Is the idea of hypnosis being a unique state of consciousness invalidated by highly motivated people faking hypnosis?
No more than it invalidates the concept of a ‘broken leg’ if someone pretends to be injured. The fact that it is possible to pretend to be hypnotised makes it a really interesting phenomenon. Stage hypnotists don’t really care very much whether their participants are faking or not, as long as the audience are laughing. Researchers have a harder time sorting out the real responses from the pretenders, but they have developed some interesting tools. One technique is to use the real/simulator design. In this design you deliver the same suggestions to people high and low in hypnotisability, with the lows told to act ‘as if’ they were hypnotised. If the two groups perform the same then your result is probably not due to hypnosis, but if the highs perform differently then it is assumed that some of the suggested effect was genuine. More recently, brain imaging techniques have been used to test the ‘genuineness’ of hypnotic effects.
