Hypnosis reconsidered.

Kirsch, Mazzoni, and Montgomery’s (in press) article musters an ardent defense of the hypothesis that hypnotic inductions produce relatively small increases in suggestibility, and that subjective changes and hypnotic phenomena can be produced by imaginative suggestions alone, without the induction of hypnosis. As the authors point out, this argument is consistent with studies conducted in a variety of laboratories over a span of more than 70 years. Nevertheless, if true to form, as Kirsch et al. (in press) anticipate, critics who subscribe to the hypothesis that hypnosis is a trance or altered state of consciousness will argue that suggestible people spontaneously enter an hypnotic state or trance when they respond to suggestions, regardless of whether or not they receive an hypnotic induction, or are lead to believe they will be hypnotized. Accordingly, the argument goes, people who are instructed to relax somehow slip into a state of hypnosis, as do people who are asked to imagine suggested events. Alternately, critics will argue that when differences across hypnotic and nonhypnotic conditions do not surface, people in the hypnosis group are not truly hypnotized. The rub is that if researchers do not clearly define the “state” of hypnosis, and then argue that people are in a trance or altered state (even with no prior induction), their claim can not be falsified, and is not amenable to scientific scrutiny. Let’s say that people who receive an hypnotic induction, a relaxation induction, and simply imagine along with suggestions (with no prior hypnotic induction) are equally suggestible. Is it any more logical to explain this equivalence by saying that the relaxed and imagining people somehow slipped into hypnosis, than it is to say that the hypnotized people slipped into a state of relaxation or imagining? After all, as Kirsch et al. (in press) contend, it is more parsimonious to