Lezaun& Calvillo. In the Political Laboratory: Kurt Lewin's Atmospheres

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In the Political Laboratory: Kurt Lewin'sAtmospheresJavier Lezaun & Nerea CalvilloPublished online: 25 Nov 2013.

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IN THE POLITICAL LABORATORY: KURTLEWIN’S ATMOSPHERES

Javier Lezaun and Nerea Calvillo

Received 15 Nov 2012; Accepted 31 May 2013

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: atmospheres; democracy; social experiment; leadership; Kurt Lewin; Ronald

Lippitt

1. Introduction: A Place for Political Demonstrations

‘All politics is local’, the saying goes, but some locales seem able to produce morepolitics than others. Some places are in fact designed to produce political effects – they arepurposefully arranged so as to maximize their political productivity. In some instances,moreover, they are set up in an experimental fashion, in an attempt to test, in a laboratory-like setting and under controlled conditions, the viability of certain forms of social order.

This raises an obvious question: what sort of politics can emerge in a laboratory? Or,to put it in a more constructive way, in what kind of experimental space can a meaningfulpolitical demonstration be generated? Isn’t ‘the political’ inextricably linked to the livedexperience of familiar places? Does it not require a certain social durée, a sedimentation ofrelatedness that is, by definition, impossible to replicate in the suspended time oflaboratory experimentation? If political action is characterized by a certain degree ofintensity, of eventfulness, can it be generated at will by the implementation of technicalprotocols within clearly circumscribed spaces?

This article revisits a classic locale of twentieth-century political experimentation,what is perhaps the archetypical political laboratory. In the second half of the 1930s, theGerman émigré psychologist Kurt Lewin and his graduate student Ronald Lippitt

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conducted a series of experiments at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station in whichthey created miniature versions of political order. By arranging small groups of children ina deliberately constructed experimental space and subjecting them, over the course ofseveral weeks, to different styles of ‘leadership’, the experimenters were able to observewhat they described as democratic, authoritarian and laissez-faire ‘atmospheres’ – or‘social climates’, as they also called.

Each of these ‘atmospheres’ was characterized by markedly different levels of inter-personal aggression, group cohesiveness and work productivity. In the authoritariansituation, Lewin and Lippitt claimed, the group experienced levels of psychological tensionthat led to frequent outbursts of violence towards some of its members. In the democratic‘climate’, in contrast, members were less prone to aggression and more likely to express‘an objective, matter-of-fact attitude’ towards each other and towards their work (Lewin1938, p. 318). The third form of political order, the laissez faire ‘atmosphere’, emergedunexpectedly in the course of the study, when one of the adults playing the role of ‘leader’failed to steer the children towards a democratic outcome and the group descendedinstead into an ‘anarchic’ state (Lippitt 1940a, p. 22). Not only did the groups adopt visiblydifferent patterns of behavior in each of these contexts: by introducing subtle changes inthe behavior of the ‘leader’, the experiment was able to create rapid transitions betweendifferent kinds of political order. The ‘atmospheres’, Lewin argued, were ‘a property of thesocial situation as a whole’ (Lewin 1939, p. 24), as became evident when children weretransferred between groups: the experimenters were then able to observe how ‘thebehavior of the children mirrored very quickly the atmosphere of the group in which theymoved’ (Lewin 1939, p. 24).

The Iowa experiment in ‘social climates’ represents a foundational moment in thehistory of experimental social psychology, but its significance goes well beyond its role ininaugurating a scientific discipline. This was the first time the superiority of democracy wastested in a laboratory. Such a test demanded a radical explicitation of the conditions –affective, material and architectural – that would allow groups to display different forms ofpolitical order. In a confined, closely monitored space, Lewin and Lippitt were able togenerate an intensity of association and disassociation that rendered visible suddenchanges in the social constitution of experimental collectives. They developed an apparatusof observation that allowed these ephemeral political states to leave a trace, and provided acomparative measurement of the productivity and cohesiveness of different micro-polities.

Simply by posing the question in this manner, the experiment broke with theassumption that politics in general, and democracy in particular, was the organic quality ofhistorically constituted communities. Instead, the experiment identified a series ofoperations that could be deployed to speedily and visibly alter the political valence ofgroups. Most critically, the study elucidated a set of techniques that would serve to facilitate(a strange and crucial new verb) the emergence of localized versions of democratic order,in the process recasting democracy as the result of carefully calibrated expert interventions.

In this essay, we revisit this critical moment in the history of the social sciences. Weexplore, in particular, the spatial and material dimensions of the setting where Lippitt andLewin achieved this radical experimentalization of political forms. We will begin byreconstructing the physical location of the study. A first series of observations wereconducted in a schoolroom, but the bulk of the study took place in the attic of one of theUniversity’s buildings. In that attic, Lewin and Lippitt created a very peculiar setting: amakeshift, porous, largely self-built enclosure that allowed the continuous observation of

2 JAVIER LEZAUN AND NEREA CALVILLO

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the children but was at the same time ‘conducive to unartificial, spontaneous club life’(Lippitt 1940a, p. 66). We will reconstruct the arrangement and peculiar furnishings of thislocale, for it was in an environment saturated with artifacts, tools and constructionmaterials that distinct ‘social climates’ became manifest.

Next we will look at the patterns of action that characterized the different styles ofmoderation adopted by the experimenters. The Iowa experiment transformed the conceptof ‘leadership’: a politico-philosophical category previously anchored in the notion ofcharisma acquired here a distinctive technical quality. ‘Leadership’ became a reflexive, self-consciously performative role – a role that could be taught, learned and play-acted bysuitably trained individuals. We will examine the process of self-affectation that went intoturning experimenters into ‘leaders’, including the patterns of their locomotion within theexperimental setting.

