Mass Hypnosis is a Feature, Not a Bug

Or, why, over the long run, free (and civil) speech benefits everyone

Jul 06, 2022

Introduction

Mattias Desmet recently re-introduced to public discourse the concept of mass formation hypnosis1 as explanation for the odd group and individual behavior lately on almost worldwide display using quite dire, apocalyptic terms. Provided here is scientific evidence from the academic literature that this odd group behavior is not extraordinary, and not necessarily dire. In fact, humans appear to constantly employ and manage the proximal causes of mass formation hypnosis to construct and maintain — for better or for worse — the cultures that they live within.

According to Desmet, the simultaneous existence of four factors in many members of a population prime a society for exhibition of the overly-focused, consequences-oblivious group and individual suggestibility that supports totalitarianism:

Social isolation;
A lack of sensemaking in individual lives;
Abundant presence of free-floating anxiety; and,
Similar (consequent) abundance of free-floating psychological discontent.

If these four factors are present in enough members of any given society, Desmet says the society in question is at risk for the ‘crystallizing’ action of “mass formation” where large numbers of discontented, anxious, confused, and isolated people simultaneously and suddenly seize upon some single apparent threat and give it their entire attention and energy. The basic reason for this attention and energy seizure, according to Desmet, is that putting focus on a such a threat provides immediate and palpable relief from a constellation of the longstanding chronic pressures of social isolation, lack of sensemaking, and free-floating anxiety and discontent. This mobilization of individual attention and energy against some single perceived threat unfortunately, according to Desmet’s explanation of the phenomenon, aggregates very easily into increasingly totalitarian individual and government behavior:

From this state of mental intoxication you can explain all of the rest of the phenomena of totalitarianism. The mental intoxication leads to a narrowing of the field of attention, it makes people only see what is indicated by the [mainstream] narrative. For instance, they see the victims of the corona virus, but do not seem to see at the cognitive level the collateral damage of the victims claimed by the lockdowns.
Mass formation [then] is actually a symptomatic solution for a real psychological problem. In my opinion, this crisis in the first place is a large societal and psychological crisis, much more than a biological crisis, let’s say.
As a consequence of mass formation people do not get egotistic at all. Rather, to the contrary, mass formation focuses your attention so much on one point that you can take everything from people, their psychological and physical well-being, their material well-being, and they will not notice it all.
Under mass hypnosis and subsequent totalitarianism [however], people become radically intolerant of dissident voices and so someone tells another story, or claims the official story is wrong, then this [dissenting] person threatens to wake the people up and they will get angry because they are confronted [again] with the initial anxiety and initial psychological discontent, and so they direct all their aggression at these dissonant voices – and at the same time they are radically tolerant for their leaders, for the people who pronounce the mainstream narrative.

Given the ongoing, anomalously strange and extreme actions of much of humanity through the last several years, this ‘mass formation hypnosis’ theory is difficult to ignore. Nonetheless, Desmet’s “30,000 foot view” of the roots of this phenomenon (social isolation, lack of sense-making, free-floating anxiety, etc.) makes mass formation sound like a huge -- but only occasionally occurring -- social problem that more or less just needs to be patiently suffered through. Indeed, Desmet-the-professional-psychotherapist believes those that are unafflicted by mass hypnosis should actively take what amounts to a psychotherapeutic approach towards those afflicted with such a malady during such temporarily difficult times:

Gustave Le Bon said, for instance, that it is very difficult if mass formation happens at the very large scale in a society, it is very difficult to wake up the masses [from their hypnotic state]. He says that usually you cannot do this, it is impossible to do this because the masses only wake up after a lot of destruction usually. But he says if people who do not agree with the mass narrative, if they continue to talk they prevent the masses from fomenting their large crimes. So, it is very important: you can make the [mass] hypnosis less deep by continuing to talk – so that is what we all have to do, I think.

Scientifically speaking, what more atomistic process lies beneath mass hypnosis?

Desmet draws no direct attention to this matter in his video interview, but the behavior of people under individual hypnosis is identical to that strong environmental obliviousness and susceptibility to outside suggestion that he describes as occurring under group or mass formation hypnosis. According to Ponton (2016), “Hypnotism puts you into a state of ‘focused concentration’, during which you’re vaguely aware of your surroundings — you just don’t care about them.” Moreover, this heightened focus and attention are accompanied by a highly increased receptivity to suggestions from others.

