Articles

The Legacy of Carl Rogers at WBSI
by Richard Farson

Arguably the most important social scientist ever to live and work in San Diego was Carl Rogers, widely considered to be America’s most influential psychologist. Those of us who became the staff of La Jolla’s Western Behavioral Sciences Institute (WBSI) are forever indebted to his instrumental role in creating, and then joining, the institute.

It all began in 1958. Caltech physicist and philanthropist Paul Lloyd, whose financial support and wise leadership eventually initiated and sustained WBSI for twenty years, had that year become interested in knowing more about Rogers’ work. To further his understanding he joined a workshop that my colleague Thomas Gordon (of parent and leadership effectiveness training fame) and I had organized, featuring Rogers. The chemistry was just right, and later when I approached Paul with a proposal for an institute that could build upon Rogers’ work, he signed on, and WBSI was born.

Rogers was the first person to undertake research into the process of psychotherapy, and in that work he demonstrated that, given the right conditions, individuals were capable of intelligent self-direction. Since therapy at the time was either highly directive or psychoanalytic, this was a radical development indeed.

Rogers’ ideas were so powerful and universally applicable that they found their way into disciplines well beyond psychotherapy—into education, religion and business. Indeed, his broad influence helped foment the revolution in political participation that characterized the latter half of the 20^th century. He became a member of the first Board of Trustees of WBSI, and a few years later left academia to join the full-time staff as a Resident Fellow.

Given the right conditions, people can be trusted. This fascinating and challenging idea became the hallmark of the institute’s work.. The task was not to follow the conventional approach, working directly on individuals to improve them, but to improve the situations that determine their lives. For nearly half a century, from its first research grant to study the leadership of small groups to its current program in policy dialogue, WBSI has explored that philosophy.

Through the years this philosophy has been tested in many ways. In that very first research program, an impressive finding emerged supporting the philosophy. Randomly selected individuals arriving for a social experiment were encouraged to try to increase their social power in a group of strangers. Almost all of the subjects denied they had that ability, but they nevertheless were able to attempt those roles with such consummate skill that not once in twenty-nine groups did anyone detect that these individuals had been instructed to do so. Apparently all of us have a mastery of roles that we may never have an opportunity to play.

In a study of more than a thousand critical incidents of group therapy—i.e., the moments the participants reported to be therapeutic—WBSI researchers found that the actions of the professional leader of the group accounted for no more of these moments than did the actions of the average group member. That led the researchers to organize and study leaderless, self-directed therapy groups—an idea considered outrageous at the time—but as it turned out, these self-directed groups were virtually indistinguishable from professionally led groups.

Not satisfied with that achievement, staffers Lawrence Solomon and Betty Berzon believed these self-directed groups could be made even more effective by structuring them through the use of tape recordings suggesting group activities (tapes later published by Bell and Howell). The idea proved to be soundly based. A Stanford University study comparing seventeen approaches to group therapy, including WBSI’s Encounter Tapes, found the institute’s leaderless approach to rank first in perceived safety and third in overall effectiveness.

In its continuing effort to make therapeutic experiences more broadly available, WBSI explored the use of television to motivate and instruct leaderless groups it had organized in the community. To assist these groups, I led a videotaped group in a television studio each week, and together with documentary filmmaker Bill McGaw, selected the key moments in its development. Using those clips, and under McGaw’s direction, I narrated a weekly series of television broadcasts on the local NBC station. Research showed that the stimulus of watching the TV program showing genuine group therapy interaction (a first for television) clearly enhanced the effectiveness of the group meetings in the community. More than that, groups formed spontaneously and gathered informally in churches, homes and bars to view the program and then hold their own group meetings.

An effort followed to capture more of the intensity of a group therapy situation than could be accomplished in a one hour televised meeting. Again with direction from Bill McGaw, Rogers and I led a group filmed for sixteen hours over a weekend. The resulting film, with the editing help of famed producer/director Stanley Kramer, won the Oscar for best feature length documentary, and has since been used to foster therapeutic understanding for hundreds of thousands of people, all over the world.

This guiding philosophy of attempting to create conditions in which people can be at their best continued through all of WBSI’s projects. Under the leadership of institute co-founder and social psychologist Wayman Crow, the staff designed and simulated tension reduction activities for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were seeking deterrence strategies during the cold war. That work led staffers Hall Sprague and Garry Shirts to develop a range of highly successful educational games for use in schools.

Turning to the problems of crime and violence, a now classic WBSI project reduced robberies (and accompanying violence) in convenience stores by an impressive 40%, employing as research assistants a group of ex-offenders, some that had been armed robbers. With first hand knowledge of such robberies, they helped redesign the stores and the systems to achieve those remarkable reductions in crime.

With sociologist Thomas Gillette and economist Tore Tjersland and others WBSI conducted a variety of governmental policy research programs, studying the conditions that would enable people to escape from poverty, perform better in schools, reduce racial tensions and live more satisfying family lives. Participant/observer studies of skid row inhabitants, conducted by Tony Gorman, showed their relations with each other to be more compassionate and caring than those of the middle and upper classes.

In the eighties the institute developed a two-year School of Management and Strategic Studies for senior executives and other top leaders. Twenty-six countries were represented in the participant group. These WBSI Fellows met in La Jolla for a week every six months, interacting with a distinguished faculty, and then continued the discussions by means of computer conferencing. At the end of two years, every graduate elected to continue this learning experience as a Senior Fellow. This program launched the field of online distance education, long before the Internet became available. It created an educational format designed to enable self-directed learning now used by millions all over the world.

Over and over again, the institute’s work involved the design of relationships, experiences or environments that enabled people to realize their potential. Having discovered the power of computer communications, the institute explored other ways to form virtual communities that could serve that goal.

Its current program, the International Leadership Forum, uses Internet conferencing to conduct dialogues that elicit the wisdom of highly influential leaders from around the world on the great policy issues of our time. This virtual think tank is the first group ever to be assembled in this manner. The wisdom generated in its conferences, interviews and commentaries is communicated to policymakers by means of its electronic magazine, the ILF Digest, www.wbsi.org/ilfdigest.

The range of potential future projects includes developing leadership forums considering the larger challenges facing the professions of design, education and criminal justice; working with the Joan Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice at the University of San Diego to conduct mass media dialogues between Islam and the West; and joining with top environmentalists to work on the social and community development aspects of their projects using seawater irrigation technology to enable hungry people living along desert coastlines all over the world to produce their own food, develop a sound economy, and fully enjoy the benefits of community life.

Forty-six years after its founding, the institute still explores Carl Rogers’ insight—given the right conditions, people can be trusted.