We draw our analysis from the written records of the study – published and archival– and from the film that Lewin shot during the experiment. Lewin made a silent movie ofthe second experimental series, which he used to convince others of the significance ofwhat had transpired in the Iowa attic. This movie, ‘Experimental Studies in Group Climates’,represents a landmark in the use of cinematographic techniques to visualize socialphenomena (van Elteren & Lück 1990). We have used this visual material to produce aseries of diagrams that capture features of the experimental set-up that are neglected inthe scientific reports and personal recollections of the experimenters. While Lewintheorized space in topologico-mathematical terms, the movie allows us to explore howthe peculiar emplacement of the experiment, its unfolding in a very particular kind ofphysical space, affected the construction of political ‘atmospheres’.1

We will conclude by reflecting on the significance of the Iowa experiment for ourunderstanding of political prototypes. The study was expected to work both asconfirmation of the technical ability to produce political transitions under laboratoryconditions, and as proof of the superiority of democracy over authoritarian and anarchicforms of group life. For Lewin, the function of the social sciences in an age of existentialstruggle against totalitarianism was nothing less than ‘to establish the reality ofdemocracy’ (Lewin, quoted in White & Lippitt 1960, p. viii). This ontological projectrequired a radical technical innovation: the transposition of the question of democracy’sreality – of its consistency and superiority vis-à-vis other forms of social order – to the scaleof the face-to-face group and the temporality of experimental duration.

2. Staging Attic Politics

The first of the two Iowa experiments in political atmospherics was designed andconducted by Ronald Lippitt in 1936. Two groups of five children, age 10 or 11, were drawnfrom a school affiliated with the University. These two ‘clubs’ would meet twice a week, onalternate days, for about thirty minutes, to and work on the same task: the fabrication oftheatrical masks. The setting was one of the school’s project rooms, ‘with sink and runningwater, plenty of floor space, and locker room’ (Lippitt 1940a, p. 65). Half of the room wasdedicated to the activities of the ‘club’, while three or four observers sat behind a table inthe other half, recording different aspects of the group’s behavior at one-minute intervals.

A single room, then, contained the experimental subjects, the experimenter playingthe role of ‘leader’, and the group of observers, with no internal divisions other than thepartial one provided by the table. The initial encounter with the two ‘clubs’ served to

IN THE POLITICAL LABORATORY 3

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dispel the fear that the visible presence of observers would hamper the children’sspontaneity. The University-affiliated school had long provided recruits for the projects ofthe Research Station, and the children were apparently so used to a constant flow ofsocial-scientific visitors that they paid little attention to this particular group of adults. Thevery possibility of spontaneous action in such close proximity to social scientists wasperhaps the key finding of this first experiment. ‘The observers’, Lippitt noted, quicklybecame ‘part of the “furniture” of the situation’ (1939, p. 29).2

The second experiment was in essence an expanded version of Lippitt’s originaldesign. This time, twenty children, all male, were arranged in four ‘clubs’, each meetingonce a week and spending six consecutive sessions under a particular kind of ‘leadership’.Over a total period of eighteen weeks, then, each ‘club’ would experience three differentstyles of direction. This second experiment took place in the attic of one of the University’sbuildings, and this time greater care was taken in physically separating the space of groupaction from the position of the observers. Burlap curtains and wire were used todemarcate a space where children and ‘leader’ would interact, while the observers –

typically a total of twelve – sat behind the enclosure in the manner described by Lippitt:

On the side towards the observers the wall was only table high and behind it, under alow sloping section of the roof, the observers sat in the shade, considerably removed for[sic] the children. The lights were so shaded that the main focus was upon the club-roomsection and away from the observer space. No attempt was made to render theobservers invisible to the children. As in the first study no difficulty was encountered inbanishing the observers from the ‘psychological present’ after an introductory periodduring which their presence was explained to the children. (Lippitt 1940b, p. 24)

From Lippit’s accounts we know that the experimental enclosure was divided in half,allowing two groups to play simultaneously next to each other (Figure 1). An intermediatearea, containing a toolbox, served as a ‘neutral zone’ between the two clubs. Lewin’smovie never shows the space in its entirety – his camera is always trained on the activitiesof one of the two ‘clubs’ – but it is clear from Lippitt’s account that the two groups wereable to hear, see and sometimes interrupt one another. As we will see, this is a recurrenttheme in the organization of the experiment: there were infrastructures and presencesoutside the monitorized space that exerted an influence on the unfolding events, yetremained invisible or unaccounted for in the scientific and cinematographic record of thestudy – they constituted a sort of ‘extended laboratory’, critical to the dynamics on displayin the different groups but never directly captured on film or in the published reports.

Lewin’s film and a handful of photographs of the attic reveal other features of thesetting. The children play in a dark, raftered space (Figure 2), with the burlap curtainsdemarcating an oval-shaped space of observation, the ‘club-room’. There are no doors orthresholds marking fixed points of entry and exit, a fact that enhances the fluidity of thechildren’s movements and their connection to the immediate surroundings of thelaboratory. The space is porous and permeable. The children can be seen entering andexiting the place at different times, with a frequency that varies depending on the type of‘atmosphere’. The ambiguity of the curtain’s shape – the folds that distort it, the gapsthrough which children and ‘leader’ arrive or leave – conform a space with flexible andchanging limits.

