The myth of Kurt Lewin and the rhetoric of collective memory in social psychology textbooks

Science and common sense

Current social psychology textbooks might not treat the history of their discipline as particularly important, but in their opening chapters they foreground the message that social psychology is a science. They often contrast the science of social psychology with unscientific common sense (Billig, 2013). This contrast forms the background against which specific references to Lewin should be understood.

It is easy to find examples of textbooks giving early prominence to the claim that social psychology is a science. On the second page of Chapter 1, Sanderson (2010) describes social psychology as a “scientific study,” as do Bordens and Horowitz (2014), while Myers (2008) uses the same description on the third page. Hogg and Vaughan (2011) include a description of social psychology as a “scientific investigation” in the opening sentence of their first chapter. Baron and Branscombe (2013) manage to convey the message even earlier: the title of their opening chapter is “Social psychology: The science of the social side of life.” Textbooks in the natural sciences tend not to emphasise their scientific credentials in this way; their readers are presumed to know that they are reading about a science (Billig, 2013).

In claiming social psychology to be a science and comparing it with unscientific common sense, the textbooks are making value-laden judgements. Chapter 1 in Sanderson (2010) contains a section entitled “Is Social Psychology Really Just Common Sense?” The author emphatically answers in the negative. Baron and Branscombe (2013) claim that we should be “suspicious of common sense,” which, unlike social psychological research, presents a “confusing and inconsistent picture of human behaviour” (pp. 14–15). Crisp and Turner (2014) suggest that we need social psychology to “provide scientific tests of what people believe is common sense, and to debunk misperceptions” (p. 2). According to Gilovich et al. (2011), “stories and parables have attempted to explain human behaviour for millennia” but social psychologists “go beyond folk wisdom and try to establish a scientific basic for understanding human behaviour” (p. 7).

In the history of European thought, the term “common sense” has had two principal meanings: the sensus communis or the commonly shared sense of a particular community or of ordinary people in general; and common sense as good sense, or le bon sens (Rosenfeld, 2011). When social psychology textbooks contrast scientific social psychology favourably with “common sense,” they are generally using the latter term to mean the commonly shared sense of ordinary people. The textbooks claim that it is not good sense to accept this common sense. Good sense should be based on scientific research into those topics about which ordinary people supposedly hold ill-informed, confused opinions.

Since “folk wisdom” includes beliefs about the past, we can ask whether the textbooks also advocate replacing shared collective memories of the past with evidence-based, historical knowledge; and whether this includes the common opinions which professional social psychologists might share about their discipline’s past.

The common trope

When textbooks describe Lewin as a/the father/founder of social psychology, they often use a particular trope. Hogg and Vaughan (2011) state: “Lewin is generally considered the father of experimental social psychology” (p. 21). Later they suggest that Lewin is “often referred to as the father of experimental social psychology” (p. 43). Sanderson (2010), having listed several Gestalt psychologists, then writes: “One of these psychologists, Kurt Lewin, is often considered to be the founder of modern social psychology” (p. 9). Stainton-Rogers (2007) uses similar wording: “Lewin is generally considered the ‘founding father’ of experimental social psychology” (p. 20). Not all textbooks use the “considered to be” trope. Gilovich et al. (2011) directly identify Lewin as “the founder of modern social psychology” (p. 11), while Baron and Branscombe (2013, p. 103) and Aronson, Wilson, and Akert (2010, p. 72) more cautiously describe Lewin as “one of the founders of modern social psychology” (without identifying who the other founders might be). And some textbooks do not mention Lewin at all (e.g., Crisp & Turner, 2014).

