread of Lewinian ideas at least in the United States. The group counted altogether 51 participants participating at different times, including Ruth Benedict, Erik Erikson, Fritz Heider, Wolfgang Köhler, Kurt Koffka,

470Cf. [Ash, 1996, espec. 121-6 and 138].

471Cf. [Ash, 1992, esp. 204].

472From an interview with Alvin Zander, who worked with Lewin in Iowa: “Kurt had funds from The General Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation to have one fellow a year” [Patnoe, 1988, 43].

473Cf. [Ash, 2005, 279].

474See [Wheeler, 2008, 1644f, 1647f.].

Margaret Mead, William Stern, Edward Chase Tolman, Murray, Tamara Dembo. Meetings were held irregularly.⁴⁷⁵

Changing the research perspective: The “applied turn”

While the philosophically inspired academic community of the Weimar Germany was devoted to fun-damental research, it left practical needs on the sidewalk. Additionally, in Berlin, amongst many other Gestalt psychologists Lewin was part of a liberal socio-political and artistic milieu, which tended to appre-ciate scholarly work in terms of the discourse around it, and not necessarily in terms of its applicability to concrete problems. As outlined in Chapter 8, though, Lewin was more of an exception; he early demon-strated his theoretical and practical interest for applied psychology (see the essayThe Socialization of the Taylor System(1920) and the experimental style of the Berlin group).

The situation looked differently in the United States. There the Gestalt psychologists encountered a pragmatic tradition to focus on socially relevant problems that needed to be solved. In this new frame-work, any person that showed capable of doing so, had a high reward expectation. Building on his initial sensitivity for applied problsolving, Lewin of all Gestalt psychologists most successfully em-braced the new work opportunities. In this respect, Wolfgang Schönpflug aptly calls his timely change of research perspectives, the “pragmatic turn” (pragmatische Wende). Speaking in particular about his research, we may characterize it as the “applied turn”:

„In Deutschland war es die vom Idealismus geprägte Philosophische Fakultät, eine von den Bedürfnissen der Praxis und den Themen der Aktualität abgesetzte intellektuelle Gemein-schaft, die in der Klärung fundamentaler Fragen wetteiferte; hinzu kam für Lewin die sozial-politische und kunstästhetische Szene, in der fundamentale Ansätze ebenfalls willkommen waren. In jedem Fall war der Intellektuelle deutscher Provenienz eingebettet in eine Umge-bung, in welcher der Diskurs die Methode der Bewährung war. Anders in Amerika: Lewin traf dort auf eine pragmatische Tradition, die Problemen wegen ihrer gesellschaftlichen Aktuali-tät hohe Aufmerksamkeit einräumte und jedem, der sich dieser Probleme tatkräftig annahm, eine Bewährungschance gab. Lewin machte sich diese Pragmatik mit ihren Konsequenzen zu eigen, und wiederum fügte er ihr seine eigene Produktivität hinzu, indem er Techniken wie das Gruppentraining entwarf und einsetzte“ [Schönpflug, 1992, 24].

As the flip side of the coin, after his emigration, Lewin’s output in philosophical works declined to a level close to zero. However, Métraux points out that the nearly total absence of philosophical contributions in Lewin’s American career does not mean that philosophy and theory of science simply vanished from his agenda, nor did his committed objectives tracelessly disappear in the new socio-academic context.⁴⁷⁶ Yet, we observe the preservation of original principles without any further development of his philosophy of science. It is the applied research track that becomes central to Lewin’s american research.

Another change of perspective occurred when Lewin gradually shifted his focus from investigations on individuals to research on group behavior and the analysis of the individual from a group perspective.

Lewin’s experimental style significantly changed throughout the American years. While before 1933 his preferred unit in experiments was a dyad, a group consisting of two rather than more participants, after the migration, he started systematic experimentation with larger groups. The ambition was to pass from the study of group-individual-relationships to experimental settings where group life could

“proceed freely”. The new goal was to study “the total group behavior, its structure and development”

[Lewin and Lippitt, 1938, 292]. Against this backdrop, upon arriving in the US, he had developed inter-est in new research themes, such as cultural and educational differences, socio-psychological barriers between social groups and its effects on minorities, as well as frustration and regression.

