Everyone's Suggestible

There’s this idea that some people are more suggestible than others—more susceptible to psychic influence. These people are the ones that do wild stuff at a hypnosis show, or are more susceptable to misinformation online. What this idea misses is that suggestion is actually something that works on all of us.

Probably the most unnerving illustration of this is the literature about eyewitness testimony. We are very worried about how easy it is to change the memories of witnesses to a crime. This is particularly true in cases of child sexual abuse, with some very famous examples, like:

the case of Barbara Snow. A notable figure in the ‘satanic panic’ of the 80’s and 90’s, Snow appears to have fairly strong beliefs that satanic ritual abuse and military experimentation is a widespread phenomenon, despite evidence to the contrary. Her clients frequently ‘recover’ memories of events that appear to corroborate this. Unfortunately, Snow also appears to have a highly coercive practice. For example, in one particular case, the police deliberately fed Snow false information that repeatedly appeared in childrens’ subsequent testimony. She has also agreed to charges of fabricating notes from her sessions. Highly motivated as she appears to be, it’s unsurprising that so many of her clients ‘recover’ memories of an extremely rare phenomenon. It seems unlikely that Snow is somehow at the centre of some vortex of nefarious activity. What seems more likely is that, as in the case of the childrens’ testimony, her clients are led to embellish a legitimate trauma. But what is startling is the extent to which they can be embellished.

But we’re not most worried about children because children are more susceptible to suggestion. We’re most worried because we’re happier thinking that children are more susceptible. You see, without rehashing that article too much, our memories are very easy to manipulate and embellish, by the very nature of how they’re stored in the brain. It isn’t simply that we’re vulnerable to coercive or interrogative suggestibility—having ideas injected by the people asking us to recall things—we’re also passively modifying our memories every time we retrieve them. If, at the time of retrieval, for any reason, we cross-pollinate our memory with some new and different information, there’s a fairly high likelihood that the memory is going to be stored alongside that new information too when you put it away. If that new information is similar enough, it’s likely to be integrated into the memory. It’s just efficient storage.

And I want to make a big deal out of this memory stuff, because I think most people aren’t keen on the idea that the way we think and act and behave is hugely susceptible to outside influences like this. No one wants to think that they’re suggestible. We’d prefer to scoff at hypnosis, than worry that we might end up the next Manchurian Candidate. But, really, it seems like under the right circumstances we’re all pretty suggestible. Not just for memories, but for everything.

Now, there’s a sort-of personality trait we call suggestibility in the literature. It was born in hypnosis research; the idea being that, the higher you score in hypnotic suggestibility, the more responsive you’ll be to suggestion in a hypnotic state, and perhaps this kind of suggestibility generalises to other things.

But, frankly, and to be quite reductive, all hypnotic suggestibility seems to track is our willingness and capacity to engage in a task we’ve been instructed to do.¹ If we’re good at exercise, and we’re comfortable participating in a hypnotism about exercise, then the positive motivation we get in the session is going to translate to performance. Less so if we’re less good at exercise, even if we’re comfortable with the idea. The same people will be differently hypnotisible across different tasks, because suggestibility measures just sort of gloss over individual differences in willingness and capacity (pdf). But, so long as we’re willing and capable, or at least not actively opposed, hypnotism is likely within our grasp. That’s why every resource you see on the topic of clinical hypnotism will claim that it works for the majority of people. They aren’t lying. It does!

Another good example of our suggestibility is the placebo effect. This doesn’t seem to bear much relationship to our susceptibility to hypnosis, something researchers are still worrying over (pdf). And yet, captured in our measures of suggestion or not, the placebo effect obviously is suggestion. And it is hugely influential, even if it’s similarly unpredictable. In plenty of cases it works even if we’re told it’s a placebo—so called ‘open-label’ or ‘honest placebos’. All of this orthogonal to your hypnotic suggestibility, which itself might be one of any number of actual forms of suggestibility.²

And the last example I’ll use to really drive home the point is any meditative practice. These, oftentimes, have real, physical effects on the body. Depending on what kind of meditation you’re doing, you might get lower levels of cortisol, lower blood pressure, pain management, influences on the immune response, changes in your focus and attention. Here, you’re not so much being suggested to, so much as you’re suggesting to yourself.

All this to say, we are suggestible. All of us. Under the right circumstances, the right kind of suggestion influences the way our mind and body interprets the world. Importantly Not because of how we think the world is, but because of how we’ve been instructed to. I keep saying it, but that ‘you’, sitting there, perched behind your eyes, isn’t as influential as you’d like to think.