JOHN F KIHLSTROM INTERVIEW (PART 2)
Having established how John entered the field, and that he would describe himself as a “state theorist”, we now delve deeper into his thoughts on hypnosis theory, and his knowledge of the famous, George Estabrooks.
Professor John F Kihlstrom. Credit: John F Kihlstrom.
In this wonderfully detailed account, John explains how he understands hypnosis, how others may understand it, and how that relates to the Stroop effect. It ends with an interesting excursion into the work of George Estabrooks, famous for the 1957 book, Hypnotism. (And you can read Part 1 here, ICYMI.)
You seem to suggest that hypnosis is either an alteration in consciousness, or a sham (is that fair?). I appreciate you are more interested in the phenomena of hypnosis, rather than the nature of it, but I was wondering what you thought of hypnotic suggestions being given in a hypnotic context, but without an induction and seemingly without the participant entering a hypnotic state? Do you think waking suggestions are different to hypnotic suggestions, for example?
The only thing that makes hypnosis interesting is altered subjective experience. If subjects really don’t forget what they’ve been doing while they were hypnotized, if they really do feel the pain after all, I don’t see why anyone would be interested in it. And if subjective experience is genuinely altered, then it seems to me obvious that hypnosis, or at least the phenomena that constitute the domain of hypnosis, entails alterations in consciousness – in the phenomenal experience of seeing, or hearing, or remembering; in the experience of voluntariness or involuntariness. J.P. Sutcliffe argued that hypnosis was in some sense a delusion because the experience of the subject departed from “the actual stimulus state of affairs”. That’s an alteration in consciousness.
But your question is whether a hypnotic induction is necessary to achieve these effects. I don’t know exactly what it means to give hypnotic suggestions in a hypnotic context but without inducing a hypnotic state, since a hypnotic induction would seem to be a necessary part of establishing a hypnotic context, but I get the idea. Martin Orne loved to tell a story about George Estabrooks, who back in the 1920s first recorded a hypnotic induction in order to standardize his experimental procedures. One day, as the story went, a subject arrived; Estabrooks put on the record, left the room, and returned a few minutes later to find the subject deeply hypnotized. It was only later that Estabrooks discovered that he had accidentally put on a recording of a Swiss yodeler! What Esty was doing with a recording of a Swiss yodeler is another question, but apparently the subject was hypnotizable, maybe already an experienced hypnotic subject; he came to Estabrooks’s lab prepared to be hypnotized, and that was that. And we know that hypnosis can be induced by means of a posthypnotic suggestion – again provided that the subject is hypnotizable – without going through the whole 15-minute induction procedure of the Harvard Group Scale.
Hypnotic Swiss yodellers from the 1920s… as imagined by Midjourney because this is a challenging article to illustrate without breaching copyright laws!
So it’s legitimate to ask whether a formal hypnotic induction does anything, and if so, how it does it. This isn’t a question I’ve felt compelled to ask because I’m not that interested in hypnosis per se. I’ve been interested in looking at specific hypnotic phenomena, like amnesia, and that’s an entirely different thing. And one thing we know is that posthypnotic amnesia has properties that differentiate it from similar phenomena observed in what, for shorthand, we can call the “normal waking state”. Take, for instance, instructed forgetting, in which subjects are presented with a list of words, and instructed to forget some of them. Instructed forgetting comes in a variety of forms, but post-input cuing of item sets – the one that most closely resembles posthypnotic amnesia – isn’t very effective at all (Basden, Basden, Coe, Decker, & Crutcher, 1994; David, Brown, Pojoga, & David, 2000; Kihlstrom, 1983; Kihlstrom & Barnhardt, 1993). Same goes for thought suppression – as in Dan Wegner’s “White Bear” study (Wegner, Schneider, Carter, & White, 1987): thought-suppression produces an ironic rebound, but posthypnotic amnesia does not (Bowers & Woody, 1996). Posthypnotic amnesia is correlated with hypnotizability, but this isn’t the case for either directed forgetting or thought suppression. All of these effects involve retrieval inhibition, instigated by verbal instructions or suggestions, but otherwise they are very different. It's just not the case that posthypnotic amnesia is just a souped-up version of nonhypnotic thought suppression.
