The life space... includes both the person and his psychological environment. The task of explaining behavior then becomes identical with (1) finding… - Kurt Zadek Lewin

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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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About Kurt Zadek Lewin

Kurt Zadek Lewin (September 9, 1890 – February 12, 1947) was a German-American psychologist, known as one of the modern pioneers of social psychology, organizational psychology, and applied psychology. He is often recognized as the "founder of social psychology" and was one of the first to study group dynamics and organizational development.

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Alternative Names: Kurt Lewin K. Lewin Kurt Tsadek Lewin
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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.

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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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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