Over the years, from time to time, I get asked the same question:
Can hypnosis be used to cause someone to commit a crime, like murder someone?
It’s an interesting question, and is usually broached by someone who watched Derren Brown, or a YouTube video, that seemed to indicate it was possible.
Many people have asked me a similar question:
Isn’t it true that a person will not do anything under hypnosis that they wouldn’t normally do?
But this is a completely different thing. I always respond that people onstage in hypnosis shows do all kinds of things they wouldn’t normally do, like talking into their shoe like it was a phone, or forgetting their name.
So it’s not about doing things we wouldn’t normally do.
It’s about committing crimes or violating their moral code.
Now let’s start by saying that the GOAT, Dr Milton Erickson said it was not possible to violate someone’s moral code through hypnotic suggestion.
Erickson’s own experiments indicated that a subject instructed to violate their closely held values would simply refuse, or awaken from trance.
But there’s another school of thought that says that a person might do so if provided with a rationale; a reason that seems legitimate.
For example, a hypnotized person is told to remove all his clothing in a public place, and refuses. But if a reason is provided, like he’s home alone on a hot day and wants to take a shower, he might well comply.
In this school of thought, the subject might comply because he isn’t directly challenging his moral code, head-on.
Dr Martin Orne of the University of Pennsylvania performed hypnosis experiments, and found that some people would indeed follow suggestions for antisocial or criminal behavior when hypnotized.
But that tells us nothing though, because Orne found that the same percentage of people would comply with the anti-social or criminal request, with no hypnosis at all.
“But I saw it on television!” is the typical response I hear.
And here’s the thing…
I’ve done a lot of television since 1975; probably close to one hundred appearances, in Canada, the US, and Australia.
And when television programs are involved, nothing is what it seems to be.
A man seemingly goes up to a total stranger, and through some verbal manipulation, hypnotizes him to go and shoot a shopkeeper. (Naturally the gun is loaded with blanks.)
But because it’s television, there will be a ton of stuff that is never shown.
Things like:
- How did they choose the “volunteer”?
- How many times did the experiment fail before it worked?
- Were there TV cameras and crew in sight?
- Did the person know it was for a television production?
Believe me, it’s the stuff you don’t see that usually makes it all work.
Like the time I had lunch with three other hypnotists and hypnotized the waiter to let us pay the bill with my Toronto Public Library card. We have it on video, and it really happened.
But the man saw the cameras and knew something was up.
And otherwise sane and reasonable people will do almost anything to get on TV.
But here’s the real problem in figuring this out:
There are different types of antisocial acts and crimes, and a person who might be persuaded to shoplift in hypnosis might not commit grand theft auto or murder, in the same trance.
And the real issue here is there’s no way to test it without having someone actually killed. That’s the litmus test.
And even so, committing murder under hypnosis might really mean that the subject knew, or at least suspected it was an experiment.
This is substantiated by Canadian researcher, Dr Nick Spanos, who surmised that hypnotic subjects were not being controlled, but were consciously or unconsciously attempting to appease the hypnotist, by being compliant to suggestion.
And since no reputable researcher would permit a psychological experiment to end in someone’s death as the indicator of success, the subject would expect something like a phony gun, or that the experimenter would stop him before he could commit a capital offense.
Perhaps we’ll never know for sure.
Mike Mandel
Cell Block D
Toronto Hypnosis Penitentiary