Stepping away from posthypnotic amnesia, the “induction question” can be addressed straightforwardly by simply omitting a formal induction procedure. This approach goes back at least to the time of Hull (1933), who reported four studies in which the target was a simple ideomotor suggestion, such as postural sway. Over all four studies, comparing induction to no induction, Hull reported that hypnosis reduced response time by 38%. Hull thought that traditional authorities would have been disappointed by such a result, and maybe he was, too. Still, he published the raw data from all those studies, and when you run a paired-sample t test, you get a pretty big effect size: Cohen’s d = .80, to be exact (I know this because I did the calculations recently in the course of reviewing a paper on this topic). Most psychologists would kill for an effect that large.
Now Hull tested his hypothesis with only a single ideomotor suggestion, of the type included, before induction, on SHSS:A/B and HGSHS:A. We might get a bigger effect if we tested a wider range of suggestions. That’s exactly what Weitzenhoffer and Sjoberg (Weitzenhoffer & Sjoberg, 1961) did, employing a 17-item scale spanning a wide variety of hypnotic suggestions – ideomotor (passive and challenge) and perceptual-cognitive, presumably administered in the course of developing SHSS:A and SHSS:C. They also published their raw data. The correlation between hypnotic and nonhypnotic suggestibility was high, r=.79; but the effect of hypnotic induction was also strong, d=.80. So the fact that hypnotizability and waking suggestibility are highly correlated doesn’t preclude there also being an effect of hypnotic induction. Hilgard and Tart (Hilgard & Tart, 1966) found much the same thing comparing hypnosis with an imagination condition: depending on whether you do a within-subjects or a between-groups analysis, the effect sizes are pretty respectable (d = .64 and .42, respectively).
Now, you can say: “Wait! That’s not fair! You can’t just give people suggestions cold. You’ve got to establish the proper attitudes, motivations, and expectancies; you’ve got to encourage subjects to really have the suggested effects!”. I guess that’s what’s meant by “setting the hypnotic context”, but the problem is that you can lay the beliefs, expectations, and encouragement on so thick that you risk getting behavioral compliance in the absence of the subjectively compelling experiences that make hypnosis interesting. That’s a problem that Ted Barber confronted (Bowers, 1967; Bowers & Gilmore, 1969), and to some extent Nick Spanos as well (Bates, 1992; Bates, Miller, Cross, & Brigham, 1988).
Anyway, the equation of hypnotizability with suggestibility – the idea that hypnotizability is just suggestibility tested in a hypnotic context – is too facile, not least because there are many different kinds of suggestibility, and hypnosis isn’t related to all of them. There’s the primary and secondary suggestibility of Eysenck and Furneaux (1945); the tertiary suggestibility proposed by Evans (1967), otherwise known as ordinary social compliance; the placebo effect; Gudjonsson’s (1984) interrogative suggestibility; and probably more. There’s a research program here, assessing the relationships among these various kinds of suggestibility, and their correlation with hypnotizability. And it would be worth pursuing. People talk about doing this, but it’s a little like the weather: nobody ever does anything about it.
Even if you could show that a hypnotic induction is unnecessary, there would still be some mysteries. Consider, for example, the discovery by Amir Raz that hypnotic suggestions for alexia (or maybe agnosia, it’s not completely clear) can abolish the Stroop color-word effect (Raz, Shapiro, Fan, & Posner, 2002). That’s exciting for a number of reasons. First, a number of investigators have tried to abolish Stroop interference by inducing color blindness, and it just doesn’t work. Raz’s approach was directed at reading, not color perception. But the implications go beyond hypnosis, because the Stroop effect is generally regarded as a result of automatic processing: skilled readers can’t help but read the words, and reading the words interferes with color naming. There’s been an unspoken (and untested) assumption that once a process has been automatized, it stays automatized forever. Once you learn to read, you can’t unlearn it (except, perhaps, through acquired alexia, but that’s a matter of brain damage, not unlearning). Raz’s findings seem to indicate that a process, once automatized, can be de-automatized; that a bell, once rung, can be unrung after all (Kihlstrom, 2011). Arthur Deikman (1966) raised the possibility of de-automatization through meditation, in another paper I first encountered in Tart’s anthology, long before automaticity had a technical definition in cognitive psychology. And for her dissertation at Yale, Heidi Wenk-Sormaz (2006) showed that a 15-minute breathing meditation does, indeed, lead to de-automatization. So, if hypnotic suggestion can lead to de-automatization, it’s not unique in this respect. This is a matter of great potential theoretical importance, in light of which it doesn’t matter whether hypnosis has been induced or not.
