Suggestibility


Suggestibility is the quality of being inclined to accept and act on the suggestions of others. One may fill in gaps in certain memories with false information given by another when recalling a scenario or moment. Suggestibility uses cues to distort recollection: when the subject has been persistently told something about a past event, his or her memory of the event conforms to the repeated message.
A person experiencing intense emotions tends to be more receptive to ideas and therefore more suggestible. Generally, suggestibility decreases as age increases. However, psychologists have found that individual levels of self-esteem and assertiveness can make some people more suggestible than others; this finding led to the concept of a spectrum of suggestibility.

Definition

Attempts to isolate a global trait of "suggestibility" have not been successful, due to an inability of the available testing procedures to distinguish measurable differences between the following distinct types of "suggestibility":
  • To be affected by a communication or expectation such that certain responses are overtly enacted, or subjectively experienced, without volition, as in automatism.
  • Deliberately to use one's imagination or employ strategies to bring about effects in response to a communication or expectation.
  • To accept what people say consciously, but uncritically, and to believe or privately accept what is said.
  • To conform overtly to expectations or the views of others, without the appropriate private acceptance or experience; that is, to exhibit behavioral compliance without private acceptance or belief.
Wagstaff's view is that, because "a true response to suggestion is not a response brought about at any stage by volition, but rather a true non-volitional response, perhaps even brought about despite volition", the first category really embodies the true domain of hypnotic suggestibility.
Self-report measures of suggestibility became available in 2004, and they made it possible to isolate and study the global trait.

Examples

Suggestibility can be seen in people's day-to-day lives:
  • Someone witnesses an argument after school. When later asked about the "huge fight" that occurred, he recalls the memory, but unknowingly distorts it with exaggerated fabrications, because he now thinks of the event as a "huge fight" instead of a simple argument.
  • Children are told by their parents they are good singers, so from then on they believe they are talented while their parents were in fact being falsely encouraging.
  • A teacher could trick his AP Psychology students by saying, "Suggestibility is the distortion of memory through suggestion or misinformation, right?" It is likely that the majority of the class would agree with him because he is a teacher and what he said sounds correct. However, the term is really the definition of the misinformation effect.
However, suggestibility can also be seen in extremes, resulting in negative consequences:
  • A witness' testimony is altered because the police or attorneys make suggestions during the interview, which causes their already uncertain observations to become distorted memories.
  • A young girl begins suffering migraines which lead to sleep deprivation and depression. Her therapist, a specialist in cases involving child abuse, repeatedly asks her whether her father had sexually abused her. This suggestion causes the young girl to fabricate memories of her father molesting her, which lead to her being placed in foster care and her father being tried on charges of abuse.

    Hypnosis

Hypnotic suggestibility is an individual trait reflecting the general tendency to respond to hypnosis and hypnotic suggestions. Research with standardized measures of hypnotic suggestibility has demonstrated that there are substantial individual differences in this variable.
The extent to which a subject may or may not be "suggestible" has significant ramifications in the scientific research of hypnosis and its associated phenomena. Most hypnotherapists and academics in this field of research work from the premise that hypnotic susceptibility or that is, the depth of hypnosis a given individual can achieve in a given context with a particular hypnotherapist and particular set of beliefs, expectations and is a factor in inducing useful hypnotic states.
Dr. John Kappas identified three different types of suggestibility in his lifetime that have improved hypnosis:
Emotional suggestibility – A suggestible behavior characterized by a high degree of responsiveness to inferred suggestions that affect emotions and restrict physical body responses; usually associated with hypnoidal depth. Thus the emotional suggestible learns more by inference than by direct, literal suggestions.
Physical suggestibility – A suggestible behavior characterized by a high degree of responsiveness to literal suggestions affecting the body, and restriction of emotional responses; usually associated with cataleptic stages or deeper.
Intellectual suggestibility – The type of hypnotic suggestibility in which a subject fears being controlled by the operator and is constantly trying to analyze, reject or rationalize everything the operator says. With this type of subject the operator must give logical explanations for every suggestion and must allow the subject to feel that he is doing the hypnotizing himself.
However, it is not clear or agreed what suggestibility actually is. It is both the indisputable variable and the factor most difficult to measure or control.
What has not been agreed on is whether suggestibility is:
  • a permanent fixed detail of character or personality;
  • a genetic or chemical psychiatric tendency;
  • a precursor to or symptom of an activation of such a tendency;
  • a learned skill or acquired habit;
  • synonymous with the function of learning;
  • a neutral, unavoidable consequence of language acquisition and empathy;
  • a biased terminology provoking one to resist new externally introduced ideas or perspectives;
  • a mutual symbiotic relation to the Other, such as the African conception of uBunthu or Ubuntu;
  • related to the capacity of empathy and communication;
  • a matter of concordant personal taste between speaker and hypnotist, and between listener and listener's like of, or use for, speaker's ideas;
  • a skill or a flaw or something neutral and universal.
Conceptually, hypnotizability has always been defined as the increase in suggestibility produced by hypnosis. In practice, hypnotizability is measured as suggestibility following a hypnotic induction. The data indicates that these are different constructs. Although the induction of hypnosis increases suggestibility to a substantial degree, the correlation between hypnotic and non-hypnotic suggestibility approximates the reliability coefficients of so-called hypnotizability scales. This indicates that hypnotic susceptibility scales are better measures of waking suggestibility than they are of hypnotizability.
Existing research into the phenomena of hypnosis is extensive and randomized controlled trials predominantly support the efficacy and legitimacy of hypnotherapy, but without a clearly defined concept of the entity or aspect being studied, the level an individual is objectively "suggestible" cannot be measured empirically, and makes exact therapeutic outcomes impossible to forecast.
Moreover, it logically hinders the development of non-bespoke hypnotherapy protocol. On this latter point, it must be pointed out that while some persuasion methods are more universally effective than others, the most reliably effective method with individuals is to personalize the approach by first examining clients' motivational, learning, behavioral, and emotional styles, among others. Indeed, few hypnotherapists will not make taking case history from the clients they will be working with priority.

