I was curious how many sessions, and how long the sessions were. A Guardian article[1] suggests the sessions were 2 hours long, once a week, and the typical total time for participants was 200 hours.
The overall process sounded a bit like something you see in military basic training, but with the additional wrinkle of the paper they made the Harvard students write beforehand...outlining their core beliefs. Drill instructors in basic training do a sort of less deep version of this. They observe people and try to induce stress with personalized yelling and screaming based on observations and some amount of data on the person (detailed "job" applications, ASVAB tests, etc).
The overall process sounded a bit like something you see in military basic training, but with the additional wrinkle of the paper they made the Harvard students write beforehand...outlining their core beliefs. Drill instructors in basic training do a sort of less deep version of this. They observe people and try to induce stress with personalized yelling and screaming based on observations and some amount of data on the person (detailed "job" applications, ASVAB tests, etc).
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2000/jun/22/features...