The distinguishing feature of the trope is its indirectness, accomplished by using a verb such as “consider” in the passive voice. The trope can also be found in handbooks and research papers. Taylor (1998) writing in the fourth edition of the Handbook of Social Psychology states: “The father of modern social psychology is generally acknowledged to be Kurt Lewin” (p. 60). In the Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, McGraw (2006) claims that Lewin “is widely recognized as the father of modern social psychology” (p. 133). Kaminski (2011) in the Canadian Journal of Nursing Informatics uses the trope twice: Kurt Lewin “has been acknowledged as the ‘father of social change theories’” and Lewin “is also lauded as the originator of social psychology, action research, as well as organizational development” (para. 2). Whether writers use “considered,” “acknowledged,” or “lauded” there is the same indirectness: the authors do not identify who is doing the considering, acknowledging, or lauding.

Academic writers use the trope about other figures and other disciplines. For example, Skidelsky (2009) writes that Simmel “is now acknowledged … as a founding father of German sociology (p. 173). According to Elliott (2008), George Herbert Mead “is widely considered the founding father of a general tradition of theoretical thinking concerned with the self: symbolic interactionism” (p. 30). Pelly (2006) claims that Lester Ward, the first president of the American Sociological Association, “is known as ‘the Father of American Sociology’” (p. 209).

It is easy to see why academic writers might favour such indirectness for academics commonly hedge statements, thereby leaving themselves an escape route in the event of a challenge (Biber & Gray, 2010; Hyland, 2005, 2009). Although the trope might be hedged it can convey a similar message to an unhedged assertion. Some writers, in fact, move between hedged trope and direct statement. Within the space of two pages Sanderson (2010) goes from claiming that “Kurt Lewin … is often considered the founder of social psychology” (p. 9) to the direct ascription: “Kurt Lewin, the founder of modern social psychology” (p. 11; see also Aronson et al., 2010, who use the direct ascription on p. 72 and the indirect trope on p. 461). This suggests that writers might be using the trope as a conventionally hedged way of conveying X to be the founder of Y.

Academic textbooks may not contain as many hedged statements as research papers, but they still contain a higher proportion than most non-academic writing (Biber & Conrad, 2009; Biber, Conrad, & Cortes, 2004). One may conjecture that the farther one gets from academic writing, the less likely one is to find the trope. Pelly (2006) might have hedged the claim about Lester Ward being the father of American sociology but there is no hedging on the sign erected in Bradford County, Pennsylvania, marking Ward’s birthplace: “Lester Frank Ward: Father of American Sociology” (Rafferty, 2003, p. 2).

At this point, some readers might think that the use of the trope in social psychology textbooks has been adequately explained. The textbook writers are merely using conventional academic wording to describe Kurt Lewin’s special status within social psychology. This is hardly surprising because textbook writers are themselves academics. However, that is not the end of the matter. As will be argued, this use of the trope in social psychology textbooks contains features that directly relate to the distinction between collective memory and history.

The trope and common sense

To understand the significance of the trope, it is necessary to examine what writers can avoid specifying by its use. Critical linguists have noted that the passive voice enables writers to be vague about who is performing actions (Billig, 2008b; Fowler, 1991; Fowler, Hodge, Kress, & Trew, 1979). Scientific writers favour the passive voice in the methods sections of papers, in order to convey that the identity of the researcher conducting the study was irrelevant to the obtained results (Biber & Conrad, 2009). When social scientists more generally use the passive voice to describe social actions, they can spare themselves the trouble of describing precisely who is acting and how they might be acting (Billig, 2008b, 2013).

The trope may refer to people believing, considering, recognising someone to be a disciplinary founder/father but by using the passive voice writers need not specify who those people are. If writers had used the active voice, then they would have needed to provide a grammatical subject to identify who was considering Lewin to be the founder/father of social psychology. Even when writers qualify the trope by adding “generally” or “often,” they avoid saying who may not agree with the judgement and most crucially, why they might disagree. By this absence they are conveying the judgement to be universal or virtually universal.