Autonomy

The intrigue of differences in individual suggestibility even crops up in the early Greek philosophers. Aristotle had an unconcerned approach:
This perhaps is a more accurate echo of the experience of practicing hypnotherapists and hypnotists. When anyone is absorbed in someone else's inspiring words as they outline an idea or way of thinking, the subjective attention is held because of the logic, the aesthetic, and the relevance of the words to one's own personal experience and motivations. In these natural trance states, like those orchestrated purposefully by a hypnotherapist, the 'critical faculties' are naturally less active when there is less to be naturally critical of.
It is perhaps the "necessarily believing it" part of the Aristotelian quote above that is problematic, as this conception of suggestibility raises issues pertaining to the autonomy of attributing belief to an introduced idea, and how this comes to take place.

Susceptibility

Popular media and layman's articles occasionally use the terms "suggestible" and "susceptible" interchangeably, with reference to the extent to which a given individual responds to incoming suggestions from another. The two terms are not synonymous, however, as the latter term carries inherent negative bias absent from the neutral psychological factor described by "suggestibility".
In scientific research and academic literature on hypnosis and hypnotherapy, the term "suggestibility" describes a neutral psychological and possibly physiological state or phenomena. This is distinct from the culturally biased common parlance of the term "suggestible". The term "susceptible" implies weakness or some increased danger to which one is more likely to become a victim. It therefore has a negative effect on expectation and itself is a hypnotic suggestion that suggestions must be noticed and guarded against. Both terms are often bound with undeserved negative social connotations not inherent in the word meanings themselves.
To be suggestible is not to be gullible. The latter pertains to an empirical objective fact that can be shown accurate or inaccurate to any observer; the former term does not. To be open to suggestion has no bearing on the accuracy of any incoming suggestions, nor whether such an objective accuracy is possible, as is the case with metaphysical belief.
While research from the 1960s indicated increased suggestibility under the influence of LSD among both mentally ill and healthy individuals, recent documents suggest that the CIA and Department of Defense have discontinued research into LSD as a means of mind control.
Some therapists may examine worries or objections to suggestibility before proceeding with therapy: this is because some believe there is a rational or learned deliberate will to hold a belief, even in the case of more convincing new ideas, when there is a compelling cognitive reason not to 'allow oneself' to be persuaded. Perhaps this can be seen in historical cases of mass hypnosis where also there has been media suppression. In the individual, unexamined actions are sometimes described by hypno- and psycho-therapists based on outgrown belief systems.
Hypnotic suggestions include terms, phrases, or whole concepts where to understand the concept includes making sense of a subjective sensation, or a framework for the appropriate response.... simple one-word forms of this include the word terrorism where to understand the concept, one must understand the notion of terror and then understand in the sentence that it is meant to refer to "that" given object.