Some of the issues that I discuss here have been considered in earlier Lewin Memorial Lectures, notably by Fritz Heider in 1959 and by Roger Barker in 1963. I mention this not to gain reflected glory from those giants of our field, but simply to note one of the purposes served by these lectures-to pursue some of the deep theoretical questions that Lewin raised during his too-short life. The purpose of this paper is to trace several lines of thought from Lewin to the theoretical work of Thibaut and Kelley. The specific issues I will focus on are still important today, so perhaps this semihistorical review will serve useful purposes in relation to current research. My comments will also show some of the many ways in which the ideas that Kurt Lewin advanced 50 or 60 years ago continue to have great relevance for social psychological theory. This paper is a memorial to Kurt Lewin. And it is also in honor of the late John Thibaut. We were students at MIT during Lewin’s last year (1946-1947), and we learned much from him and from the excellent young faculty he had assembled there. John, along with Ben Willerman, worked particularly closely with Lewin (on a study of a sewing factory in Boston). As Lewin’s research assistant, one of John’s duties (and honors) was to accompany him on walks along the Charles River. During these walks, Lewin would talk about his current theoretical preoccupations, e.g., quasistationary equilibria, and afterward John would prepare notes of the conversations. Had Lewin lived, Thibaut would have done his dissertation research under his direction. In later years, John took his Lewinian roots more seriously (and probably with more understanding) than I. That is a way of saying that much of what is valuable and derivative from Lewin in the Thibaut and Kelley ideas should be credited primarily to John. I might also add here that while, phenotypically, our theoretical work drifted
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