Hypnotized: Is it real or not? Killing a popular belief Acting as if your hypnotized by Nicholas Spanos(1982) tells us of his belief that even though many believed that being hypnotized was an involuntary action he could prove that they were wrong.
Hilgard(1978) whom many agreed with concerning being hypnotized and the state of our mind.
Proving the nonbelievers wrong
Were they right?
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Psychology has always been about the science behind the behavior of peoples feelings or reactions to things. Nicholas wanted everyone to know that despite the popular belief that we couldn’t control what we did while hypnotized it was all in the minds of the person being hypnotized and the hypnotizer. This article doesn’t have an experiment just a study to show how you can see that being hypnotized is more a feeling of peer pressure to prove to others that being hypnotized works. Nicholas Spanos was said to be an American skeptic because he went against people like Ernest
while the other wasn’t and were asked to do the same thing of dunking their hands in ice. The group that was hypnotized said they didn’t feel a lot of pain while the other group said they felt a lot.
Nicholas Spanos didn’t do much of a formal test but more of a study to see how he could prove he was right. His belief was that while you were hypnotized every action you took was voluntary and not due to a state of consciousness. To prove this he had two groups, one of which knew they were going to be hypnotized while the other didn’t. Both groups did the same experiment of dunking their hands in ice without being hypnotized and being asked to do it for as long as they could. They were then asked how much pain they felt and it recorded. Then they hypnotized one group
All of this comes from 16 studies in which Spanos was involved in. Spanos was in the thinking that if you felt that you were susceptible and went in with the thinking that this wasn’t voluntary it would make you believe you were
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being hypnotized. It would be easy to make yourself believe that someone is controlling your actions while you’re “hypnotized” especially if they make you do things that you wouldn’t normally do while “conscious”. In the end Nicholas Spanos proved that his theory on being hypnotized was voluntary was correct.