Psychiatric Perspectives on T-Groups and the Laboratory Movement: An Overview

The laboratory movement arose in the 1930s as an effort to develop educational action programs that could teach citizens to function more effectively and democratically in a variety of group settings. It has developed in many divergent directions, some of them bearing little or no relationship to the original goals. The instruments developed in the laboratory movement offer powerful potential for effecting human change, as these authors point out. They warn, however, that deficits of training, critical evaluation, or precision of goals among those involved in the use of such instruments may lead to destructive rather than beneficial results.