Kurt Lewin's Individual Change Process

1Lectures or group decisions?

During the Second World War, meat was scarce in the United States, and the government wanted families to eat cheap, nutritious but unpopular cuts such as beef hearts and kidneys. The psychologist Kurt Lewin, a refugee from Nazi Germany, compared two methods with groups of women volunteers. Some groups heard an attractive lecture on the meats' value, with recipes. Other groups were given the same information but then discussed it themselves and decided, by a show of hands, whether they would try the meats.

When the women were followed up, about 3% of those who had heard a lecture had served one of the meats, against about 32% of those who had taken part in a group decision (Lewin, 1947). Information alone had not changed habits; a group process had. From such studies Lewin developed a model of how change happens.

21. Three steps: unfreeze, change, refreeze

1. Unfreezing. The current equilibrium must be disturbed. People need a reason to change: evidence that the present way is not working, a felt dissatisfaction, and enough psychological safety to admit it. In the food study, the group discussion did this better than the lecture, because women heard their peers raising and answering their own doubts.
2. Changing (moving). The person tries the new behaviour, with information, practice, examples and support.
3. Refreezing. The new behaviour is stabilised so that it does not slip back: it becomes a habit, is rewarded, and is supported by the norms of the person's group. A public decision taken in a group is easier to keep than a private intention, because the group now expects it.

32. Force-field analysis

For Lewin, any stable behaviour is held in place by opposing forces. Change happens when the balance shifts. Figure 1 applies this to one student.

Lewin argued that it is often better to weaken the restraining forces (switch off the phone during study hours, plan revision around chores) than simply to push harder with driving forces (more warnings about exams), because extra pressure without removing resistance raises tension and makes relapse more likely.

43. Change at a larger scale

The same logic applies to whole communities. When Rwanda banned polythene bags in 2008 (Law N° 57 of 2008, replaced in 2019 by a wider ban on single-use plastics), shoppers and traders had to give up a convenient habit (unfreezing, helped by the law and by public campaigns on the damage plastic did to soil and drains), switch to paper and cloth bags (changing), and then make the new habit normal, supported by enforcement and by a shared sense of pride in clean cities (refreezing).

54. Evaluating Lewin's model

• Strengths. It is simple; it explains why information alone rarely changes behaviour; force-field analysis is a practical planning tool; and it puts groups at the centre of individual change, which the food studies supported.
• Is it really Lewin's? Stephen Cummings, Todd Bridgman and Kenneth Brown (2016) showed that Lewin mentioned the three steps only briefly, in an article published just after his death. The neat "unfreeze-change-refreeze" model was largely built by later management writers, so we should not credit Lewin with every claim made in his name.
• Too static. "Refreezing" suits a stable world; organisations and lives now change continuously, so critics prefer models of ongoing adaptation.
• Too simple and top-down. It says little about power, politics or the emotions of change, and treats change as something done to people. Edgar Schein later added the importance of psychological safety and of the anxiety that learning something new can cause.
• The food studies were small, used volunteers and measured behaviour by self-report, so the exact percentages should be treated with caution.