The film allows a diagrammatic reconstruction of the interior of the experimental‘club-rooms’. The position of the camera changes from scene to scene, but the different


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angles of vision permit a composite recreation of the space and its furniture (Figure 3). Thespace is organized concentrically around a main empty area where most of the actiontakes place. Around it a set of objects are located with no apparent order, but alwaysvisible and accessible to the children. They provide furniture for sitting, laying, working,holding and many other improvised uses. Objects are invariably detached from the curtainenvelope, increasing the possibilities of circulation within the laboratory space andblurring its material limits. The location of the entrances in diametrically opposed pointsincreases the fluidity of movement and leads to the multiplication of encounters andinteractions at the centre.

This attic-cum-laboratory differs markedly from the locales where the ‘brassinstrument psychology’ of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century conducted itsexperiments. There is no measurement apparatus, hardly any fixed equipment, no pre-assigned position for the experimental subjects. Significantly, the instruments and devices

FIGURE 1Representation of the experimental enclosure. Source: Lippitt 1940b.

FIGURE 2Views of the experimental setting. To the left, an autocratically run group – the leader istemporarily absent (source: film, 22:42); to the right, group in laissez-faire climate, withthe ‘leader’ sitting on the right end (source: film, 28:40). Notice the different lightingconditions in different atmospheres.


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that populate the space, in an apparently disorganized manner, are construction materials.Far from operating as mere perception ‘stimuli’, these are objects whose character asthings is impossible to ignore. Their obtrusive presence gives the experimental space acluttered feel; the elicitation of group ‘atmospheres’ is achieved in a space that appearscrowded and retains a rough and cheap material aesthetic.

As we will see, the set-up also differs from the sorts of laboratories that theexperimental social sciences would create in the second half of the twentieth-century. Incontrast to aseptic and barren ‘white rooms’, the Iowa attic is a seemingly undisciplined andunstructured space. The burlap walls and supporting scaffolding offer a backdrop for theplay of the experimental group, rather than an isolating perimeter. Due to the soft edges ofthe observation area, the monitoring of the experiment often becomes part of its action:children are often caught looking or smiling at the camera, wandering in and out of the‘club-room’ and disrupting any rigid separation between the observer and the observed.

Throughout the experiment the space remains an unstable hybrid of scientificlaboratory and public space, of play for the benefit of the experiment and play at theexpense of the experiment. Rather than a fully controlled space, Lewin and Lippitt set up,deliberately or inadvertently, a sophisticated transitional setting, a stage on which amultitude of underdetermined events could proliferate. The experimental attic is in thissense an inconclusive locale, unable (or unwilling) to draw the distinction between ludiclaboratory and scientific playground. As we will see, the makeshift character and unsettled

FIGURE 3Contours and furnishings of experimental setting.


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identity of this space had profound repercussions for its ability to reveal different kinds ofpolitical order.

3. Doing Politics with Things

In Lippitt’s original experiment, of which there is no visual record, the two groups ofchildren had been engaged in the same task, the fabrication of theatrical masks. Lippitthad chosen the activity for a number of reasons: ‘it was new and attractive to all thechildren. It could be broken up into several rather clear-cut units – designing, mixing clay,moulding, mixing plaster of Paris, pouring the cast, etc. – which could be carried along inparallel fashion in the two groups’ (Lippitt 1940a, pp. 65–66). Years earlier, researchers atthe Research Station had studied the potential of clay as an stimulator of cooperative playamong children (Updegraff & Herbst 1933), but as to why that material should be used tofabricate precisely theatrical masks, in what was effectively a laboratory that incorporatedkey dimensions of the theatrical stage, Lippitt offered no explanation.

In the second series, the four groups engaged in a variety of practical activities. Theexperiment was to unfold over a period of eighteen weeks, and variation was necessary,Lippitt argued, in order to offset the ‘loss of motivation’ that would result from spendingtoo much time on any particular task (Lippitt 1940b, p. 27). Carpentry, drawing andpainting signs to decorate the club’s space, wood and soap carving, model airplaneconstruction, and, again, the fabrication of masks were some of the tasks offered to thegroups.

The attic was thus a space of construction, a workshop, and it was furnished with avariety of materials, implements and devices. This makes for a peculiar situation: at thesame time that they are being closely observed by the social scientists, the children arefabricating and modifying their material environment – building their own furniture,decorating the ‘club-room’, blending directed work and spontaneous play (or, in somecases, spontaneous work and directed play), altering the topography of the experimentalspace and colonizing the experimental setting under the eyes of its designers.

Other aspects of the locale and its furnishings conspired to make this a particularlyactive space. First, the furniture seems to have come out of the transformation of the samematerial: boxes, table, benches, stools, they all look like variants or mutations of the sameoriginal object. This erases the legibility of individual artifacts, and increases the flexibilityof uses. A box can sometimes work as a container, other times as a sitting surface, and stillothers as a working space. All objects are one and many at the same time (or more thanmany and less than one): they remain abstract until activated by use. The fact that all thesefurnishings seem to be made of the same kind of wood, and with one constructive system,produces a material continuity that erases the boundary of the individual objects. Itproduces a continuous and active surface operating at different levels, a sort of flexibletopography that performs as a topological space. The roughness of the constructivesystem – wooden pieces assembled with nails in a very basic manner – produces theaesthetic effect of an absence of design.3

The final touch is the decoration of the curtains (Figure 4). Becoming a space ofrepresentation in themselves, the curtains contain the fictions and interests of the childrenand the name of their ‘clubs’ (‘Sherlock Holmes’, ‘Dick Tracy’, ‘Secret Agents’ and ‘CharlieChan’). They provide the only place for figurative representation in the whole ‘club-room’,and allow the groups to mark the space as their own.


