Large-group awareness training
The term large-group awareness training (LGAT) refers to activities - usually offered by groups with links to the human potential movement - which claim to increase self-awareness and to bring about desirable transformations in individuals' personal lives.[1] LGATs are unconventional; they often take place over several days,[2][3] and may compromise participants' mental wellbeing.[4][5]
LGAT programs may involve several hundred people at a time.[6]
Though early definitions cited LGATs as featuring unusually long durations, more recent texts describe trainings lasting from a few hours to a few days.
Forsyth and Corazzini cite Lieberman (1994) as suggesting "that at least 1.3 million Americans have taken part in LGAT sessions".[7]
Definitions of LGAT[edit]
In 2005 Rubinstein compared large-group awareness training to certain principles of cognitive therapy, such as the idea that people can change their lives by reinterpreting the way they view external circumstances.[8]
In the 1997 collection of essays Consumer Research: Postcards from the edge, discussing behavioral and economic studies, the authors contrast the "enclosed locations" used in Large Group Awareness Trainings with the relatively open environment of a "variety store".[9][10]
The Handbook of Group Psychotherapy (1994) characterised Large Group Awareness Training as focusing on "philosophical, psychological and ethical issues" relating "to personal effectiveness, decision-making, personal responsibility, and commitment."[11][12]
Psychologist Dennis Coon's textbook, Psychology: A Journey, defines the term "Large-group awareness training" as referring to programs claiming "to increase self-awareness and facilitate constructive personal change".[13] Coon further defines Large Group Awareness Training in his book Introduction to Psychology.[14] Coon and Mitterer emphasize the commercial nature of several LGAT organizations.[15]
The evolution of LGAT providers[edit]
Lou Kilzer, writing in The Rocky Mountain News, identified Leadership Dynamics (in operation 1967–1973) as "the first of the genre psychologists call 'large group awareness training'".[16]
Leadership Dynamics directly or indirectly influenced several permutations of large-group transformation trainings. Werner Erhard (successively associated with Erhard Seminars Training (est or EST), WE&A and Landmark Education) trained as an instructor with Mind Dynamics.[17]
Michael Langone notes that Erhard Seminars Training (est) became in the popular mind the archetype for LGATs.[18]
While working for Holiday Magic, Lifespring founder John Hanley attended a course at Leadership Dynamics.[19]
Chris Mathe, at the time a PhD candidate in clinical psychology, wrote that most of the current commercial forms of Large Group Awareness Training as of 1999 were modeled after the Leadership Dynamics Institute.[20]
Specific techniques used in some Large Group Awareness Trainings may include:
LGATs utilize such techniques during long sessions, sometimes called "marathon" sessions. Paglia describes "EST's Large Group Awareness Training": "Marathon, eight-hour sessions, in which [participants] were confined and harassed, supposedly led to the breakdown of conventional ego, after which they were in effect born again."[32]
Finkelstein's 1982 article provides a detailed description of the structure and techniques of an Erhard Seminars Training event - techniques similar to those used in some group therapy and encounter groups.[22] The academic textbook, Handbook of Group Psychotherapy regards Large Group Awareness Training organisations as "less open to leader differences", because they follow a "detailed written plan" that does not vary from one training to the next.[12]
In his book Life 102, LGAT participant and former trainer Peter McWilliams describes the basic technique of marathon trainings as pressure/release and asserts that advertising uses pressure/release "all the time", as do "good cop/bad cop" police-interrogations and revival meetings. By spending approximately half the time making a person feel bad and then suddenly reversing the feeling through effusive praise, the programs cause participants to experience a stress-reaction and an "endorphin high". McWilliams gives examples of various LGAT activities called processes with names such as "love bomb," "lifeboat", "cocktail party" and "cradling", which take place over many hours and days, physically exhausting the participants to make them more susceptible to the trainer's message, whether in the participants' best interests or not.[33]
Although extremely critical of some LGATs, McWilliams found positive value in others, asserting that they varied not in technique but in the application of technique.[33]
LGATs and the anti-cult movement[edit]
After commissioning a report in 1983 by the APA Task Force on Deceptive and Indirect Methods of Persuasion and Control (DIMPAC) chaired by anti-cult psychologist Margaret Singer, the American Psychological Association (APA) subsequently rejected[34] and strongly criticised [35] the 1986 DIMPAC report, which included large group awareness trainings as one example of what it called "coercive persuasion". In 1997 the APA characterized Singer's hypotheses as "uninformed speculations based on skewed data".[35] It stated in 1987 that the report generally lacked "the scientific rigor and evenhanded critical approach necessary for APA imprimatur."[34] The APA also stated that "the specific methods by which Drs. Singer and Benson have arrived at their conclusions have also been rejected by all serious scholars in the field."[35]
Singer sued the APA, and lost on June 17, 1994.[36]
Despite the APA rejection of her task-force's report, Singer remained in good standing among psychology researchers.[37] Singer reworked much of the DIMPAC report material into the book Cults in Our Midst (1995, second edition: 2003), which she co-authored with Janja Lalich.
Singer and Lalich state that "large group awareness trainings" tend to last at least four days and usually five.[38]
Their book mentions Erhard Seminars Training ("est") and similar undertakings, such as the Landmark Forum, Lifespring, Actualizations, MSIA/Insight and PSI Seminars.
In Cults in our Midst, Singer differentiated between the usage of the terms cult and Large Group Awareness Training,[39][40] while pointing out some commonalities.[41][42]
Elsewhere she groups the two phenomena together, in that they both use a shared set of thought-reform techniques.[43][44]