Now, Raz did a later experiment with Irving Kirsch, who has been among the most prominent in arguing that hypnotizability is just another name for suggestibility (at least that’s how I interpret him), and they showed that the induction of hypnosis isn’t necessary to get Raz’s effect (Raz, Kirsch, Pollard, & Nitkin-Kaner, 2006). You can get it without inducing hypnosis – provided that the subjects are hypnotizable (minor detail, but never mind!). That’s important if you think that hypnosis has some special power. But it’s completely irrelevant to the larger, much more important, much more interesting, theoretical point: which is that de-automatization is possible. The point is: if you’re a cognitive psychologist, all that matters is that an automatic process can be de-automatized. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve used hypnosis or not. Still, for now anyway, it seems that hypnotizing hypnotizable subjects is the most reliable way to get hypnotic phenomena. And I dare say that Amir would never have tried his experiment if he hadn’t thought that hypnosis was critical to its success.
Here’s another example: the use of hypnotic suggestion to induce psychosomatic effects. The classic instance, which was rediscovered by Ken Bowers (Bowers & Kelly, 1979), was Mason’s (1952) treatment of a case of ichthyosiform erythrodermia (so-called “fish-skin disease”). Here is a congenital skin disease, completely resistant to treatment; Mason tried hypnosis as an act of desperation, and it worked; and we know that the remission resulted from suggestion because of the careful manner in which Mason documented the case. There are many controlled, experimental studies of this sort, mostly involving allergies, asthma, and the like. There’s a striking study by Ikemi and Nakagawa (1962) in which hypnotic suggestion modulated a contact dermatitis similar to poison ivy. Even Nick Spanos, famous as a skeptic about hypnosis, got positive results with hypnotically suggested remission of warts (Spanos, Stenstrom, & Johnson, 1988; Spanos, Williams, & Gwynn, 1990).
Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), the Russian and Soviet neurologist, psychologist, and physiologist known for his discovery of classical conditioning through his experiments with dogs. Credit: WikiCommons.
I reviewed a lot of this literature in an address to the SCEH some years ago (Kihlstrom, 2013), and in a couple of papers (Kihlstrom, 2002, 2008b, 2023). These studies are interesting because they speak to a neglected aspect of the mind-body problem. Modern cognitive science has been consumed by the mind-body problem, but it hasn’t adequately recognized that the relation between mind and body is bidirectional: brain states cause mental states, but mental states can have physical effects outside the nervous system. Hypnosis underscores this reciprocal relationship.
I said before [in part one of this interview] that Bill Edmonston was something of a Pavlovian when it came to hypnosis, and I was always struck by the title of a book he had on his office shelves, by another Pavlovian: The Word as a Physiological and Therapeutic Factor, by K.I. Platonov (1959), a Ukrainian psychologist from back in Soviet times. The suggestion, the idea, that you’re touching a poisonous leaf gives you a skin rash; the suggestion, the belief, that your warts will disappear makes them go away. Just words. Not all the time, and not for everyone, but often enough to be interesting. I suspect that the most reliable way to get these effects is to make hypnotic suggestions to hypnotizable subjects who have been hypnotized. But it doesn’t matter if it turns out that a hypnotic induction isn’t necessary to produce these effects; that ordinary suggestion – just words – will work as well. In the larger scheme of things, what matters is that hypnosis draws attention to the fact that ideas and beliefs can have bodily consequences, and that psychosomatic effects are real and worth studying.
Earlier you talked about the Stroop effect. Are you aware of the recent experiment by Palfi et al. (Cortex, 2021), out of our University of Sussex lab, about suggested alexia? They tested hypnotically suggested word blindness against imagined word blindness and a ‘try your best’ condition in counter-balanced order. There was no difference between the suggested and imagined conditions, save for that the suggested condition felt involuntary vs the imagined condition feeling voluntary; and both were significantly different to the control condition. It appears to imply that de-automatization can be done with the imagination alone!
That paper is one of several studies following up on the very interesting research of Amir Raz, in which hypnotic suggestions for alexia (word-blindness) reduced the Stroop color-word interference effect. It’s a very dense paper, with a lot going on in it, and I don’t want to delve into it too deeply. Yes, they found equivalent reductions in Stroop interference in both the “suggestion” and “imagination” conditions. But Palfi et al. employed only “high-suggestible” subjects in their experiment, leaving open the question of how low-suggestible subjects would perform. Based on the Raz-Kirsch experiment, we would expect them not to perform very well in either condition. So, apparently, you can get alexia regardless of whether subjects are hypnotized – provided that they’re hypnotizable. This is not a problem for me.
