Suggestibility

A person is deemed to be suggestible if they accept and act on suggestions by others. Clearly, everyone acts at some point in their lives by the suggestions given by someone else, but some individuals can be more suggestible than others. Television is one example of this as some individuals see dangerous acts on television and try to perform the acts themselves. This is an example of technological determinism.

A person experiencing intense emotions tends to be more receptive to ideas and therefore more suggestible. Young children are generally more suggestible than older children who are more suggestible than adults.

However, psychologists have found that individual levels of self-esteem, assertiveness, and other qualities can make some people more suggestible than others — i.e. they act on others' suggestions more of the time than other people. This has resulted in this being seen as a spectrum of suggestibility.

This has ramifications in the scientific research of hypnosis. It is theorized in some cases, the hypnotic subject may not actually be entering a different psychological or physiological state, but rather just acting on social pressure. It is easier for them to comply than to disobey. This view does not discount the claim that hypnotized individuals are truly experiencing suggested effects, just that the mechanism by which this has taken place has in part been socially constructed and is not necessarily reliant on the idea of an altered state of consciousness.

It is claimed that sufferers of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Dissociative Identity Disorder are particularly suggestible. While it is true that DID sufferers tend to score to the higher end of the hypnotizability scale, there have not been enough studies done to support the claim of increased suggestibility.

See also

• Crowd psychology

External links

• Subliminal Influence A Critical Overview of the Research