The exact correspondence of the main behavioral symptoms between individual susceptibility to hypnosis, and to the macro-scale mass formation hypnosis diagnosed by Desmet, indicates that the phenomenon is not – Desmet’s 30,000 foot high altitude perspective on the situation notwithstanding – ultimately caused by temporary cultural conditions where social isolation, lack of sensemaking, abundant free-floating anxiety and discontent2 are affecting human populations. Instead, judging by the very well-documented, relatively stable distribution of individual susceptibility to hypnosis and to suggestion across generations and through individual lifetimes, any problems and benefits created by variations in individual susceptibility to individual or group hypnosis are, to the contrary, part and parcel of the perennial human state of being. The crux of the real problem is that sometimes the courses of action suggested by outside influences, and that are inserted into receptive human minds, are markedly suboptimal, and enter and stay there because of the lack of effective competition from alternative more optimal solutions.

Better understanding of this aspect of the human condition may lead to more focused and more effective responses to the problem of mass formation hypnosis than suggested by the prescriptive aspect of Desmet’s original mass formation model. At the least, better understanding of the problem should lessen anxiety and fear about the phenomenon.

General characteristics of the hypnotic ‘state’ supporting mass hypnosis

Hilgard (1965, pp. 6-10) reviews the major characteristics of hypnotized people in a manner that provides more insight into how massed hypnotic susceptibility and mass hypnosis can create social and cultural problems . Substitute the words “media”, “experts”, “government spokesmen” and “peers”, for “hypnotist” in the passage below, and compare these characteristics to what occurred in many humans worldwide during the COVID19 pandemic [emphases added below]:

1. Subsidence of the planning function. The hypnotized subject loses initiative and lacks the desire to make and carry out plans on his own. In an older vocabulary, he lacks the desire to will action. It should be noted that there is always a relative, rather than absolute, change in state under hypnosis. Thus the hypnotic subject has the ability to initiate action, to deliver a speech, and so on; what is important is that he has little desire to do so.

2. Redistribution of attention. To state that attention is redistributed is a loose way of saying, first, that attention is selective, that second, that under hypnosis selective attention and selective inattention go beyond the usual range. It does not follow that hypnosis is characterized by an unusual concentration of attention; it may be, in fact, that attention under hypnosis is generally diffuse, and that the attentive functions under the control of the hypnotist are residual ones. If the subject is paying very little attention to the environment, his focus on what the hypnotist tells him may appear heightened in contrast to his lack of interest in his surroundings.

3. Availability of visual memories from the past, and heightened ability for fantasy-production. Experiments and demonstrations of hypnosis commonly make use of age-regression, in which the subject is asked to return to a scene experienced in the past. He may then experience a vivid recall of what transpired at that time, although he remains an external observer of these events; the recall appears to be facilitated by the availability of visual events. If the regression suggestions are more successful, the subject may feel that he is actually living again in the past, once again a child playing with his dog, or whatever the scene may be. The memories are not all veridical, and the hypnotist can in fact suggest the reality of memories for events that did not happen.

4. Reduction in reality testing and a tolerance for persistent reality distortion. The amount of reality testing that goes on in ordinary life is overlooked because it is so familiar, but once it is called to attention it is easy to notice how frequently people check their orientation by squirming, scratching, looking around, noting the time, adjusting clothing. This reality testing is reduced in the hypnotized person, partly as a result of the manipulations by the hypnotist, with his emphasis on relaxation and detachment. Reduction of reality testing leads to the acceptance of reality distortions.

5. Increased suggestibility. The suggestibility theory of hypnosis is so widely accepted that hypnosis and suggestibility come to be equated by some writers on hypnosis. Both Hull (1933) and Weitzenhoffer (1953) see the relationship between hypnosis and suggestibility to be so intimate that they link the terms in the titles of their books. This characteristic of the hypnotized subject has been placed somewhat late in the list because it is but one of the features of hypnosis, arising at least in part as a consequence of the foregoing [listed] changes in the state of the person.

