Kurt Lewin Zitate

Kurt Tsadek Lewin gilt als einer der einflussreichsten Pioniere der Psychologie. Er ist einer der Begründer der modernen experimentellen Sozialpsychologie und gehört, zusammen mit Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler und Kurt Koffka, zu den „großen Vier“ der Berliner Schule der Gestaltpsychologie. Sein Name ist weiterhin verbunden mit der „Feldtheorie in den Sozialwissenschaften“. Nach Lewin wurde das von ihm entwickelte 3-Phasen-Modell bezeichnet. Wikipedia

✵ 9. September 1890 – 12. Februar 1947

Kurt Lewin Foto

Pko, Own work / CC BY-SA 4.0

Kurt Lewin: 51 Zitate1 Gefällt mir

Kurt Lewin Berühmte Zitate

„Es gibt nichts Praktischeres als eine gute Theorie.“

zitiert in: Robert Wegener, Agnes Fritze, Michael Loebbert (Hrsg.), Coaching Entwickeln - Forschung und Praxis im Dialog, VS-Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2011, S. 47
Original engl.: "[...] there is nothing so practical as a good theory." - Problems of Research in Social Psychology, in: Field Theory in Social Science; Selected Theoretical Papers, D. Cartwright (Hrsg.), Harper & Row, New York 1951. S. 169

„Eine Forschung, die nichts anderes als Bücher hervorbringt, genügt nicht.“

zitiert in: Fritz Gairing, Organisationsentwicklung als Lernprozess von Menschen und Systemen, 4. Auflage, Beltz Verlag, Weinheim/Basel 2008. S. 53
Original engl.: "Research that produces nothing but books will not suffice." - Action Research and Minority Problems, in: Resolving Social Conflicts; selected papers on group dynamics, G. W. Lewin (Hrsg.), Harper & Row, New York 1948, S. 203

„Die Planung beginnt normalerweise mit einer allgemeinen Idee. Aus dem einen oder anderen Grund erscheint es wünschenswert, ein bestimmtes Ziel zu erreichen, und wie es erreicht werden soll, ist häufig nicht klar. Der erste Schritt besteht dann darin, die Idee im Lichte der verfügbaren Mittel sorgfältig zu prüfen. Häufig sind genauere Informationen zur Situation erforderlich. Wenn diese erste Planungsphase erfolgreich ist, tauchen zwei Punkte auf: ein Gesamtplan zur Erreichung des Ziels und eine Entscheidung über den ersten Handlungsschritt. In der Regel hat diese Planung auch die ursprüngliche Idee etwas verändert. Die nächste Periode ist der Ausführung des ersten Schritts des ursprünglichen Plans gewidmet.“

Kurt Lewin: Zitate auf Englisch

“A conflict is to be characterized psychologically as a situation in which oppositely directed, simultaneously acting forces of approximately equal strength work upon the individual.”

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Quelle: 1930s, A Dynamic Theory of Personality, 1935, p. 122.

“We no longer seek the “cause” of events in the nature of a single isolated object, but in the relationship between an object and its surroundings.”

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

“The survival and development of democracy depends not so much on the development of democratic ideals which are wide-spread and strong. Today, more than ever before, democracy depends upon the development of efficient forms of democratic social management and upon the spreading of the skill in such management to the common man.”

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Quelle: 1940s, Frontiers in group dynamics II, 1947, p. 153.

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

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Attributed to Kurt Lewin in: Charles W. Tolman (1996) Problems of Theoretical Psychology - ISTP 1995. p. 31.

“Planning starts usually with something like a general idea. For one reason or another it seems desirable to reach a certain objective, and how to reach it is frequently not too clear. The first step then is to examine the idea carefully in the light of the means available. Frequently more fact-finding about the situation is required. If this first period of planning is successful, two items emerge: namely, an ‘over-all plan’ of how to reach the objective and secondly, a decision in regard to the first step of action. Usually this planning has also somewhat modified the original idea. The next period is devoted to executing the first step of the original plan.”

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Quelle: 1940s, Action research and minority problems, 1946, p. 37.

“For any type of social management, It is of great practical importance that levels of quasi-stationary equilibria can be changed in either of two ways: by adding forces in the desired direction, or by diminishing opposing forces.”

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Quelle: 1940s, Quasi-Stationary Social Equilibria and the Problem of Permanent Change, 1947, p. 40.

“We know, since the theory of relativity at least, that empirical sciences are to some degree free in defining dynamical concepts or even in assuming laws, and that only a system as a whole which includes concepts, coordinating definitions, and laws can be said to be either true or false, to be adequate or inadequate to empirical facts. This "freedom," however, is a somewhat doubtful gift. The manifold of possibilities implies uncertainty, and such uncertainty can become rather painful in a science as young as psychology, where nearly all concepts are open and unsettled. As psychology approaches the state of a logically sound science, definitions cease to be an arbitrary matter. They become far-reaching decisions which presuppose the mastering of the conceptual problems but which have to be guided entirely by the objective facts.”

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Quelle: 1930s, Principles of topological psychology, 1936, p. viii.

“After this first approximation, the various aspects of the situation undergo a more and more detailed analysis. In contrast to this the second method [for analysis of life space] begins with the life space as a whole and defines its fundamental structure. The procedure in this case is not to add disconnected items but to make the original structure more specific and differentiated. This method therefore proceeds by steps from the more general to the particular and thereby avoids the danger of a "wrong simplification" by abstraction.”

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Quelle: 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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Quelle: 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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Quelle: 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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Quelle: 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 (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. <br class="br">1920s

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

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Quelle: 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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Quelle: 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 (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 <br class="br">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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Quelle: 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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Quelle: 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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Quelle: 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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P.E
Quelle: 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 (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. <br class="br">1920s

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

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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 (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" <br class="br">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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Quelle: 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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Quelle: 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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Quelle: 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.

“Theoretical psychology in its present state must try to develop a system of concepts which shows all the characteristics of a Gestalt, in which any part depends upon every other part. As we do not yet have the knowledge of facts which really suffices to determine this system of concepts and as, on the other hand, this knowledge of "facts" cannot be acquired without developing this system of concepts, there seems to be only one way open: to proceed slowly by tentative steps, to make decisions rather reluctantly, to keep in view always the whole field of psychology, and to stay in closest contact with the actual work of psychological research.”

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Quelle: 1930s, Principles of topological psychology, 1936, p. viii.

“Do not in any way 'prove the rule,' but on the contrary are completely valid disproofs, even though they are rare, indeed, so long as one single exception is demonstrable.”

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Quelle: 1930s, A Dynamic Theory of Personality, 1935, p. 24.

“In psychology one can begin to describe the whole situation by roughly distinguishing the person (P) and his environment (E). 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.”

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Quelle: 1930s, Principles of topological psychology, 1936, p. 12.

“An attempt to improve intergroup relations has to face a wide variety of tasks. It deals with problems of attitude and stereotypes in regard to other groups and to one's own group, with problems of development of attitudes and conduct during childhood and adolescence, with problems of housing, and the change of the legal structure of the community; it deals with problems of status and caste, with problems of economic discrimination, with political leadership and with leadership in many aspects of community life. It deals with the small social body of a family, a club or a friendship group, with the larger social body of a school or a school system, with neighborhoods and with social bodies of the size of a community, of the state, a nation and with international problems.”

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Quelle: 1940s, Action research and minority problems, 1946, p. 36.

“Only by the concrete whole which comprises the object and the situation are the vectors which determine the dynamics of the event defined.”

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Quelle: 1930s, The conflict between Aristotelian and Galileian modes of thought in contemporary psychology, 1931, p. 165.

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