Kurt Lewin address: influence, power, religion, and the mechanisms of social control

I am indeed honored and privileged to have been selected for the Kurt Lewin Memorial Award. In fact, I cannot imagine an honor that would be more important and significant to me. Kurt Lewin, whom I was never privileged to have met, has had a tremendous influence on my life, on my choice of a field of study and research, and my subsequent scholarly activities, an influence that continues to this very day.

As an undergraduate psychology major at Ohio State University, fresh out of World War II military service, I became interested in social psychology as a field that would have relevance to the many exciting changes that were occurring in our society and throughout the world. A course in social psychology with Donald Campbell solidified my interests and enthusiasm for that field. But especially important were my informal readings of early issues of The Journal of Social Issues and Human Relations. From Campbell and from these readings, in turn, I discovered Kurt Lewin. Especially influential was his book, Resolving Social Conflict, which included several articles that hit on issues of critical importance to me, especially questions of social identity and marginality. For me, as a child of Russian-Jewish immigrants, his articles on psychosocial problems of minority groups and self-hatred among Jews were especially relevant. And when I had read the Lewin, Lippitt, and White (1939) experiments on democratic and autocratic leadership and the group decision studies, I knew that this was to be my direction. 1 then continued my studies in the social psychology program at the University of Michigan, and at the Research Center for Group Dynamics, where I worked particularly closely first with Leon Festinger and John R. P. French. It was, of course, my contact with Jack French that led to our development of our analyses of the bases of social power (French & Raven, 1959; Raven, 1965).

In 1992, as one of three presentations in honor of Jack French's receiving the Kurt Lewin Memorial Award, I discussed a Power/Interaction Model of Interpersonal Influence, an extension of the original French and Raven bases of power analysis (Raven, 1992, 1993). In this presentation, I shall review this model briefly, for those who might not be familiar with it, show how the model might be applied to social control, and then more specifically focus on religions as mechanisms of social control. As in our previous articles, I will define social power as potential influence, the ability of a person or group to induce or prevent change in another. Social control I will define as the process by which members of a social entity are influenced to adhere to values and principles of proper behavior deemed appropriate for that social entity. This is essentially a definition that had been used by many sociologists in the past (Janowitz, 1975). Parents control their children in the interests of the family, universities exercise control over professors and students, government exercises control over citizens, and religions control their adherents. . . . Society's need for social control was stated most dramatically by Hobbes (1651/1958), who observed that in the "natural" state (without social control), as each person attempted to satisfy his/her individual needs and desires at the expense of others, humankind would be in a war of all against all, such that life would be "nasty, brutish, and short." As we can see then, the concepts of social power and social control are closely interrelated, since the process of social control involves the exercise of the bases and resources of power. But both terms also have their negative and even threatening connotations. All of us, or at least most of us, like to think that we are independent agents, and being subjected to social power restricts that sense of independence. The thought of being "socially controlled" also brings forth strong negative feelings. Yet, when we consider it more carefully, power and influence are part of our everyday interaction and contribute to individual and collective benefit. Similarly for social control.

In his 1975 presidential address to the American Psychological Association, Donald Campbell (1975) presented as his major thesis that psychology and psychiatry are more hostile to the inhibitory messages of traditional religious moralizing than is scientifically justified. Indeed, religion generally has a bad name in many intellectual circles, and not without cause. We think of the numbers of people who have been killed in religious wars, the numbers who have been tortured for their religion in the Inquisition, in Salem witch hunts, or hunted down by crusaders. . . . We see some religions as inhibiting science, medical innovation, and social progress. Yet, Campbell makes a case, through his analysis of social evolution, for the adaptive quality of optimal social coordination in limiting "selfishness, pride, greed, dishonesty, covetousness, cowardice, wrath" (p. 1104). He notes that biological evolution would tend to select for characteristics that help assure biological survival; essentially it would select for tendencies to satisfy selfish interests, for oneself and one's genetic line, without concern for others. Social evolution would counter such selfish tendencies, selecting for personal restraint, sympathy, concern for others, and altruism. How many lives were saved when people, motivated by revenge or desire for personal gain, were restrained by religious belief from injuring or killing their neighbors?