6. Role behavior. The suggestions that a subject in hypnosis will accept are not limited to specific acts or perceptions; he will, indeed, adopt a suggested role and carry on complex activities corresponding to that role. Perhaps there is something of an actor in each of us; in any case, the hypnotized subject will throw himself into a role, particularly if it is a congenial one, and act as if he were deeply involved in it. This characteristic of hypnosis is so impressive that it has led to one of the current theories of hypnosis, the role-enactment theory of Sarbin.

7. Amnesia for what transpired within the hypnotic state. Ever since its discovery by the Marquis de Puységur in 1784, posthypnotic amnesia has been found to be one of the most dependable concomitants of hypnosis; it has been used ever since as the mark of what is called the highly susceptible or “somnambulistic” subject.”

According to Page and Green’s 2007 An Update on Age, Hypnotic Suggestibility, and Gender: A Brief Report, average hypnotic susceptibility levels are highest in children,3 decline to a lifetime low at about the age of 40, then gradually increase again after that point,4 all other things being equal. See Figure 1 below for illustration of these trends.

Figure 1. Note the increase in average hypnotic susceptibility after about age 40. Recent research mentioned later indicates this is another ‘burning down the house’ phenomenon caused by age-related atrophy of the prefrontal cortex of the brain.

The preponderance of evidence indicates that human females are, on average, slightly more susceptible to hypnosis and suggestion than males.5 Page and Green (ibid.) say this regarding the question of gender and average level of hypnotic susceptibility and suggestion:

As noted earlier, Morgan and Hilgard (1973) reported that women between the ages of 21 and 32 years scored significantly higher on the SHSS:A relative to similarly aged men. We replicated this finding using the HGSHS:A. Furthermore, we found an advantage for women scoring higher than men across our entire sample as well. The literature regarding gender differences and hypnotic suggestibility is equivocal. Whereas some studies failed to find gender differences (e.g., Cooper & London, 1966; McConkey, Bamier, McCallum, &Bishop, 1996) others have reported a slight advantage for women (e.g., Kihlstrom et al., 1980; Weekes & Lynn, 1990). In a recent large scale study of nearly 1,900 undergraduate students, Rudski, Marra, and Graham (2004) found females to outscore males by nearly 5/10 of a point on the HGSHS:A. Green (2004), also using the HGSHS:A, reported an even larger (i.e., greater than 1 full point) advantage among female undergraduate students relative to males. Our present finding that women scored on average 7/10 of a point higher on the HGSHS:A than men is consistent with these latter reports.

Finally, Benham, Smith, and Nash (2002) showed that since the beginning of standardized hypnotic susceptibility testing in the 1950s, there has been a smooth gradual increase in the average level of human hypnotic susceptibility and suggestibility. This trend consistent over at least 40 years is illustrated in Figure 2. The difference in average susceptibility to hypnosis and suggestion over the time period concerned is slightly greater in amplitude than that generally believed to exist between the sexes.

Figure 2 illustrating the linear increase in average hypnotic susceptibility and suggestibility over the period 1960-2000. From Benham et al., 2002.

Approximate distribution of hypnotic susceptibility in human populations

Desmet remarks:

Usually it is only about 30% [of a population that gets] grasped in a mass phenomenon or hypnosis. An additional 35-45% usually does not want to raise a dissonant voice in the public space because they are scared of the consequences. So, usually about 70% who shut up – 30% because they are convinced by the mainstream narrative and 40% because they don’t dare to speak out. And then there is an additional 20-25-30% who does not go along with the narrative and says it in certain situations.

Hilgard’s (1965) relatively large North American sample set (n=533) of individual hypnosis susceptibility scores used to standardize the Stanford hypnotic susceptibility tests appears to be the likely original scientific source of Desmet’s quoted estimates of proportions of the human population subject to mass formation hypnosis. Score range runs from 0 to 12, with 0 representing the score of an individual that is not susceptible to hypnosis and suggestion, and 12 being the highest possible hypnotic susceptibility score:

Figure 4. Test score data from Hilgard 1965. Sample dominated by testees of European heritage.

Bear in mind, while examining Figure 3, that newly-available genetic data suggest that this distribution of variation in susceptibility of humans to hypnosis varies very markedly from population to population in the world. There is evidence that Asian populations, for example, are more susceptible on average to hypnotism and outside influence than humans of European ancestry.6 This subject will be discussed briefly later because average population susceptibility to hypnotism appears to have done much to determine general national culture, as well as the very broad outlines of the histories of different populations.