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Lippitt and Lewin rarely record differences in the handling of tools and materialsbetween groups in different ‘atmospheres’, except in extreme cases. After one of theautocratic periods, for instance, the children are said to have destroyed the theatricalmasks they had been ordered to fabricate. ‘Rather clearly’, the experimenters noted withperhaps revealing haste, ‘the work products of this authoritarian atmosphere seemed tobe the objects of aggressive attack rather than prideful ownership’ (Lewin et al. 1939, p.289). The implication, they thought, was clear: ‘They couldn’t fight the leader, but theycould the masks’ (Lippitt, 1939, p. 48).4

Lewin’s film, however, shows clear differences in the distribution of work and theuse of objects and surfaces in the different ‘atmospheres’ (Figure 5). In the democratic‘social climate’, the degree of manipulation of the available materials is particularly striking:a wooden plank that was part of the furniture of the experiment is displaced and used tofabricate new tools; the children make use of the largest number of elements and spreadtheir activity to different areas of the floor, creating a large working surface. In contrast,work in the authoritarian ‘atmosphere’ tends to occur on the floor, always at the center ofthe experimental enclosure, and the children are constrained in their use of the availablefurnishings by the explicit orders of the ‘leader’. In the laissez-faire ‘atmosphere’, theactivity is distributed in various nodes, concentrating around different pieces of furniture.The floor is hardly used – the children are mostly moving around and show littleconcentration on their task.

It is striking that, despite this diversity of uses of the space and its furniture, Lippittand Lewin would consider the physical setting and material configuration of theexperiment a fixed parameter, a fully controlled variable. It is particularly remarkable,given the intensity of observation – six observers were watching each of the groups,recording minute changes in their state and structure – that none of the lines of sight wastrained on the handling or use of artifacts. The key categories of action used by theexperimenters (‘ascendant’, ‘submissive’ and ‘objective’) described relationships betweenchildren, or between child and ‘leader’, never action vis-à-vis objects. A ‘neglect of things’would of course become a hallmark of social psychology (Graumann 1974). For Lewin andLippitt, and for a generation of social psychologists after them, the depreciation ofmaterial objects and their handling served to bring into relief the reality of the group as abehavioral unity. The experimental collective could be described as a ‘face-to-face’ group,

FIGURE 4View of the experimental enclosure (source: film, 37:05).


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FIGURE 5Topology of work and use of surfaces.


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even when, as in the Iowa attic, virtually all contact between children, or between childand leader, was mediated by objects.

It is thus critical to recognize that the Iowa study unfolded in a porous spacecrowded with mobile artifacts and construction materials. Here, as in the contemporaryexamples of political demonstration discussed by Marres (2012), the functional imprecisionof the setting and its furniture allowed the groups ‘to enact alternative forms ofparticipation’ (Marres 2012, p. 127). In particular, the ‘variable normativity’ of objects,their malleability to different forms of appropriation and public use, was a critical resourcefor the display of democratic situations. ‘The relative indetermination of entities andrelations that experimental settings enable’, Marres writes, ‘does not subtract from, butadds to, their allowances for democracy’ (Marres 2012, p. 130). The children in the Iowaattic might not have been able to influence the initial experimental design – although, aswe will see in the next section, in one crucial instance they diverted the experimentersfrom their original plans – but by virtue of the makeshift character of the laboratory theywere able to adjust and alter its interior, to colonize the experimental space in a variety ofways and in the process incarnate different forms of togetherness.5

4. Affecting Leadership

With his original experimental design, Lippitt had attempted to visualize theinfluence of different styles of ‘leadership’ on the life of the group. Every other variableperceived as significant (age and background of the children, size and composition of thegroups, features of the physical setting, content of the practical activity, etc.) was heldconstant, he thought, while the behavior of the actor-experimenter – what Lippitt andWhite would describe as the ‘leader treatment’ inflicted on the children (e.g. Lippitt &White 1943, p. 488) – would change dramatically in each of the two ‘clubs’. By obtainingperceptibly different levels of inter-personal aggression and engagement with the practicaltask in the democratic and the authoritarian group, the experiment thus vindicated thepower of the ‘leader’ to trigger different ‘atmospheres’ (Lewin & Lippitt 1938).

It is now difficult to recognize the revolutionary quality of this format. This is one ofthe first examples in the history of the social sciences in which the experimenter was notmerely, or primarily, an observer, but entered the experimental enclosure as an actor inthe theatrical sense of the word, an agent provocateur whose performance was essential tothe elicitation of phenomena of scientific relevance.

In the first small-scale, Lippitt himself played both the democratic and autocratic‘leader’. Over the six weeks of the study (meeting each of the two groups twice a week inthirty-minute session), Lippitt developed a set of routines conducive to the emergence ofdemocratic and authoritarian ‘social climates’. His reports offer very few glimpses of theeffort that went into modulating these two personae, other than the offhand remark that‘[t]he adult must play a natural rather than artificial, ‘acting’ role in creating theatmospheres’ (1940a, p. 62). In order to establish this very difference, however, Lippitthad to carry out a radical stylization of the roles of democratic and authoritarian leader,embarking on a process of self-experimentation on the verbal, interactive and bodilydispositions that would serve to materialize each type of political authority.

In the authoritarian atmosphere, for instance, he dictated the steps required for thepractical completion of the task once at a time, ensuring that the group remained in thedark about the future direction of their work-play. In the democratic group, in contrast, he


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would use the first meeting to offer a general ‘activity perspective’. When further technicaladvice was needed, ‘the [democratic] leader tried to point out two or three alternativeprocedures from which choice could be made’. In the autocratic group, ‘[t]he dominatorcriticized and praised individual’s activities without giving objective reasons, and remainedaloof from active group participation’. In contrast, the leader in the democratic groupshould make sure that he ‘gave objective praise and criticism’. He should attempt ‘to be agroup member in spirit and in discussion but not to perform much of the actual work’(Lippitt 1940b, p. 28).6

This initial stylization of leadership roles would be elaborated further in the secondexperimental series. In order to control for the possible influence of the experimenter’spersonality, four graduate students – all males, despite the presence in Lewin’s group ofseveral female researchers – played the role of ‘leader’. Every six weeks each experimenterswitched to a new ‘club’ and acted out a different type of leadership. The actingtechniques would be fine-tuned to such an extent, the experimenters hoped, that the fourperformers could trade places with no effect on the observable group dynamic; the actorsshould become fully interchangeable, the mask of democratic or authoritarian ‘leader’fitting equally well any of the individuals playing the role.

