I went through Werner Erhard’s “est” course, a program with overtones of hucksterism but that, from a training standpoint, I found to be an ingenious and often brilliant application of shaping and reinforcement. The program was called, rightly I think, the Training. The leader was called the Trainer. The shaping goal was improved self-awareness, and the principal reinforcer was not the Trainer’s responses but the nonverbal behavior of the whole group.
To develop group behavior as a reinforcer, the 250 people in the group were told to applaud after every speaker, whether they felt like applauding or not. Thus from the beginning the shy were encouraged, the bold rewarded, and all contributions, whether insightful or inane, were acknowledged by the group.
At first the applause was dutiful and no more. Soon it became genuinely communicative—not of degrees of enjoyment, as in the theater, but of shades of feeling and meaning. For example, there was in my training class, as I expect there is in every est group, an argumentative man who frequently took issue with what the Trainer said. When this happened for the third or fourth time, the Trainer started arguing back. Now, it was apparent to all that from a logical standpoint, the argumentative man was perfectly correct. But as the argument wore on and on, no one else in the room cared who was right. All 249 of us just wished he’d shut up and sit down.
The rules of the game—shaping rules, really—did not permit us to protest or to tell him to shut up. But gradually the massive silence of the group percolated into his awareness. We watched him realize that no one cared if he was right. Maybe being right was not the only game in town. Slowly he sputtered into silence and sat down. The group instantly erupted in a huge burst of applause, expressive of sympathy and understanding as well as of hearty relief—a very powerful positive reinforcer of the illumination the arguer had just received.
This kind of training occurrence, in which the important events are behavioral and thus nonverbal, is often maddeningly difficult to explain to an outsider. Erhard, like a Zen teacher, often resorts to aphorisms; in the case of the arguer described above, the est saying is “When you’re right, that’s what you get to be: right.” That is, not necessarily loved, or anything else nice: just right. If I I were to quote that aphorism at a party when somebody is being bombastic, another est graduate might laugh—and indeed, any good modern trainer might laugh—but most hearers might assume I was moronic or drunk. Good training insights do not necessarily lend themselves to verbal explanation.
Direct marketer Dan Kennedy on Erhard and EST: (Source)
In the 70′s, when I asked Werner Erhard to sum up his personal growth thing, EST, he said “We preach independence but breed dependence.”
Karen Pryor, writing in Shoot the dog:
Direct marketer Dan Kennedy on Erhard and EST: (Source)