What is it about?
People are generally quite poor at producing random sequences of responses. In this study we used a quiz task where participants are instructed to give random answers to very easy questions. Past research has shown that most people are not able to do this: although participants typically believe they are responding randomly, most people cannot help but give correct answers most of the time. In this study we tried a series of different hypnotic suggestions to see if we could increase participants' ability to respond randomly. We found that particular types of suggestions did lead to more random responding.
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Why is it important?
Most hypnosis research shows that hypnosis can be very effective at changing motivations, beliefs and attention. Hypnosis is used clinically as a treatment for conditions such as chronic pain, and is also becoming more commonly used as a research tool in cognitive science. Despite growing levels of interest in hypnosis, the mechanisms that underlie hypnotic effects are still not agreed upon. A common view amongst researchers is that hypnosis can profoundly influence the way that individuals monitor and evaluate their experiences but that it is not able to influence behaviours that are normally outside of conscious control. In this study we showed that, in certain contexts, hypnosis may actually be able to inhibit typically automatic responses.
Perspectives
This was quite a surprising finding for us. Past research has tried multiple methods of making people more random and nothing has been found to work (for example, imposing strict time limits on responses and offering financial rewards for more random responding have both failed). Because of this we expected that hypnosis might change people's level of belief in how random they were but did not expect that hypnosis would actually make people more random. Although this particular random responding task is quite contrived, this finding is exciting as it suggests that hypnosis may be effective at altering other patterns of automatic behaviour.
Dr Vince Polito
Macquarie University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Hypnotic clever hands: Agency and automatic responding., Journal of Experimental Psychology General, June 2018, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/xge0000451.
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