This calibration of roles required much more than a mere list of instruction aboutwhat the different ‘leaders’ should or should not say. It implied the development of a setof techniques for the embodiment of different sorts of political authority, something thatcould only be accomplished through an intense process of self- and other-observation. Inthe first experiment, Lippitt had kept a ‘leader’s diary’ where after every meeting with thechildren he recorded his ‘group-as-a-whole impressions’. In the second experiment, thefour actors constantly observed each other ‘to appraise one another’s techniques with aneye to a better equation of methods in creating the same type of social climate’ (Lippitt1940b, p. 28). Furthermore, the performances of the four adult ‘leaders’ unfolded underthe close scrutiny of the twelve observers. Their behavior was recorded as carefully as thatof the children – all their statements and actions were classified in 40 kinds of ‘leaderactivity’, later consolidated into nine general categories: ‘orders’, ‘disruptive commands’,‘non-constructive criticism’, ‘guiding suggestions’, ‘extending knowledge’, ‘stimulating self-guidance’, ‘praise and approval’, ‘jovial and confident’ and ‘matter of fact’.

The ultimate product of these intersecting angles of observation was the develop-ment of certain gestural habits and interactive dispositions – democratic and authoritarianmodes of comportment that could be used to coax the groups towards ideal-typicalpolitical situations. Here, as in Massumi’s discussion of Ronald Reagan’s self-discovery as anactor-leader, the invention and embodiment of a political role was above all a process ofself-affectation. The proper modulation of the ‘leader’s’ performance in each of the‘atmospheres’ required ‘the artificial construction of a self and the suffusing of that selfwith affect’ (Massumi 2002, p. 63).

Lewin’s movie gives us further insight into this process. The four actors playing therole of ‘leader’ display mannerisms that seem deliberate and consciously adopted: theauthoritarian ‘leader’, for instance, is almost always impeccably dressed in suit and tie,whereas his democratic counterpart is ready to take off the jacket, roll up his sleeves, andparticipate in the work of the group. The authoritarian demeanor is expressed by brusquehand movements, with the ‘leader’ often pointing to different tools and materials as heorders the children to carry out specific tasks. He hardly ever sits down, and seems mostly


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concerned with maintaining his distance and hierarchical preeminence vis-à-vis thechildren (Figure 6).

The exertion and self-discipline demanded by the bodily representation of pureforms of political authority are made clear by the most surprising – and, perhaps, the mostsignificant – result of the Iowa experiment: the unexpected development of a third style of‘leadership’, the technique of laissez-faire direction.

Ralph White, a recent arrival at the Iowa Station, was one of the graduate studentstasked with playing democratic ‘leader’ in one of the groups. As he began to play the rolesketched out in Lippitt’s instructions, however, the children did not react as expected. ‘Thegroup started to fall apart’, White recalled several decades later. ‘There were a couple ofkids who were real hell raisers, and they found a great opportunity to raise hell, whichwasn’t productive’. This was a potentially dangerous development. ‘It began to look’,White pointed out, ‘as if the autocratically led groups would be better than the democraticone in at least that respect. They would be more productive and integrated’ (White, 1990,p. 21).

White’s mistake had been to equate democratic ‘leadership’ with the absence ofdirection. ‘His model of democracy’, Lippitt noted, ‘was passive and permissive’ (quoted inBradford 1974, p. 9). He had assumed that a democratic ‘atmosphere’ would emergesimply by virtue of the inaction and aloofness of the ‘leader’. Rather than derailing theexperiment or compromising its value as a demonstration of the superiority of democracy,however, this unexpected turn of events was used to develop a third category of ‘socialclimate’. As Lippitt noted:

Ralph, who had drawn the role of democratic leader in the first time period behaved in away that was quite different from the other democratic leader roles as we had definedthem and was obviously getting quite a different effect in terms of responses of thechildren. Kurt [Lewin]’s observation of this as he stood behind the burlap wall andoperated the movie camera led to an excited gleam in his eye as he perceived a basicgenotypic difference between the democratic patterns and what we labeled the laissez-faire pattern of leadership. So instead of correcting Ralph’s style we moved it moretoward a pure case of laissez-faire pattern and planned for other leaders to use the same

FIGURE 6Leaders in action. To the left, democratic leader: ‘Gradually the adult becomes anaccepted member of the group. He helps develop group planning. Work soon becomesmore persistent and coordinated.’ (source: film, 32:13); to the right: authoritarian leaderdirecting work (source: film, 25:40)


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role to get a more complete analysis of the dynamics of the difference. This shift…weakened the classic purity of experimental design but it added at least a smaller sampleof a third pattern which tremendously enriched the value and validity of the wholeexploration.7

White’s inaction was thus turned into a third style of facilitation. In ‘clubs’ subjected to thissort of treatment, the ‘leader’ would simply provide the construction materials andintervene only if and when the children asked for his help. He would offer ‘very infrequentcomments on member activities unless questioned’, and ‘made no attempt to participatein the group’s work or influence its progress’ (Lewin et al. 1939, p. 273). The film shows thelaissez-faire ‘leader’ working very hard at being passive and emotionally uninvolved.

