Sensitivity training

Sensitivity training
Intervention
MeSH	D012681
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Sensitivity training is a form of training with the goal of making people more aware of their own prejudices and more sensitive to others.

According to his biographer, Alfred J. Marrow, Kurt Lewin laid the foundations for sensitivity training in a series of workshops he organised in 1946 to carry out a 'change' experiment, in response to a request from the Director of the Connecticut State Interracial Commission. This led to the founding of the National Training Laboratories in Bethel, Maine in 1947. Kurt Lewin, who met Eric Trist in 1933, influenced the work of the London, England, United Kingdom , both in its work with soldiers during the second world war and in its later work with the journal Human Relations jointly founded by a partnership of the and Lewin's group at MIT.

During World War II, psychologists like Carl Rogers in the US and William Sargant, John Rawlings Rees, and Eric Trist in Britain were used by the military to help soldiers deal with traumatic stress disorders (then known as shell shock). This work, which required service to large numbers of patients by a small number of therapists and necessarily emphasized rapidity and effectiveness helped spur the development of group therapy as a treatment technique. Rogers and others evolved their work into new forms including encounter groups designed for persons who were not diagnosably ill but who were recognized to have widespread problems associated with isolation from others common in American society. Other leaders in the development of encounter groups, including Will Schutz, worked at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.

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