The perceptual organization of effective counselors

An experiment to determine whether good counselors could be distinguished from poor ones on the basis of their characteristic "ways of perceiving" self, others, and the task of counseling. The names of 29 counselors-in-training were arranged in order of performance from "best" to "poorest," at the end of a year long training by the 14 faculty members who taught and supervised them. These rank orders were correlated with S's characteristic ways of perceiving scores inferred from blind analysis of 4 "human relations incidents" written by each counselor in a personality theory course. Statistically significant correlations ranging from .40 to .65 were obtained for all 12 aspects of perceptual organization indicating that clear distinctions can be found between good and poor counselors in perceptual terms.