What makes a circle safe, and what goes wrong when it isn’t?
A Study of Encounter Group Casualties
Adjacent
Of 170 students who finished a 30-hour encounter group, 16 were left with lasting harm. Harm clustered under forceful, charismatic leaders who pressed individuals hard instead of working with the group.
Stanford undergraduates signed up for a course and were assigned to one of 18 groups. Each followed one of ten approaches, among them T-groups, Gestalt, psychodrama, transactional analysis and Synanon; one approach replaced the leader with tape-recorded instructions. The researchers counted a casualty when a student came away seriously and lastingly worse off because of the group. The full study appeared as Encounter Groups: First Facts (Lieberman, Yalom & Miles, 1973).
Two findings matter for Circling. The label a leader worked under said little about how they led: Yalom later noted that the two Gestalt leaders were no more alike in practice than any other pair. And the leaders were poor judges of who had been hurt; the other members judged it best.
What it doesn’t show
1960s groups with charismatic leaders, not Circling. A critic argued that the comparison with students outside the groups used a different measure, so how much extra risk the groups carried is disputed. Lieberman, Yalom and Miles (1972) report the same study’s wider outcomes. The students had asked for an encounter-group experience.
Summary based on the abstract and on Yalom’s later account of the study.
Directions that build on it
- Safety, facilitation and harm
Links
Cite
Yalom, I. D., & Lieberman, M. A. (1971). A Study of Encounter Group Casualties. Archives of General Psychiatry, 25(1), 16–30. https://doi.org/10.1001/archpsyc.1971.01750130018002