Glossary
Demand characteristics
Listen instead of reading · 35 minDirty Mind: Dirty Talk Hypnosis – Find Your Own WordsNo script, no borrowed lines: a trance that lets your own words out – in a lower, slower voice. Also known as: experimenter demand
In short
Demand characteristics are the small cues in a situation that reveal what is expected of you – and that influence how you behave.
What does it mean for you?
We constantly sense what a situation expects of us – in the bedroom just as in the lab. That is why it matters that nothing "has to happen" in a trance. You may simply experience whatever comes, without having to prove anything to anyone.
What research says
Participants usually want to be good participants. If the setting signals what hypnotized people "should" do, some will do it whether or not anything special is happening.
Orne's answer was the real–simulator design: some participants are asked to fake hypnosis, and the experimenter does not know who is who. Effects that simulators can also produce cannot be credited to hypnosis alone.
Related topics
Studies on this page
Glossary
- Response expectancy Response expectancy means: if you firmly expect something to happen on its own – calm, a light arm – that very expectation can help bring it about.
- Trance logic Trance logic means that people in hypnosis calmly accept contradictions that would bother them immediately when awake – similar to a dream.
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