Every field needs someone who asks the question nobody wants asked. In hypnosis research, that person was Martin Orne. He was not an opponent of hypnosis. He used it clinically all his life. But he insisted on knowing how much of what researchers observed was hypnosis, and how much was simply people doing what the situation seemed to require.
The man
Martin Theodore Orne was born in Vienna in 1927, the son of a surgeon and a psychiatrist. The family left Austria in 1938 and settled in the United States. He trained in both medicine and psychology at Harvard, and spent most of his career at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directed a research unit and edited the leading journal in the field for decades. He died in 2000.
The question
As a student, Orne noticed something about hypnosis experiments. Subjects seemed remarkably good at producing whatever the experimenter was hoping to find.
That raised a doubt. When a hypnotized person behaves in an unusual way, there are at least three possible explanations.
- Hypnosis has caused it.
- The person has worked out what is wanted and is obligingly doing it.
- The person would have done it anyway, hypnotized or not.
Most researchers had assumed the first. Orne set out to tell them apart.
Demand characteristics
In a paper presented in 1959 and published in 1962, he introduced a concept that spread far beyond hypnosis. He called it the demand characteristics of an experiment: all the cues that tell a participant what the study is about and how they are expected to behave. The instructions, the setting, the experimenter’s manner, rumours on campus, the very fact of being in an experiment.
Participants, Orne argued, are not passive objects. They are people trying to make sense of an odd situation, and usually trying to be helpful. They want the experiment to succeed.
To show how far this goes, he gave volunteers tasks that were deliberately pointless, such as working through sheets of sums and then tearing each sheet into pieces before starting the next. He expected them to give up. They carried on for hours. In an experiment, people will do almost anything, because they assume it must be for a good reason.
The paper became one of the most cited in psychology.
The real-simulator design
Orne then devised a way to separate hypnosis from compliance.
Take people who have been tested and found to respond very little to hypnosis. Ask them to pretend to be deeply hypnotized, and to fool the experimenter. Tell them the experimenter will stop the session if the pretence is detected. The experimenter does not know who is genuinely hypnotized and who is acting.
Then run the experiment on both groups and compare.
- If simulators and genuinely hypnotized people behave the same, the behaviour cannot be put down to hypnosis. It could be produced by anyone who understood what was wanted.
- If they behave differently, something more is going on.
It turned out that experienced hypnotists could not tell the two apart by watching.
What the method showed
Antisocial acts. Earlier studies seemed to show that hypnotized people could be made to throw acid at someone or pick up a venomous snake. Orne’s simulators did exactly the same, or more readily. The behaviour came from trust in the experimenter, not from hypnosis.
Feats of strength and endurance. Hypnotized subjects appeared capable of unusual physical performance. Motivated people who were not hypnotized matched them.
Memory. Orne was among the first to show that hypnosis does not improve the accuracy of recall, and can create confident false memories. He testified in major court cases, and his work underpinned guidelines restricting hypnotically refreshed testimony.
What simulators could not fake
Orne also looked for the opposite: things that genuinely hypnotized people did that simulators did not.
He described what he called trance logic: a tolerance for contradiction. A deeply hypnotized person told that someone was sitting in an empty chair might report seeing them, and then, when the real person was pointed out standing elsewhere, calmly accept seeing two of them. Simulators tended to behave more “logically,” refusing to admit to seeing the same person twice.
Later research found trance logic less reliable than Orne hoped. But the principle held: the experience of hypnosis has features that people do not know to imitate.
His wider influence
- Demand characteristics is now a standard concept in every branch of psychology and in medical trials.
- The real-simulator design remains a tool in hypnosis research.
- Forensic guidelines on hypnosis and memory drew heavily on his work.
- Hypnosis became more credible, because claims that survived his tests were worth believing.
He was sometimes controversial. Late in life he was criticised for releasing therapy recordings of a famous patient, the poet Anne Sexton, to her biographer, with the family’s permission.
Why it matters to you
- Be sceptical of dramatic demonstrations. People will do a lot because they have been asked.
- Ask what a study was compared with. If no group was pretending or simply motivated, hypnosis may not be the explanation.
- Trust the findings that passed the test. Hypnotic pain relief, for instance, holds up against simulators and placebo.
- Remember memory. Confidence is not accuracy.
The bottom line
Martin Orne took hypnosis seriously enough to doubt it. By asking what else could explain the results, and building a clever way to find out, he cleared away a good many myths and left the genuine effects standing on firmer ground.
Next in the series: Pierre Janet: The Forgotten Pioneer Who Named Dissociation
This article is for general information and is not medical advice.