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Kurt Lewin Essay example

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Kurt Lewin
Kurt Lewin was a great innovater at his time in the field of Psychology. The theories he developed, the methods of reserch he used and the people he influenced all have had a profound impact on Psychology and even more specifically on Social Psychology.
Lewin was born in 1890 in what is now Poland but at the time was the Prussian province of Posen, in the village of Moglino and was the second of four children (Greathouse). His parents owned a general store, and a farm on the outskirts of the village. When Lewin was fifteen his family moved away from the small village, the farm and their store and went to Berlin. …show more content…

In 1932, after several years of work with Wertheimer and Kohler in Germany, Lewin was invited to be a visiting professor at Stanford University (Patnoe pf.3). He stayed in the United States for six months and then moved back to Germany just as Hitler was coming to power. Being a Jew Lewin wanted to get out of the country as fast as possible. Luckily he was able to do this because of the Committee on Displaced Scholars (Frostburg).
Lewin's first job after his immigration was at Cornell. There he did studies "concerning social pressure on eating habits in children (Patnoe pg.4)." During his time there Lewin published one of his eight books, "A Dynamic Theory of Personality." After two years of work and the exhaustion of funds at Cornell, Lewin took a new position at The University of Iowa at their Child Welfare Research Station where he would stay for ten years (Frostburg).
In 1945 he moved back to the East Coast and established two new centers of research and study of his own; one at M.I.T., The Research Center for Group Dynamics and in New York, the Commission for Community Interrelations (Patnoe pg.8-9). His aspirations for the two centers were that they would corroborate "to combine scientific study with Action Research in an effort to

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