Palfi et al. did find one big difference between their hypnosis and imagination conditions, which is that subjects in the hypnosis condition showed greater experienced involuntariness in responding. Of course, this may simply have reflected differences in the instructions between the two conditions. In the hypnosis condition, the subjects were told that “meaningless symbols” would appear on the screen, whereas in the imagination condition they were instructed to actively imagine the presented words as gibberish. Philosophers, notably R.S. Peters (1958/1960) and Ruth Macklin (1968), call this the distinction between a “happening” and a “doing”. Ted Sarbin (1984) and Nick Spanos (1986a) picked up on this distinction, in their arguments about experienced involuntariness in hypnosis: subjects’ reports of involuntariness are either in compliance with demand characteristics, or else they are attributions that they are encouraged to make about their own behavior. Spanos went even further, suggesting that reports of inability to resist hypnotic suggestions, something closely related to experienced involuntariness, was simply a strategy that subjects use to convince observers that they are really hypnotized (Spanos, Cobb, & Gorassini, 1985).
Now, Palfi doesn’t think that reports of involuntariness are merely a matter of demand characteristics and self-presentation, and neither do I. In order to explain experienced involuntariness, they rely on the “cold control” theory of hypnosis offered by Zoltan Dienes and Josef Perner (2007). To a cognitive social psychologist, the phrase “cold control” brings to mind the distinction between “cold cognition”, of the sort that cognitive psychologists typically study, and the “hot cognition”, laced with emotion and motivation, that social psychologists favor, but that’s not what they have in mind (Abelson, 1963). Instead, Dienes and Perner draw on the “Higher Order Thought” (HOT) theory of consciousness proposed by David Rosenthal (2005). For Rosenthal, consciousness is tantamount to metacognition: we have first-order thoughts (FOTs), including mental representations of current, past, and future events, intentions for action, and so on, and then we have higher-order thoughts (HOTs) about those thoughts – meta-thoughts, if you will – and these HOTs constitute consciousness. Without HOTs, FOTs are unconscious. The opposite of “hot“ is “cold”, so the “cold” in cold control theory is a clever play on words.
It’s an appealing idea. The late Tom Nelson (1996), a pioneer in the study of metamemory, also proposed a link between metacognition and consciousness, and Julian Jaynes (1976) had a similar idea about consciousness in his theory of the bicameral mind (Kihlstrom, 2021). In a sense, cold control theory is a variant on dissociation theory, because FOTs and HOTs, which normally go together, can be dissociated from each other. I expressed a similar idea, in the context of Jack Hilgard’s (1977) neodissociation theory of divided consciousness, published in the inaugural issue of Consciousness and Cognition (Kihlstrom, 1992): a percept, memory, or thought might be processed by one cognitive subsystem (what the neuropsychologists might call a cognitive module), comprising a FOT; but not processed by the Executive Ego, which would ordinarily give rise to HOTs and conscious awareness. Bringing us closer to the Palfi experiment, a posthypnotic suggestion might be executed by such a subsystem, without the intention, or the action itself, ever reaching the Executive Ego. So while the difference in experienced involuntariness is consistent with cold control theory, it’s also consistent with neodissociation theory: both entail disruptions in metacognition.
Cold control theory leaves some questions open, like precisely how this dissociation comes about, but it’s no different than other dissociation theories in that respect. It also doesn’t explain how skilled readers can perceive familiar words as meaningless gibberish. Derek Besner has argued that the Stroop effect may not be quite so automatic as we might like to think it is (e.g., Besner & Stolz, 1999), but still...
Speaking of demand characteristics, I think our readers would find this an interesting topic within the world of hypnosis, and I’m interested in your thoughts. For instance, how much of hypnotic response in experiments do you think is down to the demand characteristics of the situation? It would appear that Graham Wagstaff would say almost all of it, but I guess you’d disagree. Where do you think Nick Spanos would position himself on this? Was his social role-play all demand characteristics, do you think? Does that differ from Barber, Sarbin, Coe, and more recently, Kirsch?
I try to avoid comparing and contrasting theories of hypnosis. The question of how much of hypnosis is attributable to demand characteristics is at least as old as Martin Orne’s “Artifact and Essence” paper (Orne, 1959). This debate tends to get framed in terms of “state-nonstate”, but I prefer to think of the terms of the debate as “nothing but” versus “something more” (Kihlstrom, 1993). That is, is hypnosis simply a special case of some general principle – is it “nothing but” suggestion (a view that goes back to the debate between Charcot and Bernheim) or compliance, or role-playing, or imagination? Or does hypnosis tell us something about how the mind works that we didn’t know before? The theorists you cite here are all part of the “sociocognitive” camp, which is actually more “socio” and less “cognitive” – more inclined to explain hypnosis in terms of conventional social-psychological constructs that refer to factors that lie “outside” the subject, and less inclined to look “inside” for cognitive mechanisms like disrupted retrieval or familiarity-based recognition in posthypnotic amnesia.