However, the judgement cannot be literally universal for the writers are not presuming that their readers already know about Lewin. They sometimes repeat the judgement. This would be doubly unnecessary if they believed that Lewin’s founding of social psychology was part of general common sense. The writers are assuming that their student readers are not members of the community that considers Lewin to be the father/founder. Even if the writers implicitly associate themselves with the judgement of this unnamed community, they give no grammatical indication. For example, they do not write that “we consider Lewin to be our father/founder,” using the first person plural as Levine (2008) did in the introduction to Journeys in Social Psychology, a book which brought together a distinguished group of largely American, experimental social psychologists to reflect on the development of their discipline. Levine wrote that “we study the give and take between individuals and the environments that guide their behaviour, what our founding father Kurt Lewin called ‘the life space’” (p. ix).

Nevertheless, the textbook writers manage to imply some sort of affiliation without using the first person. The group that considers Lewin to be social psychology’s founder/father is, by implication, a group that is competent to make such a judgement. It is not a group of bio-chemists, undergraduates, or residents of Bradford County. The group is presumed to be professional social psychologists. By using the trope uncritically, the textbook writers are implying that their readers should accept this judgement. Since the textbook writers are themselves social psychologists, their position is effectively the same as Levine’s openly stated position: they might imply that Lewin is our founding father but by their grammar they avoid expressing open partiality.

If we take note of a significant absence, we can see that the judgement contained within the trope is based on an assumed collective memory, not historical judgement. Smyth (2001) has shown that psychology textbooks are rich in references, especially when compared with textbooks in the natural sciences. When discussing the findings of empirical studies, social psychology textbooks cite sources, but when it comes to judgements about the discipline’s past, referencing all but disappears. In stating that Lewin is (generally) considered to be the father/founder, textbook writers do not support the claim with references to empirical studies of social psychologists’ opinions about the father/founder of their discipline. Nor are there references to historical studies.

Instead the judgement stands within a small oasis of reference-free prose. Because the judgement is not referenced as the judgement of historians, it is implicitly presented as the shared sense of the community that is being represented by the textbook. Thus, textbook writers convey that it is good sense to accept this commonly held judgement about the discipline’s past.

Common sense simplifying history

The common sense, which the trope tacitly assumes, is part of the disciplinary common sense of social psychology—or to be more precise the disciplinary common sense held by the sort of experimental social psychologists represented by Levine (2008). By considering Lewin to be the founder/father, the holders of this common sense assume Lewin to have been an experimentalist, producing the sort of work that anticipated the empirical investigations that have become common within mainstream social psychology. A number of omissions and simplifications suggest that this is a judgement of disciplinary common sense rather than disciplinary history.

First, there are questions that textbooks tend not to pose: in what respect was Lewin the father/founder of (modern) social psychology and what did he do to qualify for that title? The textbooks, especially those with historical sub-sections, often describe Triplett as having conducted the first experiment in social psychology in 1898. Gilovich et al. (2011) use the passive trope: Triplett’s study is “widely regarded as social psychology’s first experiment” (p. 536), as if being “widely” held makes a belief more trustworthy. The first edition of Journeys in Social Psychology, which contained a narrower band of contributors than the second edition, grew out of a meeting to mark the centenary of Triplett’s experiment. However, studies into the origins of experimental social psychology throw doubt on whether Triplett’s study was actually the first social psychological experiment (Danziger, 2000; Haines & Vaughan, 1979). The issue here is not to identify the first experiment, but to note that textbook writers can identify Lewin as the founder/father of social psychology while also claiming a much earlier experiment to be the first in social psychology.

Historians have no difficulty in explaining the apparent contradiction. Danziger (2000) argues that founding a discipline like social psychology involves much more than conducting the first experiment that later comes to be called social psychological. However, the textbook writers generally do not discuss exactly why Lewin might merit the title of founder/father. Rather unusually, Stroebe, Hewstone, and Jonas (2013) do mention the difficulty and suggest that Lewin influenced social psychology by inspiring his research students rather than by his own empirical work which is not widely cited today. Sometimes, the textbooks are somewhat vague about what they are attributing to Lewin. Gilovich et al. (2011), having described Lewin as “the founder of modern social psychology” (p. 11), describe him on the following page as “a pioneer in social psychology” (p. 12). The authors do not explain the difference between being “the founder” and being “a pioneer.” It is as if such historical niceties do not matter. Gilovich et al. (2011) have a 54-page reference list, but their brief discussion of Lewin does not refer to a single history of social psychology. The 54-page reference list does not include the main histories of the discipline. Thus, the textbook directs students towards first-hand reports of empirical studies in social psychology; but to understand the past, readers have to rely on collective memories within the disciplinary common sense that the textbook is transmitting.

