(no subject)
Dec. 27th, 2018 11:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[cw: amnesia]
Pet peeve: when people discussing the nature of morality or just neat facts throw this tidbit out there--
"Haidt et al hypnotised some test subjects to feel disgust in response to certain words and not know why, and then gave them paraphrased descriptions of the same situations, some of which contained disgust triggers and some of which didn't. The disgusted ones came up with convoluted justifications of why the disgusting situations were (more) immoral (or *occasionally* just 'I don't know, but it strikes me as wrong'), failing to notice that the disgust was the *real* reason why they were bothered."
--without clarifying that yes the researchers *did* check for the main failure mode and only *some* of the subjects had said failure mode, and furthermore these subjects' results were discarded.
---
Here's the problem: there's a spectrum of possible responses to an amnesia suggestion (the part where the subjects don't know *why* they feel disgusted). They can straight-up work or straight-up fail, but they can also *partially* work. And an amnesia suggestion that partially takes often manifests as a *compulsion to lie*, to *pretend* you don't know the thing you actually do still know.
So if you know the stuff in the previous paragraph and you hear the tidbit, you think "But did they *actually* not notice the real reason why they were bothered, or did they just feel compelled not to include that reason in their explanation? Maybe they were consciously aware that they were pulling the reasons they were giving out of their asses."
The study is "Hypnotic Disgust Makes Moral Judgments More Severe" (Wheatley & Haidt 2005), and a proof copy is freely available. At the end of the experiment, the researchers had the subjects describe what was going on during the experiment from their own perspectives. (A couple of the subjects' comments are included in the "General Discussion" section, in the lower-left of page 4.) Some of them *did* have the compulsion-to-lie manifestation (remember that these subjects' results were discarded!), while in others the amnesia fully took and they did believe what they were saying at the time.
---
I mean, yes nobody can know stuff about everything, and sometimes in more casual conversations--especially spoken--one cannot reasonably be expected to be super clear (I admit, when speaking I sometimes have enough trouble making sure the right number of negations come out of my mouth), but also I for one spent ages casually mentally dismissing that tidbit, before eventually reading the study and finding that they *had* in fact accounted for that flaw. (whether there are *other* flaws in the study is another question, and one I am not particularly well equipped to answer)
And I'm probably not the only one, given that the kind of social circles (at least the ones I'm acquainted with) where Jonathan Haidt's research comes up in conversation tend to have very high rates of hypno-fetishism and I expect some of them have absorbed enough hypnosis knowledge to see the problem.
(If you don't run in such circles, please enjoy this glimpse into another plane of reality.)
---
I am going to tag this post with my kink tag, for the same reasons that I used that tag on the post a couple years ago about why Christmas-themed hypnotic inductions on people you don't know very well are a terrible idea.
Pet peeve: when people discussing the nature of morality or just neat facts throw this tidbit out there--
"Haidt et al hypnotised some test subjects to feel disgust in response to certain words and not know why, and then gave them paraphrased descriptions of the same situations, some of which contained disgust triggers and some of which didn't. The disgusted ones came up with convoluted justifications of why the disgusting situations were (more) immoral (or *occasionally* just 'I don't know, but it strikes me as wrong'), failing to notice that the disgust was the *real* reason why they were bothered."
--without clarifying that yes the researchers *did* check for the main failure mode and only *some* of the subjects had said failure mode, and furthermore these subjects' results were discarded.
---
Here's the problem: there's a spectrum of possible responses to an amnesia suggestion (the part where the subjects don't know *why* they feel disgusted). They can straight-up work or straight-up fail, but they can also *partially* work. And an amnesia suggestion that partially takes often manifests as a *compulsion to lie*, to *pretend* you don't know the thing you actually do still know.
So if you know the stuff in the previous paragraph and you hear the tidbit, you think "But did they *actually* not notice the real reason why they were bothered, or did they just feel compelled not to include that reason in their explanation? Maybe they were consciously aware that they were pulling the reasons they were giving out of their asses."
The study is "Hypnotic Disgust Makes Moral Judgments More Severe" (Wheatley & Haidt 2005), and a proof copy is freely available. At the end of the experiment, the researchers had the subjects describe what was going on during the experiment from their own perspectives. (A couple of the subjects' comments are included in the "General Discussion" section, in the lower-left of page 4.) Some of them *did* have the compulsion-to-lie manifestation (remember that these subjects' results were discarded!), while in others the amnesia fully took and they did believe what they were saying at the time.
---
I mean, yes nobody can know stuff about everything, and sometimes in more casual conversations--especially spoken--one cannot reasonably be expected to be super clear (I admit, when speaking I sometimes have enough trouble making sure the right number of negations come out of my mouth), but also I for one spent ages casually mentally dismissing that tidbit, before eventually reading the study and finding that they *had* in fact accounted for that flaw. (whether there are *other* flaws in the study is another question, and one I am not particularly well equipped to answer)
And I'm probably not the only one, given that the kind of social circles (at least the ones I'm acquainted with) where Jonathan Haidt's research comes up in conversation tend to have very high rates of hypno-fetishism and I expect some of them have absorbed enough hypnosis knowledge to see the problem.
(If you don't run in such circles, please enjoy this glimpse into another plane of reality.)
---
I am going to tag this post with my kink tag, for the same reasons that I used that tag on the post a couple years ago about why Christmas-themed hypnotic inductions on people you don't know very well are a terrible idea.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-28 12:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-28 10:57 pm (UTC)---
I have not literally read the book on hypnotic amnesia, but I've read a bunch of people who have.
I don't spend *much* time in hypnofetish circles these days because TBH I have had enough SJ Discourse for one lifetime, and I never attended any meetups or anything, but I still flit around the edges and overall think that spending a couple years reading and occasionally interacting with their blogosphere was a valuable experience. Though it is still the case that I have never had (broadly defined) sex, a future me who is sexually active feels *plausible* now in a way it never did before: I have a sense now of what that would be like when things were going well, and what to watch out for, and what can be accomplished.
And as I mentioned in the previous post, I finally learned masturbation techniques that actually suit me, which is probably the most important thing given how...I was going to say "how autophilic I am", but it seems like the standard definition is narrower than the one Alison uses in this thread.
(see also this conversation I had on AO3 with the author of my favourite piece of erotic fanfiction)
---
(While it was not portrayed as being based in hypnosis, and memory play is a limit for me so I have no personal experience, I do get the impression that my brain based the feeling of being bewitched on the descriptions I've read of what compulsion-to-lie pseudo-amnesia feels like.)