What, if any, are the distinguishing characteristics of people susceptible to individual and mass hypnosis?

Desmet answers this question once again in ‘high-altitude’, general terms:

Concerning the question why some people are immune to mass formation – that is a very good question. The group that is immune is always highly diverse, they come from all political orientations, from all social classes. That’s something that was described already [for example] in the Dreyfus case.
What makes people immune? I think to answer this question we need to go really deeply into individual psychology and to ask ourselves in what way do people try to establish psychological stability. Some people always do it by going along with the group, and other people do it much more by staying very close to what they think is reasonable. And both these things – identifying with the group and, on the other hand, trying to be as reasonable as possible – both these things give a specific kind of psychological stability and psychological strength.
I think there is a tendency to independent thinking, this is characteristic of people who are more or less immune to mass formation.

As you would expect of an experienced and competent professional, Desmet’s above summary and politically careful answer to the question is consistent with the detailed empirically-established findings of psychological science to date. Kihlstrom (1998) provides a less generalized review of the results of scientific inquiries into the observable personality characteristics associated with people with low and high susceptibility to hypnosis up to the date of his writing:

Hypnotizability is not substantially correlated with most other individual differences in ability or personality, such as intelligence or adjustment. Interestingly, it does not appear to be correlated with individual differences in conformity, persuasibility, or response to other forms of social inﬂuence. However, in the early 1960s, Ronald Shor, Arvid Ås, and others found that hypnotizability was correlated with subjects’ tendency to have hypnosis-like experiences outside of formal hypnotic settings,7 and an extensive interview study by Josephine Hilgard showed that hypnotizable subjects displayed a high level of imaginative involvement in domains such as reading and drama. In 1974, Auke Tellegen and Gilbert Atkinson developed a scale of absorption to measure the disposition to have subjective experiences characterized by the full engagement of attention (narrowed or expanded) and blurred boundaries between self and object. Absorption is the most reliable correlate of hypnotizability (by contrast, vividness of mental imagery is essentially uncorrelated with hypnosis), although the statistical relation is too weak to permit conﬁdent prediction of an individual’s actual response to hypnotic suggestion. So far as the measurement of hypnotizability is concerned [however], there is no substitute for performance-based measures such as the Stanford and Harvard scales.

Since the Kihlstrong 1998 summary review above:

Ludwig et al. (2013) confirmed that susceptibility to hypnosis is signaled by certain personality traits known to be controlled by frontal cortex functioning. People of both sexes who are present-focused and who tend to dislike challenging mental tasks (“high non-planning impulsivity”), and people with high self-reported self-control under conditions of self-perceived difficulty and hardship (holding the level of high non-planning impulsivity constant), are more susceptible to hypnosis. In addition, in men only, the tendency to act on the spur of the moment and consequently live an inconsistent lifestyle, is also associated with increased susceptibility to hypnosis and suggestion.
Terhune and Hedman (2017) experimentally demonstrated that those highly susceptible to hypnosis possess much reduced awareness of when and if they are being externally manipulated. The results of this study jibe inversely with Desmet’s imputing a “tendency to independent thinking” to those immune to mass formation hypnosis. This independent thinking tendency will also be further discussed below.

Hypnotic susceptibility – determined by the ‘hypnotist’ and other nurture, and/or by nature?

There are two scientific working hypotheses about the basic nature of hypnosis and suggestion. On the one hand, there are those who believe those hypnotized enter a uniquely different state of mind than their everyday mind – an altered (trance) state of mind, and those non-state skeptics who believe hypnosis and suggestibility are non-extraordinary, and represent either a placebo effect, an arbitrary redefinition of the ordinary interaction with a therapist (or some other teacher or active agent in the world), or role-playing. Surprisingly, Hilgard (1965, p. 48), a staunch academic supporter of the altered state working hypothesis of hypnosis, admits that the somewhat ceremonial, formal hypnotic induction process is not absolutely critical to the development of hypnotic susceptibility. He states, “…that there is no uniform relationship between hypnotic state [achieved by induction and the hypnotist] and response to suggestions.”