The formulation of this third technique of leadership would come to carry a greatdeal of significance for Lewin. The observations indicated that groups where the ‘leader’had adopted a thoroughly passive disposition generated a higher number of aggressiveactions than those in authoritarian ‘climates’. In the 1940s, Lewin would use this evidenceto advance the view that strong, proactive ‘group management’ was essential toharmonious democratic life. Democracy, in other words, was not the result of autonomousself-organization. ‘Freedom of the individuality’, Lewin wrote, ‘is only one side of thedemocratic way of life. If unlimited, it will lead to laissez-faire, to anarchy. Democracydemands limitations of individual freedoms for the sake of the group’ (Lewin 1941).

At a time when the strong ‘leader’ was being touted as an antidote against thedeficits of democracy, Lewin was articulating an alternative relationship between directionand political freedom. In order to do so, he gave the notion of ‘leadership’ a specific and,at the time, revolutionary quality. ‘Leadership’ was turned into a role, a teachabletechnique or skill devoid of any sort of charismatic connotation. The Iowa experimentdemonstrated that it was possible to achieve ‘a rather amazing homogeneity of behaviorpattern’ among those ‘typifying the same type of leadership technique’ (Lippitt 1940b, p.102). These leadership techniques operated, moreover, at the level of the small group, notthe crowd or the multitude. Most importantly, the Iowa study demonstrated that it waspossible to devise a system for the training of ‘efficient democratic leaders’ (Bavelas &Lewin 1942). That is, one could standardize and disseminate a form of uncharismaticauthority conducive to the emergence of participatory group life. The democratic ‘leader’would be nothing more (and nothing less) than the indispensable technician of aminiaturized democratic order. Democracy, in turn, became an object of expertmanagement, a conflict-less situation brought about by the trained performance of afacilitator.

5. Topologies and Topographies of Group Life

In his Principles of Topological Psychology (1936), Lewin had advanced a method forthe mathematical representation of the psychological ‘life space’. ‘Life space’ referred to‘the totality of facts which determine the behavior of an individual at a certain moment’(1936, p. 12). That totality could be represented as a ‘space’ in the mathematico-topological sense of the term – as a system of relations for which certain axioms hold. ‘Therepresentation of the life space’, Lewin wrote, ‘has to indicate the “position” of personsand objects in certain “regions.” It has to take into account locomotions of a quasi-physical, quasi-social, and quasi-conceptual nature; neighborhood relationships of regions;


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boundaries; approaches and withdrawals; expansion and contraction; and finally move-ments and forces in certain directions’ (1936, p. 51).

This thoroughly spatialist language did not imply, Lewin insisted, any reference tophysical space. The psychological ‘life space’ was not defined by metric directions ordistances. It designated rather a set of relationships within a field – especially therelationship between ‘part’ and ‘whole – through which ‘the possibility of certain[psychological] operations’ could be precisely identified (Lewin 1936, p. 52). ‘To usespatial concepts in psychology’, Lewin wrote, ‘means to treat psychology mathematically,but does not imply physicalism’ (Lewin 1936, p. 58).

When it came to representing topologically the events that had taken place in theIowa study, Lewin resorted to the visual language he had used in the past to describe the‘life space’ of individuals – Jordan curves containing ‘the totality of facts’ psychologicallypresent to the group, and a series of displacements and trajectories towards or away froma given object or task. Lewin was clear that none of this should be understood as arepresentation of movement in a concrete territory: the ‘life space’ was not coterminouswith or commensurable to any physical locale of action. Even when Lewin or Lippittrepresented the ‘space of free movement’ in each of the ‘atmospheres’ (Figure 7), this wasunderstood in field-topological terms, as the degree of psychological accessibility ofdifferent ‘regions’ of the present situation.

Such a topological representation of the group necessarily excluded much of whathad transpired in the Iowa attic. In particular, those elements of a radically physical nature– the texture of materials, the dimensions of the ‘club-room’, the size and shape of theobjects with which the children engaged, the movements and displacements across theattic, the position of openings in the enclosure, in short, all the topographical features ofthis unique locale, were rendered invisible in Lewin’s topological depiction of theexperiment (cf. Burnes & Cooke 2013).

And yet, ‘group locomotion’ – to take one of Lewin’s core interests – took on a veryphysical, metric nature in the Iowa studies. The scenes in Lewin’s film allow arepresentation of the differential patterns of movement in each of the ‘atmospheres’(Figure 8). In the laissez-faire ‘social climate’ the leader is highly static, barely changing hisposition, while the children trace long trajectories of movement within the ‘club-room’ anddisperse themselves and their activities to the limits of the laboratory. In the democratic‘climate’, in contrast, children and ‘leaders’ exchange coordinates and trace precisetrajectories, occupying in the process a larger area at the center of the experimental space.In the authoritarian scenes the children make mostly short movements around a staticleader. These differences in the patterns of collective perambulation are striking. Noinstructions on the nature of the leaders’ movements can be found in the archivalmaterial, and yet it is evident that in each of the ‘atmospheres’ the groups adopted adistinct relationship to physical space. The superposition of the previous diagrams (Figure9) clearly identifies idiosyncratic patterns of occupation and differential uses of space ineach of the three ‘climates’.

