Resolving Social Conflicts and Field Theory in Social Science
It’s two books smashed into one, though the discontinuity isn’t as large as one might expect. Resolving Social Conflicts and Field Theory in Social Science are both works of Kurt Lewin. I’ve been a fan of his work for some time not just because he was one of the first people to describe a phase-gate process for change (see Lewin’s change model), but also because he demonstrated perspectives that were ahead of their time. (See A Dynamic Theory of Personality and Principles of Topological Psychology). These works speak to the organization of America and Germany, a relevant topic for the time of these writings – 1948 and 1951, respectively. Speaking as someone who understood both cultures, he was prepared to describe the machinery that made each function.
Both of these volumes were originally collections of Lewin’s papers, so the boundaries of the original works were already somewhat arbitrary. Ensuring that, collectively, the wisdom would be available drove the combination of the works.
Democracy or Autocracy
In a time before McCarthy, it was safe to ponder the benefits and weaknesses of different forms of government. It was safe to look for the strengths of autocracy while living in a democracy. It’s not surprising that Americans believe democracy is a better form of government. After all, that’s what the founding fathers created. Lewin’s perspective wasn’t on gross domestic product or raw output of a structure. True to his purpose and perspective, he focused on the psychology of the various forms of organization. He wanted to map out the forces that kept organizations stable and those that disrupted them. He wanted to understand how a government which someone might not interact with every day might shape day-to-day interactions.
It reminds me of a discussion of leadership. (See Leadership.) Reinventing Organizations proposes different levels of organizational maturity with representative colors. What’s striking about this is the acknowledgement that, sometimes, telling someone exactly what to do is the appropriate response. It’s not that it should be the case every time – but sometimes it is right. Similarly, Lewin points out the times that autocracy is just easier.
The Role of Education
“It seems to be easier for society to change education than for education to change society.” Here, the data isn’t so clear. Lewin conditionalizes the statement (seems) and leaves open the work of others, like Robert Putnam, who explains in The Upswing what a large impact education had on America during the course of 120 years. While education isn’t swift in the ways that it shapes a society, it can be powerful. Elephants aren’t the fastest creatures on the planet, but they do have a lot of force they can bring to bear once they’ve made their decisions.
The forces that move education – particularly in higher education (secondary education) – aren’t as controllable as the autocracy might like to believe. While it’s also possible to shape elementary grades, and there have been instances of that, the effects take a long time to mature.
Lewin makes the point that someone cannot easily learn democracy with autocratic methods. If the educational system is focused on autocracy, then other learning may be hard. Consider the case of teaching racial relations as explained in A Class Divided. No amount of lecture could have taught the children what it feels like to be discriminated against (in a small way).
Power Gradients
I can only imagine what Lewin might say if he were alive today. He noticed that even in the late 1940s, American children were given a more equal footing with parents than children in Germany. It seems that democracy had permeated them, and they thought they were equal to their parents. In light of books like The Coddling of the American Mind, we can see this enhanced entitlement and have to wonder if it’s gone too far. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi reported that the famous Dr. Spock was concerned with some of his guidance in Baby and Child Care at the end of his life. The guidance was largely permissive – and the impacts of enabling children were concerning.
Interference
One way that the two societies are different surfaced in the way that adults monitored or enabled children’s play. What is now called “helicopter” parenting was discussed in Lewin’s writings. He encouraged the same kinds of low-touch interactions that The Anxious Generation calls for today. We want to allow children to work out their problems themselves – if they don’t learn it, how will they be able to resolve conflicts when they grow up?
In an ideal world, parents should support in ways that prevent scars but promote bruises. (Sort of like what Robert Putnam found in Our Kids.)
Being Adults
In America, Lewin reports, it’s much more likely that people will agree to disagree – and be willing to work together and respect each other even in the presence of disagreements. Here, too, Lewin’s perspective of today would be interesting. It seems as if we have lost this professional courtesy. We’re faced with polarization (see Why We’re Polarized) and extremes (see Going to Extremes).