Hilgard (1965, p. 20) summarizes the views of one of the two main modern academic proponents of the skeptical non-state model of hypnosis and suggestibility. This particular proponent skeptical of the altered state view of hypnosis, Barber, appears to have provided the only psychological model that allows for both individual and group hypnosis and individual and group hypnotic susceptibility:

Another active worker in hypnosis, Barber, takes a point of view similar to that of Sarbin, in that the role of induction [and the hypnotist] is minimized, and the trance state is also minimized. What is left, then, is an ability to yield [embody and exhibit] hypnotic-like phenomena, which some people possess and other people do not possess [bold emphasis added]. He believes that the major phenomena of hypnosis can be demonstrated, with individual differences in the ability to produce them, but that the phenomena do not require an induction procedure or a special sort of state (except, in some instances, it is necessary to control motivation or to arouse imagination).

Under the Barber model of hypnosis and suggestibility, any intended or accidental environmental influence potentially can come to seize and influence the minds of people susceptible to hypnosis, whether the influence is the hypnotic induction of a certified hypnotist, a random comment from a passer-by, a brief deep frown from a disappointed parent, a spouse’s morning mood, a television advertisement, or alarming news.

In the applied fields of medicine and business marketing and advertising, the working approaches and techniques of Milton Erickson and Robert Cialdini, respectively, are congruent with Barber’s model of hypnosis. Instead of the establishment of rapport with a suggesting ‘hypnotist’ through a process of formal hypnotic induction, both Erickson and Cialdini have found that the same effect can be obtained by the simple intentional or unintentional provision of a variety of attention-gathering environmental cues to subjects. Cialdini has systematically explained these cues, reporting that there are three main kinds of such:

1. The sexual;

2. The threatening (think COVID19!, global warming!, ‘weapons of mass destruction’!, and ‘mass hypnosis’! itself); and,

3. Novel stimuli.

The last listed kind of rapport-building, attention-gathering cue – novel stimuli -- encompasses the effects of the different clinical techniques used in individual-scale, formal hypnotic induction procedures.

Apropos Barber’s clearly stated view that hypnotic susceptibility is a characteristic intrinsically possessed by some people and not by others, Morgan’s 1973 inquiry into the sources of human variation in susceptibility to hypnosis and suggestion found, by using twin studies, that about 64% of hypnotic susceptibility in children is heritable (i.e. from ‘nature’), while the other 36% or so is accounted for by other social, cultural, or epigenetic factors (i.e., by post-birth environmental ‘nurture’). With regard to nurture’s effect, Morgan observes that in children, the behavioral influence of the same sex parent on the child appears to be responsible for much of the non-inheritable variation in hypnotic susceptibility and suggestibility.

Pointing to a pertinently heritable part of the human body already mentioned as influencing susceptibility to hypnosis and suggestion, Parris (2016) remarks:

The prefrontal region (the region of the frontal cortex anterior to the motor areas) of the human cerebral cortex appears to play an important role in suggestion. Children, with still-developing prefrontal cortices, are more susceptible to suggestion. Older adults, who experience atrophy of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) as a result of the normal processes of aging, are also more open to suggestion. Damasio (1994) described how patients with damage to the PFC are more vulnerable to “snake-oil” salesmen and disreputable characters. Asp et al. (2012) showed that patients with ventromedial PFC damage were more likely to believe in misleading advertisements. The role of the frontal cortices in suggestion ﬁts with the putative role of the prefrontal cortex in the control of thought and behavior.

Figure 4. The prefrontal cortex of man. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefrontal_cortex

Given the theoretical importance of the prefrontal cortex in determining hypnotic susceptibility and suggestion, most recent scientific efforts to identify likely gene-level controls of the inheritable portion of susceptibility to hypnosis and suggestion have focused on an enzyme operating within the neuronal synapses of the PFC, catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT). This enzyme controls the chemical concentrations of the dopamine in the prefrontal cortex by chemically breaking this neurotransmitter down. The dominant neurotransmitter in the brain, dopamine’s actions in a pathway in the prefrontal cortex permit, among other things, human computational prediction of short- and long-term outcomes of external and internal events.8

The three genotypes or polymorphisms of the rs4680 variants of the COMT enzyme are COMT(Met,Met), COMT(Met,Val), and COMT(Val,Val) -- where (Met,Met) represents a homozygous substitution or replacement of the amino acid methionine for the amino acid valine in the COMT gene; (Met,Val) represents the heterozygous form of the enzyme; and (Val,Val) represents the ancestral or ‘wild type’ homozygous form of COMT.9 A Tunbridge et al. (ibid. – see the last footnote for the source) aside suggests the prehistoric development of methionine substitutions on the rs4680 gene might have been critical in determining the unique course of human cultural and technological evolution:

No equivalent polymorphism [of the COMT enzyme] has been found in any other species examined to date, including nonhuman primates. Therefore, the Met 158 variant may be specific to humans, and it appears that [average] COMT activity [in the prefrontal cortex of the human brain] has decreased during evolution.

