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In the Political Laboratory: Kurt Lewin's Atmospheres

2013; Routledge; Volume: 7; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17530350.2013.860045

1753-0369

Javier Lezaun, Nerea Calvillo,

Social Representations and Identity

Abstract In a series of groundbreaking studies conducted in the late 1930s at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, the émigré German psychologist Kurt Lewin and his graduate student Ronald Lippitt transformed the relationship between social-scientific experimentation and political design. In the controlled, confined space of the laboratory they were able to produce, they claimed, distinct political ‘climates’. Authoritarian, laissez-faire and, most precarious and precious of all, democratic ‘atmospheres’ were the observable effect of subjecting small groups of children to different styles of ‘leadership’ under artificial conditions of work-play. In this essay, we reconstruct the practical set-up that allowed Lewin and Lippitt to render political forms observable and manipulable under experimental conditions. We will analyze the physical configuration and material furnishings of the experimental setting, as well as the self-affected practices of ‘leadership’ that the experimenters deployed in their attempts to change the political valence of groups. The discovery of a set of technical procedures for the realization of localized but tangible forms of democratic life was a startling and welcome discovery in the bleak years of totalitarian ascendancy. We conclude by revisiting the significance of these experiments for our understanding of how the social sciences can generate spaces and situations of political experimentation. KEYWORDS: atmospheresdemocracysocial experimentleadershipKurt LewinRonald Lippitt ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The idea for this paper grew out of a conversation at the workshop Prototyping Cultures, held at Medialab-Prado in Madrid in November 2010. We are grateful to Alberto Corsín Jiménez and to Adolfo Estalella for the invitation to participate in that event, and for their encouragement to think about our material proto-typically. Early versions of the paper were presented at the Institute of Social Psychology of the London School of Economics and in the Department of Sociology of the Technische Universität Berlin. We would like to thank Martin Bauer and Jan-Peter Voß for making those discussions possible. Finally, the paper benefited from the insightful critical comments of two anonymous reviewers. Notes 1. We ran the movie frame-by-frame and produced a diagram of the experimental space by locating the position of the camera in the different scenes, and then establishing size and position relations between the different objects seen in the film. Next we tracked the movement of things, children and ‘leaders’ and inscribed these displacements within the spatial diagram. Although the movie is a heavily edited version of the original footage, it allows us to observe variations of these elements across the different ‘atmospheres’. 2. As Danziger has noted, the school was a critical device in the creation of experimental forms of social-scientific research, for ‘it provided a social framework within which the old distinction between natural and artificial social forms was no longer very meaningful, where the artificial had become natural’ (Citation1992, p. 312). 3. In the experimental use of discarded materials, the Iowa laboratory resembles the methodological experiments of Moholy-Nagy's and Albers' foundation course at the Bauhaus (rather than the clean and controlled aesthetics of Bauhaus buildings). A concern with purity of form had been shared by Gestalt psychologists and Bauhaus designers (see van Campen Citation1997). Lewin was familiar with avant-garde artistic and architectural practice (he commissioned Peter Behrens to design his Berlin house). Yet the reports of the Iowa study include no reference to any constructive principle or method for the design of the experimental space and its furniture. 4. Despite the thoroughness with which the children were observed before, during and after the experiment (they were extensively debriefed upon the conclusion of the study, for instance), Lippitt's reports and the published scientific accounts include only fragmentary references to how the children interpreted the experimental situations. We are thus unable to describe, in any meaningful way, the phenomenology of their experience. Here, we are exclusively concerned with what the experimenters made of (and with) the events that unfolded in the attic. The children's own understandings must remain the central mystery in any reconstruction of the Iowa study. 5. For a contrasting example of how a fully ‘controlled’ (i.e. fixed) material environment affects the nature and reach of experiments in democratic living see Lezaun (Citation2011, Citation2013). 6. To identify the traits of ideal-typical democratic and authoritarian actors, Lippitt drew on some theoretical sources – particularly Paul Pigors' doctoral thesis, Leadership or Domination (1935) – but for the most part he seems to have derived his acting technique from his own practical experience in ‘group work’. Before joining the Iowa Station, Lippitt had been a student at the International YMCA (Young Men's Christian Association) College, in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he had become familiar with the direction of boys' ‘clubs’ and Boy Scouts troops (Lippitt Citation1940b, p. 29). Transcript of Interviews with Alex Bavelas and Dorwin Cartwright, Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron (M944, Folder 1). See also Patnoe (Citation1988), pp. 31–32; White (Citation1990), pp. 19–20. 7. Interview with Ronald Lippitt Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron (M946, Folder 21). In a later recollection, Lippitt remarked that ‘Ralph was terribly awkward in his relations with kids’ (quoted in Bradford Citation1974, p. 9). Before joining Lewin's group in Iowa, White had developed his experimental skills in the study of animal (rat) behavior. 8. In the case of Lippitt the intensity of engagement might have been compounded by the fact that he wrote his doctoral dissertation in the attic under the influence of amphetamines: ‘I do remember moving into the attic with a camp bed and finishing the dissertation in ten days in the Spring of 1940 with the help of benzedrine’ (quoted in Bradford Citation1974, p. 10). For a discussion on the role of benzedrine in the Lewinian tradition, and its possible contribution to the ‘heightened sense of existential presence’ that is common to many of its artificially generated groupings, see Cooke (Citation2009). 9. That Lewin was interested in developing effective cinematographic techniques for the depiction of psychological states and social phenomena is evident from his correspondence with Sergej Eisenstein and Alexander Luria in the 1920s and 1930s (see Bulgakowa Citation1997, p. 124ff.; See also Kurt Lewin papers (Box M2931) in the Archives of the History of American Psychology, The University of Akron). 10. Sloterdijk's notion of the state of suspension, a place-period of residence (Aufenthalt), as key to the political architecture of modernity, captures well the ambiguity of temporal and spatial elements central to the notion of ‘atmosphere’ (Sloterdijk Citation2004, p. 501ff). To our knowledge, there is no reference to Lewin's work in Sloterdijk's ‘atmospheric’ re-interpretation of modernity. Neither is there a mention of Lewin's and Lippitt's experiments in Latour's and Weibel's well-known exhibition/catalogue Making Things Public: The Atmospheres of Democracy.