Sensitivity training

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 Tavistock Clinic, 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 Tavistock Institute and Lewin's group at MIT.