There is an evidence that Lewin and Lippitt understood the active nature of thephysical setting, even if they chose to omit any traces of ‘physicalism’ in their accounts ofthe study. The changing location of some pieces of furniture, for instance, suggests aneffort to progressively refine the experimental space so as to perfect its atmosphericproductivity. There are also, particularly in the accounts and recollections of those whohad to spend considerable amounts of time within the enclosure (Ronald Lippitt, Ralph


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White, Daniel Adler and Boyd McCandless, the four researchers who played the role of‘leader’), signs of an affective engagement with the physicality of the experimental space.8

The visceral quality of this encounter is implied in the choice of the terms ‘atmosphere’and ‘climate’ to describe the phenomenology of group life inside the ‘club-rooms’. Neverfully theorized (and used interchangeably), both terms indicate an attempt to graspsomething that could be felt by the experimenters and witnessed by the observers, butwhich was not measurable in a straightforwardly statistical or mathematical way, asensorial reality rooted in a particular place and time.

The most definitive proof of Lewin’s sensitivity to the texture of physical space,however, is his own use of movement and position in the cinematographic representationof the experiment. In his movie, the camera adopts different angles in different‘atmospheres’. Lewin’s insistence, for instance, in capturing the democratic ‘leader’ as anaccepted member of the group explains the peculiar photography of the democratic

FIGURE 7Topological representation of changes in the ‘space of free movement’ in an authorit-arian ‘atmosphere’. The influence of the leader, in red, reshapes the original ‘life space’ ofthe group, limiting access to most regions (Lippitt, 1940a, p. 136).


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FIGURE 8Circulations of children and leader.


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FIGURE 9Material organization and flows.


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scenes: in them, the camera moves closer to the action, approaches the group, and levelsitself with the faces of ‘leader’ and children. In ‘laissez faire’ scenes, in contrast, the camerareplicates the aloofness of the actor-experimenter: statically positioned in a corner tobetter oversee the action, it refuses to engage with the unfolding disintegration of thegroup.9

Not long after the Iowa study was completed, Lewin and his collaborators began todiscard the language of ‘atmospheres’ and ‘climates’ in favor of a concept that wouldenjoy a long and distinguished career in the social sciences: ‘group dynamics’. In doing so,they de-emphasized the material encapsulation and visceral nature of experimentalpolitics in favor of a kinetic quality seemingly internal to the collective in question. Yet theuse of an atmospheric language to describe the phenomena experienced in the Iowa atticand the peculiar cinematography used for their depiction suggest that the researchers hadwitnessed and were trying to convey an incorporeal but tangible reality, a quality of socialbeing that was ethereal and volatile but at the same time acute in its affective power, andshaped by a very particular kind of physical containment.

6. Conclusion: A New Reality Principle for Democracy

In a recollection written in 1943 of his thoughts upon escaping Germany a decadeearlier, Lewin referred to ‘the peculiar mixture of desperate hope, curiosity and skepticismwith which the newly arrived refugee from Fascist Europe looks at the United States’(quoted in White & Lippitt 1960, p. viii). His was a world-weary outlook. ‘Democracy ’he says:

people are fighting for it, people are dying for it. It is the more precious possession wehave. Or is it but a word to fool the people? An invisible bird is sitting high up on the topof the flagpole. Everybody is pointing with his finger in that direction and everybody istalking about it. Well, maybe that is the only reason why you and I have finally gotten tobelieve in “it”. Are we really sure that it is more than ballyhoo, more than a word? Is therereally anything there? (quoted in White & Lippitt 1960, p. viii)

For Lewin, the question of democracy had reached an ontological level. ‘Is democracysomething “real”?’, he asked. ‘Is there anything behind democracy but a word? Is the birdon the flagpole alive? If it is not a perfect bird and not as much alive as it should be, is it atleast real?’ (quoted in White & Lippitt 1960). This Cartesian doubt about democracy’s realityreveals the fragility of the political imaginary of a generation that had just experiencedfirsthand the rise of Fascism. It also points to the central role that, for Lewin, the socialsciences had to play in firming up the increasingly frail abstraction of a democratic polity:

If Science is going to help to establish the reality of democracy for the young American itcannot be a science dealing with words. It will have to be a science dealing with facts;with facts of a very tangible nature; with facts close to the everyday of the individualperson; with facts that matter (quoted in White & Lippitt 1960, p. ix)

Nothing less than establishing the reality of democracy, that is, founding a new realityprinciple for democracy, was at stake in the Iowa experiments. Lewin’s solution, we haveseen, relied on a radical transformation of the spatial and temporal scales of politicalexperience. The localized gathering of a small number of individuals, subjected to theright sort of ‘leadership’, provided the most tangible incarnation of democratic life.


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The question of democracy’s reality was transposed to the scale of miniature publicsliving in the always-ongoing moment of laboratory time – what Tolman described asLewin’s exclusive interest in the ‘manipulable present’ (1948, p. 23). Democracy becameequated with the first-hand experience of harmonious living in encounters moderated byexperts. The production of the right political affects – for that is what was meant by‘atmosphere’ or ‘social climate’ – was the result of modulating the intensity of relations inface-to-face groups caught up in an experimentally generated ‘total situation’ (Lewin1946b).

This shift in the parameters of political experience enabled ‘the creation of“miniature political systems” in the laboratory’ (Cartwright & Zander 1968, p. 18). It alsoendowed the social sciences with a new and momentous power. If relevant political formscould be generated and manipulated under experimental conditions, social scientists werein a position to bring crucial problems of the age into their laboratories. There they couldcarry out a ‘constructive attack’ on the question of democracy’s worth (Lippitt 1939, p. 30),a phrase that captures nicely this new and unashamedly constructionist approach to thehandling of political realities (cf. Lezaun et al. 2013).

