Group Insight Game (GIG) Simply Explained

1. What It Is About

The Group Insight Game is a group procedure. Sperry Andrews developed it over decades and founded the Human Connection Institute in the USA in 1990. The group sits opposite each other, on site or via video conference. Whoever is not speaking maintains uninterrupted eye contact with the person who is speaking. In turn, each person speaks two sentences to the whole group: What does the group perceive together in this moment, what does it feel and understand? Only statements about the now are permitted, without past and future and without I-statements. By closing their eyes, the speaking person shows that they are finished. A session lasts about two hours. According to Andrews, shared attention arises with deep agreement, calmness and the feeling of being connected with all people and nature. As applications he names mental and physical well-being, teamwork, joint decisions and conflict resolution. From 1988 to 1993 Andrews worked with psychologist William Braud at the Mind Science Foundation in San Antonio on laboratory studies on whether people notice that they are being looked at.

2. What Studies Show

There is still no study in humans on the Group Insight Game itself. What is available are experiences of participants, and alongside this research on the individual components: eye contact, shared perception in the group and mindful interaction with one another. 778 papers are recorded on these related topics, 61 of them controlled in humans.

Experiences, not study results: 16 reports from 2 public sources were evaluated. 13 of them describe an improvement, 3 remain unclear. Reported are a lessening of the feeling of separation, deep connectedness, calm and peace, a disappearance of the sense of time and tears without shame. It is repeatedly stated that the experience persists and is more easily accessible than meditating alone. The duration ranges from a few minutes in a session through an evening and weekly meetings to sessions over years. Some of the reports come from the provider side and are therefore not first-hand accounts.

A controlled study with 49 international students compared shared presence offerings with pure self-help materials. The group with the shared meetings had advantages in interaction and in the number of relationships 4. Controlled means: There was a comparison group; however, the participants were not assigned randomly here.

In one study, 78 adults suffering from severe loneliness received five weekly group sessions. Afterwards they felt less stressed and less lonely, even after three months 2. Those who had previously received the bonding hormone oxytocin as a nasal spray felt additionally more closely connected to the group. There was no comparison group without any group sessions at all.

A review on synchrony between people in mental disorders screened 12 papers on neurofeedback and 7 studies on brain stimulation 1. Synchrony means that two people enter a similar rhythm, when speaking, when breathing or in brain activity. The paper names synchrony as a possible starting point for support, for example in social anxiety. Whether the uninterrupted eye contact in the Group Insight Game sets in exactly here is a hypothesis; it has not yet been measured.

A model of mindfulness between people suggests that mindfulness training strengthens self-perception, self-regulation and benevolence towards others and thereby improves the quality of encounters 3. The planned protocol for this envisages a study. Results are not yet available.

3. What Remains Unclear

With the Group Insight Game itself it is not possible to separate whether the described states arise from the speaking rules, from eye contact, from the group situation or from the participants' expectations. A controlled test is still outstanding. What Andrews describes beyond speaking and eye contact is so far only a hypothesis from his description: shared breathing and feeling, the reinterpretation of negatively appearing energy as a resource and a jointly experienced intelligence. It is also open whether the effect persists over months and whether the procedure differs from silent forms of meditation or from group conversations without eye contact. The remote effects between people far apart from one another are an open, testable question. The experience base says nothing about side effects: No report mentions any, and a systematic recording does not yet exist.

4. What This Means in Everyday Life

Anyone reading about the Group Insight Game finds two different things: reports from people about their experience and research on individual components such as eye contact and mindfulness. The experiences are described impressively, but they are experiences, not study results. Whether the procedure works and through what cannot be deduced from this. Next, a study would be needed that compares the Group Insight Game with a group conversation without the speaking and gaze guidelines, using questionnaires on loneliness, perceived stress and well-being, at the start, after the sessions and at a follow-up after three months. In addition, physical measures of synchrony could be collected before and after the sessions. Such a study would have to assign participants randomly and predefine how it is evaluated. Then the open question could be answered.

All details with study numbers and sources: detailed page on Group Insight Game (GIG). For children: Group Insight Game (GIG) for children.