Hawkins stretched his legs out restfully on the grass in front of him. As he thought about it, there had been few times in the past when he had given the psychologist his head and let the man talk. Probably, Hawkins thought to himself, Broussard spends most of his time listening to the petty confessions of all of us and never gets the opportunity to unload a bit himself. He caught himself wondering just who on Earth confesses the Pope....
And so he uttered the magical words, "I don't think I quite understand...."
Broussard scarcely needed the encouragement to continue. "Lewin liked to think of psychological situations as approximating physical situations. He spoke in terms of valences and attractions, of vectors and forces operating through psychological distances. For example, let's consider the case of a child put into a long hallway. At one end of the hall is a large, fierce dog. At the other end is an ugly man with a big switch. We tell the child that he has to go to one end of the hall or the other. This becomes an 'avoidance-avoidance' situation in the Lewinian terminology. Both the man with the switch and the fierce dog carry negative valences—that means that the child actually doesn't want to approach either of them—and the closer the child comes to one of them, the more powerfully it repels him. Just as with magnets—the closer you bring one negative charge to another negative charge, the more powerful is the force of repulsion."
Captain Hawkins smiled. It wasn't going to be as bad as he had feared. "What does all this have to do with baseball?"
"We'll get back to home plate in just a moment. But first, let's continue with the child. We put him in the hallway, tell him to go to one end or the other, and then we just sit back and watch. At first he stands about as close to the center of the hall as he can, assuming that the two negative valences are about of equal strength. He's undecided—can't make up his mind which is worse, the man or the dog. So we prompt him to action—shock him or tell him that he has to keep moving. Then he begins to move back and forth, vacillating between the two undesirable objects. So we apply more and more pressure to try to force him to a decision. But the closer he moves to the dog, for example, the more distasteful it becomes, and the less dangerous does the man seem to be. So the child turns around and starts towards the man. But here the situation is repeated. It's a beautiful example of a conflict situation."
Giving vent to a well-disciplined snort, Captain Hawkins said, "And eventually the child either gets well switched or badly bitten, eh?"
"No, that's where you're wrong. Eventually the child tries to escape from the hallway altogether. Sometimes he'll try to climb the walls, or break down a door, or anything like that which will release him from what has become an impossible psychological environment."
"So," said Hawkins. "I think you left me stranded on first base."
Broussard laughed. "Pardon the sermon, Captain. What I was trying to point out was that the baseball game represented just about the same sort of thing to you as the hallway did to the child. Any time a human being is faced with two impossible decisions like that, he usually ends up by 'leaving the field' of conflict altogether. Nowadays we can even predict the exact field forces necessary to bring on this type of behavior."
"And what do you predict I'm going to do right now?" Hawkins asked with a bit of a laugh in his voice.