The Social Animal

I finished up chapter eight.

Chapter eight dealt with sensitivity-training groups, or as he calls them, "T-groups". I thought it was a fitting topic to discuss since he just discussed prejudice and attraction. The T-groups is one of his solutions to reducing prejudice and increasing attraction, or at least toleration.

A T-group is a period of time, a weekend or longer, where a person is in a room or area with people for up to 9 hours a day. The idea of the T-group is to get people to interact openly with each other. The goal of the T-group is to gain an understand of your own feelings, consequences and effects of your actions on others' feelings, and to gain an overall more sensitive and understanding attitude about yourself and others. The T-group leader must be an experienced leader to truly be effective. The leader has to know when to intervene with interactions between members and when to observe. The leader isn't supposed to be a psychiatrist, but more of a member of the group.

The whole chapter talks about how to talk openly to avoid misinterpretations of feelings and judgements. He explains how many times people express their judgements about a person to them without properly explaining how they came to that conclusion about the person (feelings). This results in defensive behavior or hurt feelings from the attackee. So communicating properly can allow people to learn more about others. He also stresses the fact that speaking openly is easier in a T-group because that is the norm in that environment. Everyone is encouraged to speak openly to others in the group. So in the real world, telling everyone how your feeling won't always be welcomed. It will often be made fun of and ridiculed. The real world benefits of T-groups is the understanding people receive about how their actions make others feel.



TOTAL READING TIME: 11 hr. 30 min.

Page: 270