For example, you’re right that compliance lies at the heart of Graham Wagstaff’s theorizing (e.g., Wagstaff, 1991), which would seem to imply that hypnotic subjects are just going through the motions. But social psychologists distinguish between compliance at the level of behavior and compliance at the level of belief; and Wagstaff acknowledges that compliance in hypnosis can be of the latter kind, such that subjects really believe that they are five years old again, or can’t remember what they’ve been doing while they were hypnotized. Still, these changes in belief are held to be mediated by ordinary social-psychological processes, such as persuasion or causal attribution.
So the “sociocognitive” theorists are also more complicated than would sometimes seem to be the case. Take Sarbin’s role theory of hypnosis (Coe & Sarbin, 1977, 1991; Sarbin, 1950, 1954; Sarbin & Allen, 1968; Sarbin & Coe, 1972). As a sociological social psychologist, Sarbin was more interested in explanatory constructs that lie outside the individual – not inside, like mental states in general, much less altered states of consciousness (Scheibe & Barrett, 2016). Sarbin did not invent role theory, though he became its leading proponent; and he didn’t apply it solely to hypnosis – he thought that mental illness was a role, too. But hypnosis was the model interaction he used to illustrate the theory. He always insisted that he didn’t mean that hypnosis was merely play-acting, but his application of what he called the “dramaturgical metaphor” – that both hypnotist and subject are engaged in a performance the success of which depends on such factors as expectations, role demands, role skills, and reinforcement by the audience, conveys just such an impression. Interestingly, the list of role skills includes hypnotizability, reminding us that Sarbin devised a predecessor to the Stanford scales (Friedlander & Sarbin, 1938) – though, contrary to the current consensus, he denied the structural complexity of hypnotizability (Coe & Sarbin, 1971). More important in the present context, Sarbin and Coe (1972) included role involvement (actually, “organismal involvement”) in his list of determinants of successful role enactment. From his point of view, subjects could become so involved in playing the hypnotic role that they forget they were role-playing – as in Stanislavskian “Method” acting, where the actors become the characters they’re playing. This sounds suspiciously like an altered state of consciousness to me! Maybe that’s why role involvement dropped out of the final statement of the theory (Coe & Sarbin, 1991).
Sometimes, the theorists themselves evolve. For a long time, Ted Barber (1969) dismissed the idea of hypnosis as an altered state of consciousness, or even something real, going so far as to write “hypnosis” in scare quotes, and arguing that hypnotic effects could be produced in anyone who had positive attitudes, motivations, and expectancies – what he summarized as “task motivation”. There’s a notorious study (Barber & Calverley, 1964) in which Barber tested student nurses’ performance on the Barber Suggestibility Scale: one group was retested after receiving task-motivation instructions, which end with the injunction that “If you don’t try to the best of your ability, this experiment will be worthless and I’ll tend to feel silly. On the other hand, if you try to imagine to the best of your ability, you can easily imagine and do the interesting things I tell you and you will be helping this experiment and not wasting any time” (Barber, 1969, p. 46). Another group received a lecture from their supervisor to the effect that the hospital’s doctors believed that the nurses were too gullible, and that their behavior in the research study showed that they were “too easily directed and easily led in their responses to suggestions”. Compared to baseline, the scores of the task-motivation group went up, while those in the other group’s dropped to the floor. These results were claimed to support the hypothesis that attitudes were an important determinant of response to hypnotic suggestions, but it’s hard to see task motivation, and by extension hypnosis itself, as involving much more than ordinary social compliance. It’s not surprising, then, that Ken Bowers found that performance following task-motivation instructions was corrected downward by honesty demands (Bowers, 1967). Later, however, largely under the influence of Nick Spanos and John Chaves, Barber got a little less behavioristic and a little more cognitive, and he linked himself to the New-Age-y human potentials movement (Barber, Spanos, & Chaves, 1974). Toward the end of his life (he died in 2005), he realized that highly hypnotizable subjects really had a different experience compared to other subjects: the scare quotes were gone and he was sounding like a state theorist (Barber, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c).
