Word: hypnotists
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Hypnosis is perhaps best understood as an "interpersonal relationship" between the hypnotist and the subject. In everyday life, most individuals have experiences of a trance-like nature. Such experiences as falling asleep in a lecture, getting totally absorbed in a book, or sleep-walking occur quite frequently. In hypnosis "the individual gets permission to function at this level," and he is more able to tolerate logical inconsistencies than he would be in the waking state...
...individual who falls asleep in class attributes this either to his own tiredness or to the dullness of lecture, and yet were sleep to be hypnotically induced, the subject would tend to blame this on the "occult" powers of the hypnotist. In reality, what happens in hypnosis depends more on the person under hypnosis than it does on the hypnotist...
...classic formulation of the motivation view of hypnosis by Robert W. White, professor of Clinical Psychology. Basing his experiment on the hypothesis "that much hypnotic behavior results from the subject's conception of the role of the hypnotic subject, and by explicit and implicit cues provided by the hypnotist and the situation," Dr. Orne set up two groups of hypnotic subjects. Two separate lectures on hypnosis were given in an introductory psychology course. In one the erroneous impression was given that catalepsy of the dominant hand (the hand stays put wherever it is placed) is typical of the hypnotic state...
Thus an important adjunct to understanding the hypnotic state is the preconceptions of the person who is to be hypnotized. A person in hypnosis will behave the way he thinks a hypnotized subject should behave. This will be modified by implicit and explicit cues from the hypnotist...
...subject often is motivated by what Dr. Orne calls "the demand characteristics of the situation." In an experiment, for instance, the subject feels he has to cooperate with the experimenter for "the sake of science," and thus his behavior in trance is motivated by a desire to help the hypnotist...