This collective memory is not always trustworthy. Gilovich et al. (2011) describe Lewin as a “physicist before becoming a psychologist” (p. 11). This is inaccurate: Lewin studied philosophy as an undergraduate (Marrow, 1969). Hogg and Abrams (1988) also wrongly ascribe a background in physics to Lewin (“the father of modern experimental social psychology”; p. 8), while also wrongly describing Wundt (“the father of experimental psychology”; p. 8) as having trained as a physicist; they do not cite any sources on Wundt’s or Lewin’s lives. Hogg and Abrams were using the examples of Lewin and Wundt as part of an argument that social psychology was scientific by virtue of its methods. If experimental psychology and experimental social psychology were founded by proper natural scientists, then this strengthens present claims of scientific status. The authors are in effect constructing a desired disciplinary memory to support present positions and they do so by overlooking historical studies.

Most of the histories of modern social psychology stress that Lewin did not, and indeed could not, single-handedly found social psychology. Social psychology already existed as a sub-disciplinary entity in the United States before Lewin’s famous studies, as is evidenced by the first and second editions of the book Experimental Social Psychology (Murphy & Murphy, 1931; Murphy, Murphy, & Newcomb, 1937). To make Lewin the founder/father is to diminish the roles of Floyd and Gordon Allport, whose contributions to founding the discipline are emphasised within historical studies (Danziger, 2000; Farr, 1996; Moscovici & Marková, 2006; Pandora, 1997). In fact, Daniel Katz (1979) declared that “Floyd Allport was the father of experimental social psychology” (p. 351).

Those textbooks that identify Lewin as founder/father tend not to give much, if any, space to alternative views of social psychology or its history. Moreover, textbook writers tend not to draw attention to the gaps in Lewin’s legacy. Most have chapters outlining the research into attitudes. According to Hogg and Vaughan (2011), attitudes “remain a key, if sometimes controversial, part of social psychology” (p. 149). This textbook, like others, does not mention that the figure considered to be the father/founder of the discipline resisted using the key disciplinary term of “attitude,” as Gordon Allport (1948) made clear in his generous obituary of Lewin.

We can ask what else the collective memory of the discipline might be overlooking. The biggest simplification is the way that Lewin is recruited as if he were patron of current experimental ways of doing social psychology. The mainstream textbooks are filled with descriptions of experimental studies in which variables are tightly controlled in order to isolate specific effects. Hogg and Vaughan (2011) in their opening chapter write that social psychology “is largely experimental” because most social psychologists “would prefer to test hypotheses experimentally if at all possible” (p. 9). They then describe a hypothetical social psychology experiment. It is a tightly controlled study with 20 children randomly assigned to two conditions where they either watch a violent or a non-violent programme. All else is controlled. The problem is this is just the sort of experimental investigation that Lewin explicitly criticised as “Aristotelian” (Lewin, 1931/1999a). He preferred to examine concrete, individual situations in which groups or individuals would organically develop new patterns of action over time (Lewin, 1938; see Billig, 2014).