Nicholas Spanos. Credit: Open Media via our previous post.
Nick Spanos presented a tangle of complexities. Just by virtue of the sheer number of papers he published, and his relentless focus on hypnosis and related topics (like multiple personality disorder), he must count as the leading sociocognitive theorist of hypnosis. But for all that energy devoted to the topic, he sometimes seemed to have a dismissive attitude toward the whole enterprise. At the very least, he sometimes took the role of provocateur. For example, the Carleton University Responsiveness to Suggestion Scale is so awkwardly named that one would be forgiven for thinking it was chosen simply for the acronym (Spanos, Radtke, Hodgins, Stam, & Bertrand, 1983). He explained subjects’ reports of involuntariness as attributional errors (Spanos & DeGroh, 1983), which at least implies that subjects believed their own self-reports; but he also explained their reported inability to resist suggestions as a self-presentational strategy designed to convince observers that they were deeply hypnotized – implying that they were just going through the motions after all (Spanos et al., 1985). Like Ted Barber, he claimed that hypnotizability could be improved when subjects adopted appropriate expectations and motivations (Spanos, Robertson, Menary, & Brett, 1986); but the Carleton Skills Training Program, which incorporated these principles into a method for enhancing hypnotizability, was thoroughly laced with compliance (Bates & Kraft, 1991). Sometimes, Nick just seemed to be wrong: he explained hypnotic analgesia in terms of subjects employing various stress-inoculation strategies like self-distraction (Spanos, 1986c), but a series of studies by Bowers and Miller showed that, unlike hypnotic analgesia, the success of these strategies was not correlated with hypnotizability (Miller & Bowers, 1986, 1993). Other times, he just missed the boat. When I reported that posthypnotic amnesia affected episodic but not semantic memory (Kihlstrom, 1980), he reversed the effect by changing the wording of the amnesia suggestion (Spanos, Radtke, & Dubreuil, 1982). The implication was that subjects were just doing what they were told, when what he discovered was hypnotic agnosia – the word-blindness that Amir Raz found to reverse the Stroop effect (Raz et al., 2002). As I said before, that’s most interesting finding in the last 20 years of hypnosis research. Nick observed it 20 years earlier – and, frankly, Fred Evans (1971) saw it 10 years before that, but never published it; but he just wrote it off as just another artifact of the wording of the suggestion. Similarly, he showed that hypnotically deaf subjects showed the deleterious effects of delayed auditory feedback, concluding that “Now you hear it – now you still hear it” (Spanos, Jones, & Malfara, 1982), instead of thinking it might reflect a dissociation between explicit and implicit perception (Kihlstrom, Barnhardt, & Tataryn, 1992). I’m sure, when he turned his attention to warts, he didn’t expect hypnosis to prove better than placebo (Spanos et al., 1988; Spanos et al., 1990), and it was unfortunate that he died before he could get closure on his repeated finding to the contrary. Still, like Ted Barber, at his best Nick challenged us to think more clearly about hypnosis, and to do better research.
I greatly respect Irving Kirsch’s work on placebo effects, but I think it’s a mistake for him to characterize hypnosis as a “nondeceptive placebo” (Kirsch, 1994, 2023). In the first place, there’s an old finding from Orne’s lab (McGlashan, Evans, & Orne, 1969), subsequently replicated by Kirsch himself (Baker & Kirsch, 1993), that shows pretty clearly that there’s more to hypnotic analgesia than placebo. Of course, every treatment has a placebo component, because every treatment is administered in some psychosocial context. But even if hypnotic analgesia and placebo analgesia were perfectly correlated, that wouldn’t prevent there being a significant difference between the means. Even if hypnosis were nothing but a placebo, it wouldn’t be a nondeceptive placebo, because it would be presented to patients as if it were an active treatment with specific effects. Physicians don’t like to prescribe placebos, and insurance companies don’t like to pay for them – and I suspect that patients don’t like to take them, because they imply that their illnesses are “all in their heads”. So presenting hypnosis as any kind of placebo not only misrepresents the actual state of affairs but impairs the adoption of hypnosis by empirically oriented clinicians who prefer treatments that really work.