Lewin reports in that in Germany (in the 1940s) seemed to lean more towards moral disapproval. It’s as if they took a page out of Mastering Logical Fallacies and decided that name calling was the right way to handle disagreements. Perhaps it’s because the only way they learned to solve agreements was by bullying and overpowering the other person.
A Tale of Two Views
Lewin proposed that we could view culture as an equilibrium – a place where it all balances out. More specifically, he believed in a dynamic equilibrium or, in his words, “equilibrium in motion.” We’d think of this as the kind of patterns that emerge around strange attractors. The second view seems related both to the first and the broader body of his work. He sees culture as the constellation of forces that are working to create areas of relative rigidity and patterns of relative flexibility. Culture is in motion – a motion that you have to learn to work with.
Teaching Theory
There’s a lot we’ve learned about teaching and learning. Works like Efficiency in Learning and How People Learn have cataloged a portion of that research. Lewin explains that, without safety, people cannot learn. It’s one of the fundamentals for learning that is clear. Some frameworks, like Knowles et al.’s vision of The Adult Learner, extend this to expose the relationship of the learning to the student – something that is often missed.
Lewin also briefly raises the issue of those who are not connected with reality. He suggests that reeducation is necessary when people lose touch with reality. I’ve two concerns here. First, reeducation is often the word used when people disagree with someone’s beliefs and want to change them – forcibly. (See After the Ball for some historical perspectives on the ways that gays treated themselves and were treated by others.)
The second concern is that it’s notoriously difficult to help people regain touch with reality. While we have ways of adjusting perceptions, some are so incorrect that it may be difficult to adjust them back into some degree of connection. Lewin notes that a step-by-step approach is more effective than trying to go directly to the end goal. This is something that Motivational Interviewing concurs with, as does DBT. (See DBT Explained.)
Social Chemistry
Lewin argues that sociology has every right to its research. Why is it any less valid than chemistry or physics research? The argument has been made about the variability of results, lack of repeatability, and so forth. However, there’s a very simple statistical answer for all of this. When we’re dealing with people, we’re dealing with expensive, complicated creatures that don’t have a high degree of conformity. But more importantly, owing to the expense, we tend to use smaller sample sizes – and that statistically means more variation in our results.
One could argue that physics and chemistry can do research with small sample sizes – but it misses the fundamental point. Physics and chemistry necessarily work at least at an atomic (if not subatomic) level. That means any substance that is tested necessarily has more atoms (or molecules) than we can ever hope to survey in humans. Consider that one mole (unit of measure) contains 602 sextillion items. We couldn’t get to that number if we included every human on Earth.
So, while we should respect the research done in sociology, we need to accept the fragile nature of the results.
Psychological Future
One of the threads that Phillip Zimbardo pulled on is the way that we view time. In The Time Paradox, Zimbardo discusses the different ways that we view time in a positive and negative way, both the future and the past. He also brings in aspects of determinism and hedonism. Here, Lewin makes the case for the perception of the future as a psychological future – meaning the way that we think about it matters. It’s not a truth about the future (since it’s not possible to be proved) but is instead a prediction of the future that can be accurate – or it can be overly optimistic or overly pessimistic. (See The Signal and the Noise and Superforecasting for more about prediction of the future.)
What we make of our future goes a long way towards building or crushing hope. (See The Psychology of Hope for more.)
Change is Different than Stability
Change is, of course, different than stability. They are definitionally different, but Lewin explains that they’re not just different, they’re markedly different. They don’t even behave the same way. Subtle changes in the forces that act on individuals and the collective forces for the organization are as different as a desert wind and a desert downpour. It is as the economists say, “Free is a different territory than not free.” (See Predictably Irrational.)
If we want to better understand how we relate to others, how that is influenced by the structure of relationships as well as the forces of pressure that shape us, you may find the answers in Resolving Social Conflict and Field Theory in Social Science.