Abstract
Hypnosis and hypnotic suggestions are gradually gaining popularity within the consciousness community as established tools for the experimental manipulation of illusions of involuntariness, hallucinations and delusions. However, hypnosis is still far from being a widespread instrument; a crucial hindrance to taking it up is the amount of time needed to invest in identifying people high and low in responsiveness to suggestion. In this study, we introduced an online assessment of hypnotic response and estimated the extent to which the scores and psychometric properties of an online screening differ from an offline one. We propose that the online screening of hypnotic response is viable as it reduces the level of responsiveness only by a slight extent. The application of online screening may prompt researchers to run large-scale studies with more heterogeneous samples, which would help researchers to overcome some of the issues underlying the current replication crisis in psychology.
Highlights
Hypnosis and hypnotic suggestions have been shown to be useful experimental tools to test theories of cognitive neuroscience (Oakley & Halligan, 2013; Raz, 2011), especially theories related to consciousness (Cardeña, 2014; Terhune, Cleeremans, Raz, & Lynn, 2017)
The density of the data is similar between the groups even around the right tail of the distribution indicating that similar proportion of the participants scored high on the Sussex Waterloo Scale of Hypnotizability (SWASH) in the offline and online groups
The online assessment of hypnotic suggestibility appears to be feasible and the benefits far outweigh the downsides involved with its application
Summary
Hypnosis and hypnotic suggestions have been shown to be useful experimental tools to test theories of cognitive neuroscience (Oakley & Halligan, 2013; Raz, 2011), especially theories related to consciousness (Cardeña, 2014; Terhune, Cleeremans, Raz, & Lynn, 2017). Correlations between hypnotisability and measures employed by consciousness researchers (e.g. the rubber hand illusion; the vicarious pain questionnaire; mirror touch synaesthesia) have recently been found (Lush et al, 2019). These correlations suggest that measures common in the consciousness literature are driven by hypnotic suggestibility. In order to conduct experiments involving hypnosis, researchers generally need to recruit from a specific subsample of people based on their tendency to respond to hypnotic suggestions. Researchers run hypnosis screening sessions before recruitment, so that, for example, they can identify the participants at the lowest and highest end of the scale (low and highly hypnotisable people, respectively). Screening procedures are time-consuming; to identify a single highly suggestible participant for an experiment, one has to find, on average, ten people who are willing to undertake a screening that can last from 40 up to 90 min depending on the applied method
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