Jajeji

Experiments in Social Space (1939)
Kurt Lewin

CLASSIC

I
I am persuaded that it is possible to undertake experiments in sociology which have as much right to be called scientific experiments as those in physics and chemistry. I am persuaded that there exists a social space which has all the essential properties of a real empirical space and deserves as much attention by students ofgeometry and mathematics as the physical space, although it is not a physical one. The perception of social space and the experimental and conceptual investigation of the dynamics and laws of the processes in social space are of fundamental theoretical and practical importance. Being officially a psychologist I should perhaps apologize to the sociologists for crossing the boundaries of my field. Myjustification for doing so is that necessity forces the move, and for this the sociologists themselves are partially to blame. For they have stressed that the view which holds a human being to be a biological, physiological entity is utterly wrong. They have fought against the belief that only physical or biological facts are real, and that social facts are merely an abstraction. Some of thesociologists have said that only the social group has reality and that the individual person is nothing more than an abstraction—a being who properly should be described as a cross section of the groups to which he belongs. Whichever of these statements one might consider correct, one certainly will have to admit that psychology has learned, particularly in the last decade, to realize the overwhelmingimportance of social factors for practically every kind and type of behavior. It is true that the child from the first day of his life is a member of a group and would die without being cared for by the group. The experiments on success and failure, level of aspiration, intelligence, frustration, and all the others, have shown more and more convincingly that the goal a person sets for himself is deeplyinfluenced by the social standards of the group to which he belongs or wishes to belong. The psychologist of today recognizes that there are few problems more important for the development of the child and the problem of adolescence than a study of the processes by which a child takes over or becomes opposed to the ideology and the style of living predominant in his social climate, the forceswhich make him belong to certain groups, or which determine his social status and his security within those groups. A genuine attempt to approach these problems experimentally—for instance, that of social status or leadership—implies technically that one has to create different types of groups and to set up experimentally a variety of social factors which might shift this status. The experimentalsocial psychologist will have to acquaint himself with the task of experimentally creating groups, creating a social climate or style of living. The sociologist I hope will therefore forgive him when he cannot avoid handling also the so-called sociological problems of groups and group life. Perhaps the social psychologist might prove

Kurt Lewin

Commentary by Edgar H. Schein Kurt Lewin was ascientist and researcher par excellence, yet Lewin probably contributed more to the practice of management and to the field of organizational consulting than anyone in history. On the scientific front, Lewin was a genius in creating true social experiments that demonstrated unequivocally the impact of leadership style and social climate on the productivity and emotional life of the group. Between thestudies he initiated in the 1930s and the Hawthorne studies conducted in the 1920s, overwhelming evidence was produced that participation and empowerment influence productivity and morale in a positive direction. He showed clearly the dysfunctional aspects of the autocratic leadership style, a lesson we have yet to learn. Why should consultants and managers read this article? First, to get a...