In addition, the founder/father criticised the practice of running separate trials for each condition (i.e., 10 children watching aggressive programmes and 10 watching non-aggressive ones) and then statistically comparing the averaged data from the conditions. Lewin strongly argued that statistics belonged to the Aristotelian or pre-modern stage of science (Lewin, 1938, 1931/1999a). He aspired to a science in which mathematics, especially geometry, would be used for exploring qualitative, not quantitative, differences. From the textbooks one would not suspect that Lewin disapproved of the procedures that have now become standard. Gilovich et al. (2011) write of the importance of statistical analyses: “We will not mention the concept of statistical significance again because all of the findings we report in this book are statistically significant” (p. 59). It is just as well that they do not discuss Lewin’s empirical studies. Curiously, Gilovich et al. include Lewin’s 1931 article criticising Aristotelian (statistical) methods in their reference list, but do not refer to it in the text. It is as if the memory of Lewin’s views has been textually repressed but returns as a bibliographic reference to haunt the disciplinary consciousness. However, few readers will notice the reference, detached from any connection with the text.

Gilovich et al. (2011) and other textbooks, which briefly pay tribute to the founder/father, do not refer to historians or other scholars who have outlined Lewin’s controversial views on science and who have pointed to the contradiction between those views and the methodological practices that have become standard in social psychology since the 1960s. If the trope, which writers use to accord Lewin the status of founder/father, implicitly assumes the sense of a community, then its collective memory is marked by simplification and omission. We can say that more is being communally forgotten about Lewin than is being communally remembered; and much of this forgetting is communally convenient, at least for those sharing the dominant intellectual position within the disciplinary community.

Nothing as practical as a good theory

To go further, we need to examine what the textbooks tend to remember about Lewin’s contribution to social psychology, given that a decreasing number of them quote his empirical studies (Delouvée et al., 2011). A good number of the textbooks, but by no means all, associate Lewin with the famous motto “there is nothing as/so practical as a good theory.” Baron and Branscombe (2013) in their only reference to Lewin write: “Kurt Lewin, one of the founders of modern social psychology, often remarked ‘There’s nothing as practical as a good theory’” (p. 103; see also Aronson et al., 2010, pp. 72–73, p. 462; Myers, 2008, p. 17).

Such textbooks tend to present the motto as occupying a special place within the disciplinary common sense. Aronson et al. (2010) write: “Kurt Lewin (1951), one of the founders of social psychology, coined a phrase that has become a motto for the field: ‘There is nothing so practical as a good theory’” (p. 72). In claiming that Lewin’s saying has become a motto for the field, Aronson et al. are pointing to its special status among members of the disciplinary community. There are two additional signs that mark out the motto in the textbooks as being part of the disciplinary common sense. Both these signs are absences.

Conclusions

The adjectives “natural” and “inherent,” as used by the textbook writers in the above examples, suggest that we might be observing that part of the disciplinary common sense that could be called disciplinary ideology. According to some theorists, ideology functions to make the contingent world of human actions appear natural and immutable, as if beyond politics and vested interest (Billig, 1991; Eagleton, 1991; Ricoeur, 1986). Claiming the link between “good” theory and practice to be “natural” implies that the link does not depend on particular social and political contexts, or that there might be social, political conditions in which second-rate and even untrue theories might be more likely to be used practically (Billig, 2014).

The critical discourse analyst Teun van Dijk (2009) writes that ideology refers to the shared fundamental, axiomatic beliefs of particular groups. Few social psychologists would challenge the quotations which have been examined above, or would critically unpack the meanings of Lewin’s much-quoted motto. As such, experimental social psychology, whose rationale is based on a scientific critique of common sense, would seem to possess its own disciplinary common sense, communal memories, and even ideological assumptions.

Kurt Lewin derived the distinction between Aristotelian and Galileian science from his teacher, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, although he deliberately ignored Cassirer’s writings on psychology (Billig, 2014). Cassirer (1953) argued that our human ability to create myths is integral to our capacity for language and, in consequence, even in the most scientific of times myth-making still retains a force. Cassirer’s ideas on myth may be generally ignored by social psychologists, but they are instantiated within those textbooks that herald Lewin as the discipline’s father/founder, while simplifying, even forgetting, his ideas. Such textbooks are recreating Lewin as a mythic hero, not as a historical figure. Also, they treat his motto as if it were a magical phrase which, if uttered, will ward off disciplinary doubts.