To implement these ideas, methodological innovation was introduced, whereof the main one the attempt to work withreal life situations. Two contrasting experimental styles were practiced by Lewin’s American

475See [Marrow, 1969, 111-115], for a complete list of group members see (ebd. 260).

476See [Métraux, 1992, 382].

working groups. The more conventional one made use of the “holistic transposition” technique (see Chapter 10) to transfer a real life situation into a setting suitable for experimental observation. Hereby the main challenge was to identify the “essential structural characteristics” of the real life situation so the transposition left the relationship between the whole and all parts unaltered.⁴⁷⁷ The other, princi-pally different approach penetrated the experimental setting itself. A group of investigators “in the field”

was charged with the task to collect immediateinsights about the social situation and dynamics of in-terest. Initially, the role of the investigator was largely that of a silent observer, who made notes, drew conclusions and finally submitted a report including a set of recommendations. With time, however, a completely new research style grew out of it, namely that of participative investigation, in which the psy-chologist engaged in interaction with the probands and social change was introduced in a collaborative effort (i.e. action research). In the following range of Lewin’s American landmark experiments of different types are instanced for illustration purposes.

Leadership and social climates

The one paradigmatic experiment on leadership and social climate, that established Lewin’s reputation as a social psychologist, involved the observation of groups of 10-year-old boys (Boys Scouts) over a period of several months, in a joint study conducted together with Lippitt and White in 1939. The experi-mental setting was that of a club, rather than a school, where the subjects were engaged in the making of theatrical masks. Instead of comparing individual behavior under isolated and group conditions the crucial experimental comparison was among different kinds of groups. Group differences were created by adult leaders, who were instructed to behave in accordance with a set of programmed instructions prepared beforehand (the Berlin model of semi-structured experimentation was, thus, made use of). In the autocratic groups, the assignment of tasks, techniques and partners was dictated by the leader, who abstained from participation in work but offered personal praise and criticism for the work accomplished by group members. In laissez-faire groups the policy, such as the division of labor, was determined freely by group members, without any participation from the leader. The latter remained uninvolved in work decisions unless explicitly asked. Democratic groups were characterized through collective processes with decision-making assisted by the leader. Before accomplishing tasks, members were given choices and a way to collectively decide the division of labor; the leader usually provided technical advice. An outcome of the experiment was that under autocratic leadership the boys were more likely to lose initia-tive, to become discontent and aggressive (when the autocratic leader left the room, tensions exploded) and to act without regard for group goals or the interests of other group members. Under laissez-faire leadership the participants were less work-centered that in other cases. Scapegoating was developed under both autocratic and laissez-faire condition. When the democratic leader left the room, the boys usually continued working on the tasks.⁴⁷⁸

The experiment was pioneering in terms of social psychology since it involved studies conducted on groups rather than on individuals. Additionally, it constituted the first attempt to create a social climate in a controlled set-up. Another important trait of this pioneering socio-psychological experiment was the tendency to combine a range of different methods, amongst others, interviews were conducted with parents and children, each boy was given the Rorschach inkblots, as well as a Moreno-type question-naire.⁴⁷⁹ As pointed out, this hybridity of experimental styles, as the willingness to experiment with the

477See [Lewin, 1951b, 164-169].

478See [Lewin et al., 1939, Lewin, 1939a].

479See [Lewin et al., 1939, 298]. (1) Rorschach inkblot test is a psychological test in which subjects’ perceptions of inkblots are recorded and then analyzed using psychological interpretation. Some psychologists use this test to examine a person’s personal-ity characteristics and emotional functioning. It has been employed to detect an underlying thought disorder, especially in cases where patients are reluctant to describe their thinking processes openly. The test takes its name from that of its creator, Swiss psy-chologist Hermann Rorschach. (2) In the 1930s, the Jewish Romanian psychotherapist and psycho-sociologist Jacob L. Moreno came to develop a quantitative method for measuring social relationships in course of his studies of the relationship between social structures and psychological well-being. This quantitative approach became widely known and used associometry. Using the

experiment itself, was a distinguishing characteristics of the BEP (Section 8.6).