About

Circling Science maps the research and philosophy around Circling and Authentic Relating. It exists to help the practice be taken seriously by mainstream science, which means being exact about what is known and plain about what isn’t.

The practice

Circling is a group practice that some of its teachers call relational meditation. Participants attend to their moment-to-moment experience of one another and say what they notice, with the connection itself as the object of attention. It was developed by Guy Sengstock and Jerry Candelaria in San Francisco in the late 1990s and is now taught by several schools; the name is a trademark managed by the International Circling Federation. Authentic Relating is a wider family of exercises and games that shares principles with Circling, such as owning your experience.

The map

Every paper and book sits on one of four rings, by how directly it concerns the practice:

The practice: work that studies Circling or Authentic Relating itself.
Applied: work that uses or discusses the practice in another field.
Adjacent: work on a related practice or mechanism, without testing Circling.
Background: earlier work that helps think about the practice, without being about it.

Science fills the left half of the map and philosophy the right. Within each ring, time runs upwards: the oldest work sits lowest.

What gets in

Peer-reviewed articles, theses, conference papers and books that discuss Circling or Authentic Relating, and the closest evidence and philosophy around them. Each entry says what kind of work it is, what it found and what it doesn’t show. Where only an abstract has been read, the entry says so. Evidence is described, not scored.

Citations are checked against Crossref. Grants carry the date their details were last checked.

Who keeps it

Curated by Michał Gacka.

Cautions

Some works carry cautions: specific, checkable reasons to read them with care, such as a small sample, outcomes that rest only on the participants’ own ratings, a review screened by one person, or a publisher with weak peer review. A caution doesn’t mean a work is wrong, and plenty of good studies carry one or two. Each work’s page says what lies behind its cautions. They come from a fixed list, so the same weakness has the same name everywhere. The list follows, with when each caution applies.

How the study was done

Small sample: Fewer than 30 people in a condition, counting each person once when everyone takes part in every condition, or fewer than 10 groups behind a claim about groups.
6 works carry it
Self-report only: Every outcome is the participants’ own rating; nothing was observed, recorded or measured by anyone else.
15 works carry it
No later follow-up: Outcomes were measured only during the practice or right after it, so we can’t tell whether anything lasted.
10 works carry it
Self-selected participants: Participants came from people already drawn to the practice, through its own courses, retreats or groups, so the results may not hold for anyone else.
9 works carry it
One person screened: A review whose studies were chosen or read by a single person, with no second reviewer to catch mistakes.
1 work carries it
No quality appraisal: A review with no structured appraisal of how trustworthy its studies are, such as a checklist or risk-of-bias ratings.
1 work carries it
Contested idea: The work rests on a theory or a measure whose validity is widely disputed; the limits name it.
0 works carry it

Who made it and where it appeared

Same study as another entry: It reports data from a study already in the catalogue, so it isn’t an independent replication.
4 works carry it
Studied by its developers: An author created or teaches the practice, programme or measure being evaluated. Studies run by developers tend to find larger effects (Munder et al., 2013).
7 works carry it
Commercial interest: An author sells the practice being studied, or is paid or funded by an organisation that does.
3 works carry it
Questionable publisher: The publisher is described by independent sources as predatory or as having weak peer review. The work itself may still be sound.
1 work carries it
Correction published: The publisher has issued a correction or an expression of concern; the limits say what it changes.
0 works carry it
Retracted: The publisher has withdrawn the work.
0 works carry it