Together with Steve Lynn, Irving has proposed a theory of hypnosis that has all the features of your typical sociocognitive approach, such as a focus on motivation, expectations, and the importance of context (Kirsch & Lynn, 1995; Lynn, Laurence, & Kirsch, 2015). But it also has some unique features. First, they acknowledge that hypnosis involves “fascinating and perplexing alterations in consciousness” (2015, p. 314) – which is all any reasonable “state theorist” can ask. They don’t endorse any “state” theory, because they argue that the same effects can be achieved through non-hypnotic suggestions. That may be true, to some extent – though if it’s only true for hypnotizable subjects, that casts somewhat different light on the claim. Second, they go beyond ordinary-language social-cognitive constructs like “expectations”, “self-fulfilling prophecies”, and “attributional error” (e.g., Spanos, 1986b) and adopt the technical vocabulary of cognitive psychology in a way that other socio-cognitive theorists haven’t done. A prime example is their treatment of experienced involuntariness, where they invoke the familiar distinction between automatic and controlled processes (Kirsch & Lynn, 1997, 1999). Personally, I think that arguments about “the automaticity of everyday life” (Bargh, 1997) and “the unbearable automaticity of being” (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999) go too far (Kihlstrom, 2008a). All too often, especially in social psychology, the concept of automaticity is applied all too loosely. But still, Kirsch and Lynn are trying to take a new perspective on hypnosis, with contributions from both social and cognitive psychology, and even venturing into cognitive neuroscience. They’ve added “something more” to the usual “nothing but”.
How well did you know George Estabrooks? His book, Hypnotism, contains some fantastic stories – do you know his book and, if so, what do you think of his tales? Were you ever involved in his hypnotic demonstrations?
I can’t claim to have known Estabrooks well. By the time I got to Colgate, he had retired and Edmonston had been hired to replace him, so he was the kind of “campus character” you find around colleges and universities. He’d show up in the Department, or the Student Union, and talk with any students who were interested. And I was one of those students: he was a very interesting guy. I wrote about him a little as a sidebar to an article that Ed Frischholz and I did on Bill Edmonston – part of a projected series of portraits of editors of the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis that was cut short when Ed died (Kihlstrom & Frischholz, 2010). Estabrooks was Canadian and took his bachelor’s degree from what is now Acadia University in Nova Scotia. At Acadia, he had been a student of George Barton Cutten, a psychologist who pioneered the use of hypnosis in the treatment of alcoholism (Cutten, 1903a, 1903b). Cutten became president of Acadia, and when he became president of Colgate he brought Estabrooks onto the faculty.
Cutten himself was an interesting person. He had Yale double doctorates, in divinity as well as psychology. He took a leave from Acadia to serve with the Canadian Army in World War I, and afterward led rehabilitation efforts for soldiers who suffered from physical and mental trauma. He pulled Colgate out of severe financial difficulty. As an educator, he was a visionary who established an innovative “core curriculum" approach to general education that still defines the Colgate experience: not just a “great books” course, as at Chicago, but covering the natural and social sciences as well; not just a distribution requirement, but a scheme where all students had about one-quarter of their coursework in common. For these accomplishments, when I was there in the 1960s, Colgate named a big, new, beautiful, upper-class residential complex for him. On the other hand, Cutten was also an avowed racist and antisemite, and a proponent of eugenics. He thought that Jim Crow should be extended to “poor white trash” as well as Blacks, and he did everything he could to keep Blacks and Jews out of Colgate. One of his screeds, to the effect that the American “melting pot” would destroy the white race, is inscribed (with intentional irony) on a wall at the National Immigration Museum, on Ellis Island. Those might have been acceptable attitudes in the 20s and 30s, but by the 60s they were in bad odor, and rightly so; and so, for his sins, Colgate removed his name from the complex.
Anyway, back to Estabrooks. Before college he also enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Forces to serve in World War I – at age 19, already a commissioned officer. He saw action in the Second Battle of Ypres – where the Germans first used poison gas. He saw his first demonstration of hypnosis in a “USO”-type entertainment for the troops. After his discharge he enrolled at Acadia, which is where he encountered Cutten. He was a Rhodes Scholar, and he did his first hypnosis experiments at Oxford (Estabrooks, 1929a). He then enrolled at Harvard, in a PhD program offered by the then-new Graduate School of Education. His doctoral dissertation, possibly inspired by Cutten, was on racial differences in intelligence. Interestingly, he concluded that these were impossible to determine, because of three problems: the inability to rule out environmental factors (suggesting that he considered “race” to be a biological construct), ambiguities surrounding “race”, and difficulty defining “intelligence” (Estabrooks, 1928a, 1928b, 1931b). Minor problems!
