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.
[7] 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".
"[11][12] Psychologist Dennis Coon's textbook, Psychology: A Journey, defines the LGAT as referring to programs claiming "to increase self-awareness and facilitate constructive personal change".
[15] 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'".
[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[update] were modeled after the Leadership Dynamics Institute.
This academic article describes and analyzes large group awareness training as influenced by the work of humanistic psychologists such as Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow and Rollo May.
It notes minor changes on psychological tests after the training and mentions anecdotal reports of psychiatric casualties among est trainees.
[22] In 1989 researchers from the University of Connecticut received the "National Consultants to Management Award" from the American Psychological Association for their study: Evaluating a Large Group Awareness Training.
Lieberman's 1987 study,[4] funded partially by Lifespring, noted that 5 out of a sample of 289 participants experienced "stress reactions" including one "transitory psychotic episode".
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.
[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.
[33] 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".