Inducing Change and Stability in Belief Systems and Personality Structures

Because I needed to get as far away from Brooklyn as I could when 1 graduated from college, I chose to go to Berkeley rather than Iowa; I was thus not privileged to meet or work with Kurt Lewin. Nonetheless, I have been influenced by his writings throughout most of my career. My formulation about the open and closed mind (Rokeach, 1960), and the Dogmatism Scale I had constructed to measure general authoritarianism as an alternative to the measurement of Fascist authoritarianism (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950), were heavily influenced by Lewin’s emphasis on the ahistorical and contemporaneous, and by his concepts about the structure of the person and the life space-such concepts as cognitive structure, the central-peripheral dimension, time perspective, differentiation, and rigidity. Similarly, my work on the organization of values, attitudes, and belief systems was influenced by Lewin’s structural way of thinking, even though 1 preferred the verbal to Lewin’s topological style of conceptualization. Later, my work benefited from Kurt Lewin’s emphasis on change experiments and on his insistence that in order to understand a phenomenon we must study the conditions under which it will undergo change (Marrow, 1969). I was also deeply influenced by what he had to say about the importance of integrating psychological theory and research with social action. But in deciding what problems were worth my time and energy, 1 more or less consciously employed three criteria rather than Lewin’s two: theoretical relevance, social relevance, and personal relevance. I also saw a difference between trying to be socially relevant and trying to be socially useful. It seemed far easier for me to decide in advance of whatever research 1 embarked upon whether it might be relevant to a deeper understanding of society and the self than whether it would be socially useful. So 1 was content to proceed on the assumption that the more a