In this respect, the Iowa experiment stands as the locus classicus of two powerfultraditions of social-scientific practice – traditions that despite their shared origin in Lewin’swork would soon begin to trace divergent trajectories. One tradition, best representedamong Lewin’s students in Iowa by Leon Festinger, saw in the experimental attic arevolutionary but still imperfect sort of laboratory, a messy locale where the legibility offunctional relations was compromised by permeable boundaries and a somewhatimprovisatory research design. This tradition would focus on the material conditions ofthe laboratory space, but instead of developing the adaptable and makeshift aspects ofthe Iowa attic chose to tighten up the conditions of experimental control. The spaceroughly prototyped in the Iowa attic would evolve into the sort of aseptic ‘white room’characteristic of academic social–psychological experimentation in the 1950s and 1960s –a locale seemingly devoid of any stimuli other than those under the direct control of theexperimenters, and thus adequate to the production of ‘placeless’ evidence (cf.Guggenheim 2012). Full laboratorization was the most direct path, this traditioncontended, to the scientific respectability and academic credibility of the discipline.

But an alternative interpretation of the Iowa study presented itself immediately afterits completion. In this view, what the experiment had produced was fundamentally a setof techniques for democratic facilitation, techniques that could and should be deployed ina variety of contexts, often without the support of a physical laboratory infrastructure. Thiswas the focus of Lewin’s and Lippitt’s own work in the 1940s. During and immediatelyafter the war they used the insights gained in the Iowa study to design newmethodologies of intervention – ‘action research’ was the term coined to describe thisparticular mode of sociological interrogation – that could be employed ‘in the solution ofsocial problems where tensions in human relations are involved’ (Lippitt 1949, p. xiii). Inthis tradition, the laboratory was still part of the repertoire of social-scientific work, butprimarily as a minimal set-up where instruments and formats of group management couldbe deployed under conditions of technical rigor. ‘The “laboratory in the social order”’,wrote Lippitt (1940a, p. 1920), ‘should replace the “laboratory and the social order” type ofpsychological investigation’.

In this interpretation, political ‘atmospheres’ were site-specific, but not limited to anysingle sort of locale or tied to a fixed experimental apparatus. What the Iowa attic had


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provided was a medium for the radical stylization of a series of directive dispositions,dispositions that could be carried by the ‘leader’ into multiple and diverse contexts wherethey would serve to trigger small-scale version of democratic order and all its attendantqualities – deliberation, affective involvement, cooperative work, increasing levels of‘group belongingness’, etc. This tradition would find professional niches outside academia,in management training, psychotherapeutic communities, and government-sponsoredsocial work. Its practitioners belong to that tradition of ‘engineers of atmospheres andarchitects of interiors’ that Peter Sloterdijk has placed at the center of the politicalontology of the twentieth century (Sloterdijk 2004, p. 66). The task of these engineers wasto make explicit the conditions for a contained experience of democracy, and bring intobeing, through their art, a realization of the power of ‘harmonious and productive living’(Lippitt 1949, p. ix).10

The Iowa experiment displayed, in an unresolved manner, the tensions andintersections of these two traditions of social-scientific practice (cf. Graumann 1986).Many of the elements that made the attic an unusually productive space, such as thepermeability of its boundaries or the malleability of its equipment, were neglected in thescientific record of the experiment in favor of an exclusive emphasis on the role of the‘leader’. This selective interpretation helped Lewin and Lippitt zero in on the figure of theexpert social scientist as instigator of new political situations, and thereby standardize atechnical practice of self-affectation in the service of democratic management. Yet theexperimenters’ ability to provoke and register changes in the political valence of groupsalso depended on a very particular arrangement of the physical setting and its materialfurniture, even if what this design enabled was a certain kind of indeterminacy.

This indeterminacy refers back to the proto-typical nature of the Iowa experiment, inthe sense of the concept elaborated in this collection. Conceived as a mechanism forgenerating and then holding in suspension pure political forms, it achieved this goal bycrafting a material environment conducive to the proliferation of staged but under-determined events. Procedurally open and – as our own analysis proves – virtuallyinexhaustible in its power to allow new and alternative readings, the Iowa study served toproduce a series of political facts ‘not yet at our disposal’ (cf. Rheinberger 1997). Inparticular, it enabled a radical shift in the scale, content and duration of democraticexperience, transposing the question of its reality to the affective state of small groupscaught up in experimental situations.

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.


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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’ (1992, 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 1997). 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 (2011, 2013).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 1940b, 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 (1988), pp. 31–32;

White (1990), 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 1974, 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


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amphetamines: ‘I do remember moving into the attic with a camp bed and finishing thedissertation in ten days in the Spring of 1940 with the help of benzedrine’ (quoted inBradford 1974, 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 iscommon to many of its artificially generated groupings, see Cooke (2009).

9. That Lewin was interested in developing effective cinematographic techniques for thedepiction of psychological states and social phenomena is evident from his correspond-ence with Sergej Eisenstein and Alexander Luria in the 1920s and 1930s (see Bulgakowa1997, p. 124ff.; See also Kurt Lewin papers (Box M2931) in the Archives of the History ofAmerican Psychology, The University of Akron).

10. Sloterdijk’s notion of the state of suspension, a place-period of residence (Aufenthalt), askey to the political architecture of modernity, captures well the ambiguity of temporaland spatial elements central to the notion of ‘atmosphere’ (Sloterdijk 2004, p. 501ff). Toour 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’sexperiments in Latour’s and Weibel’s well-known exhibition/catalogue Making ThingsPublic: The Atmospheres of Democracy.

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Javier Lezaun. (author to whom correspondence should be addressed). Institute forScience, Innovation and Society, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK. Email: [email protected]

Nerea Calvillo. Sociology Department, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross,London, SE14 6NW, UK. [email protected]


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mailto:[email protected]



Lezaun& Calvillo. In the Political Laboratory: Kurt Lewin's Atmospheres

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