Large Group Awareness Training

Large Group Awareness Training or LGAT offers a mechanism for promoting awareness-change and rapid, thorough commitment to a cause or idea. LGAT sessions tend to provide brief but intense experiences of a few hours or days in which, ideally, participants adopt the message of the 'training' promptly and enthusiastically. Compare to the concept of emotional contagion.

Evaluations of LGATs
Critics see the classic LGAT as utilizing peer pressure and group dynamics in a high-pressure sales environment that promotes uncritical psychobabbling togetherness and thus markets nebulous memes; and as fostering a propensity to recruit new participants into a participation-oriented pyramid scheme under the guise of providing useful training.

Others see LGAT as a group mind methodology that trainers can use to accelerate imparting specific skills. For example, people typically teach the skill of improvisational comedy via group-awareness training.

Professional researchers have not always viewed LGAT favorably. Cushman (1989), for example, found that the program he studied "consists of a pre-meditated attack on the self". Haaken and Adams (1983) found in their study that "although particpants often experience a heightened sense of well-being as a consequence of the training, the phenomenon is essentially pathological", meaning that "the training systematically undermines ego functioning and promotes regression to the extent that reality testing is significantly impaired" in the program they studied. Leiberman's 1987 study, funded partially by Lifespring, noted that 5 out of a sample of 289 participants experienced "stress reactions" including one "transitory psychotic episode". He commented: "Whether [these five] would have experienced such stress under other conditions cannot be answered. The clinical evidence, however, is that the reactions were directly attributable to the large group awareness training."

Explaining LGATs
Historically, LGAT origins trace back, at least in part, to the encounter group movement of the 1960s. They reached their peak popularity during the 1980s. According to Daniel Yankelovich, a prominent pollster of the 1980s, close to 13% of the U.S. population fell into the category of "intense seekers" who spent much of their time "assessing and reassessing their personal lives, their jobs, their friends, their mates from the perspective of the needs and wants of the self. They tend to be under thirty-five, unmarried, college-educated, white-collar professionals.  They are the ones most preoccupied with finding  spiritual, mental, and physical wholeness through diet, exercise, meditation, psychotherapy, or whatever  — many of them prime candidates for such quasi-spiritual activities as primal therapy sessions and est. Given the intensity of their quests, many have stumbled into what Yankelovich calls the "fulfillment trap" — wanting more than they can have and putting self ahead of social relationships" (Roof and McKinney 1987:47).

Margaret Singer, the psychologist sometimes described as an " anti-cult activist", popularised the term LGAT. She describes her interpretation of the methodology of a fictional "generic" LGAT in her book Cults in our Midst (1995).

Examples of alleged LGATs
Supporters of all the groups listed below generally dispute the validity of the classification of their group as an "LGAT" for several reasons:
 * They resent the association of their group with some or all of the other movements, and feel that this fails to do justice to the variations in structure, methodology and philosophy that differentiate them.
 * They dispute that the description in Singer's book accurately describes their own procedures (even if it may or may not reflect the practices of some of the other organisations).
 * They reject the (implied or explicit) suggestion that classification as an LGAT brands their group as a cult, or as in some (specified or unspecified) way "cult-like".

Alleged LGATs include:


 * Context Associates
 * est/Landmark Education
 * Exegesis
 * Garden Company
 * Insight
 * Impact Trainings
 * Klemmer & Associates
 * Lifespring
 * Mankind_Project
 * Momentus
 * Promise Keepers
 * Training Phoenix 2000
 * PSI World
 * Silva Method
 * Sterling Institute of Relationships
 * Whole Mind Learning (WML)
 * WorldWorks
 * Life Training / Kairos Foundation
 * Resource Realization/ WWASP
 * Cannon Training | The Great American Business Owner|