An Open Avenue to Understanding the Implications of Variations in Human Susceptibility to Suggestion
Or, what Mattias Desmet hasn't explicitly mentioned when talking about that troublesome mass formation hypnosis
It turns out that psychologists have pretty well mapped out variations through time, age, and sex of humans of susceptibility to suggestion/hypnosis. Below is a short list of some of the papers available on the Internet that show, among other things:
Hypnotic suggestibility is highest in the young but gradually decreases until about the age of 40, and then increases again after that;
Suggestibility level is, on average, significantly higher in females than males;
Suggestibility level is, on average, measurably higher in those who are politically liberal than in those who are politically conservative.
The proportions of the human population that are moderately and extremely susceptible to mass formation hypnosis according to Desmet correspond to the proportions of the human population that are individually moderately and extremely susceptible to hypnosis.
Here are just a few of the papers/links I’ve found so far — and am still reading and digesting:
https://psychcentral.com/lib/all-about-hypnosis-and-hypnotherapy#1
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17444365/ (See
https://booksc.me/ if you are looking for a full copy of the text of this last paper.)
Note that various Wikipedia entries explain the meanings of such hypnosis-related terms as “suggestibility”, “openness to new experiences”, “agreeableness”, and “fantasy-prone personality”.