Estabrooks’s PhD was in Education, but he spent a lot of time over in the Psychology Department, where William McDougal was sponsoring the pioneering hypnosis research by P.C. Young (1925, 1926a, 1926b, 1927), and Gardner Murphy was exploring various parapsychological phenomena. In addition to his dissertation research, he did one of the very earliest experiments on telepathy (Estabrooks, 1927/1961), the positive results of which led McDougall and Murphy to arrange a postdoctoral fellowship, sponsored by one of the “spook funds” that places like Harvard had (and still have), to follow up on those findings. Instead, Estabrooks decided to take a teaching job at Springfield College: the person who took over the fellowship was – wait for it! – J.B. Rhine.
Estabrooks’s work precipitated the CIA’s ‘mind control’ projects – as captured in the 1962 film adaptation of The Manchurian Candidate, pictured. Credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection; WikiCommons.
When Estabrooks moved to Colgate, he restarted his work on hypnosis, picking up where he had left off at Oxford (Estabrooks, 1929b). He was the first to record a standardized hypnotic induction (Estabrooks, 1930c), and he did the first psychophysiological study of hypnosis, examining what we now call the electrodermal response (Estabrooks, 1930b). But, you know, that’s about it. His little book on Hypnotism (1943/1957), and another one on Spiritism (Estabrooks, 1947) may have done a lot to shape public understanding of hypnosis, but as I remember it promoted a lot of inaccurate beliefs about its persuasive and coercive powers. For example, he thought that Adolf Hitler was a great hypnotist, and that the German people had been hypnotized into submission (Estabrooks, 1951, 1962a, 1971). He tried to persuade the FBI, OSS, and CIA that hypnosis could be useful in the training and detection of what he called “superspies”, and probably helped precipitate the CIA’s interest in “mind control” techniques. But in the end, Estabrooks’s greatest contribution to hypnosis was in organizing a big symposium at Colgate, which brought leading authorities together, both researchers and clinicians, at the beginning of what might be called the “golden age” of hypnosis research (Estabrooks, 1962b).
I said earlier that nobody ever placed an ad for a Professor of Hypnosis, and at first glance Estabrooks might seem like the exception that proves the rule: Cutten, a hypnotist, hired Estabrooks, another hypnotist. But Estabrooks wasn’t hired as a hypnosis researcher: at the time, Colgate faculty were hired because they were teachers first and foremost; research was very much downplayed. There’s a reason that his PhD was from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education: he had an abiding interest in educational policy and practice. Cutten knew that even as an undergraduate – an older, returning student marked by the Great War – Estabrooks was active with the campus YMCA to establish a Freshman Orientation Week, which was not a common feature of North American campus life at the time (Finnegan & Alleman, 2013). Not only did he chair the Psychology Department for almost 30 years; he directed its Office of Student Placement for even longer (Estabrooks, 1929d). He was concerned with the adverse effects that a student’s personality and adjustment might have on success in college (Estabrooks, 1929c; Steen & Estabrooks, 1928). With a colleague he added a new scale to the Strong Vocational Interest Blank (C. W. Young & Estabrooks, 1937).
Estabrooks continued to study intelligence, though he left the topic of racial differences largely behind. A study comparing observers’ impressions of intelligence with targets’ actual IQ test scores might count as an early study of impression-formation (Ackerson & Estabrooks, 1928). A study of word-associations anticipated Rosenthal’s (1963) classic studies of experimenter bias by more than 30 years; in retrospect, we can also see it as perhaps the first study of social priming (Estabrooks, 1930a). He devised an innovative system of note-taking (Estabrooks, 1927c); and long before cognitive psychologists took an interest in mnemonic devices (Bower, 1970; Roediger, 1980), he taught the method of loci to facilitate the memorization of lists and sequences (Estabrooks, 1927a). Most important, from a teacher’s standpoint, anyway, he invented the short-answer test (Estabrooks, 1927b).
More seriously, Estabrooks argued that the purpose of a college education is to develop the personality as well as the mind (Estabrooks, 1931a); and that, in the 20th century, education was for democracy as well as for the intellect (Estabrooks, 1932). In the midst of the Great Depression, he argued that colleges could institute an OxBridge-like tutorial system without incurring additional costs (Estabrooks, 1934). His last article on hypnosis closed the loop: a pilot study to determine whether hypnosis could enhance motivation in “underachieving” students (Estabrooks & May, 1965).
(I think that’s more than you wanted to know about Estabrooks, and I apologize. But you asked! And I did know him, a little, and he is an important figure from the early years of 20th century hypnosis who shouldn’t be forgotten.)
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