The homozygous (Met,Met) form of the COMT enzyme breaks down dopamine in the brain 3-4Xs more slowly than in the case of the COMT wild type, thereby causing the average cortex dopamine levels in people with this particular mutation to be higher than they are in people with the ancestral homozygous (Val,Val) form of the enzyme. And, because the Val and Met alleles are co-dominant in the rs4680 COMT gene, people that possess the heterozygous form (Met,Val) of the COMT enzyme that breaks down dopamine show intermediate brain levels of dopamine; i.e, substantially more dopamine than in the (Val,Val) ancestral form but less of that neurotransmitter maintained by the homozygous (Met,Met) COMT form of the enzyme. This is because the (Met,Val) heterozygotic form of COMT breaks down neuronal dopamine more slowly than the (Val,Val) homozygote, but faster than the (Met,Met) homozygote does.

The Figure below from Liu et al. (2010) provides a graphic illustration of one consequently strong characteristic difference in brain activity between wild type COMT (Val,Val) and heterozygous COMT (Val,Met) carriers of the rs4680 COMT genotypes. Executive function communication between the prefrontal cortex and the rest of the brain is materially stronger for people with methionine-containing forms of the rs4680 gene than it is for those with the valine-containing wild type. Again, this is due to the longer life of dopamine in the frontal lobes of people with the form of the COMT enzyme that breaks down dopamine more slowly and thereby prolongs dopamine neurotransmitter chemical action for longer time periods.

Figure 5. Comparison of neural connectivity between COMT (Val,Val) and COMT (Val,Met) carriers. People with COMT (Val,Val) genotype exhibit less communication to the frontal cortex and its executive functions.

Malhotra et al. (2002) further demonstrate significant differences in prefrontal cortex operation among the three rs4680 genotypes of COMT. Heterozygote COMT (Met,Val) and wild type homozygote COMT (Val,Val) both consistently make more perseverative errors on a standardized test for prefrontal cortex function than do subjects homozygous for the (Met,Met) variant of the rs4680 COMT gene. Executive functioning for people with either one of the two Val-containing rs4680 gene variants is therefore moderately more difficult and error-prone than it is for those who possess the no-Val homozygous (Met,Met) SNP.10 See Figure 6 below.

Figure 6. Who does the same things over and over again the most in this data set? Who, consequently, probably comes to most value perseverance and tenacity in the face of difficulty?

Results from research seeking to determine if these COMT variants are largely (remember the 64% heritability estimate of Morgan) responsible for heritable variations in human susceptibility to hypnosis and suggestion have been inconsistent to date.11 Whether these equivocal results derive from sampling errors, measurement errors, and/or the influence of confounding variables is not yet known. Stanford University, the academic home of modern hypnotic susceptibility quantification, is, however, currently conducting further research into the matter. Perhaps the Stanford research work will help better clear up the current uncertainty and doubt.

In the meantime, Szekely et al. (2010) have indeed obtained the theoretically- expected result in their research work. Their data very clearly indicate that relative efficiencies of prefrontal cortices afforded by differing levels of dopamine in brain neurons determined by rs4680 COMT genotype represent a basic hereditary control of individual susceptibility to hypnosis and suggestion. It appears that COMT enzyme built with more and more methionine than valine increasingly reduces hypnotic susceptibility. See the Figure 7 graph below. These results are remarkably consistent in principle with the scientific findings regarding the effects of different COMT genotypes on prefrontal cortex functioning provided in Figures 5 and 6 above.

Figure 7. The average dopamine concentrations across the neuronal synapses in the prefrontal cortices of the test subjects increase from the left to the right.

Is the COMT enzyme connection to hypnotic susceptibility consistent with the empirically-observable attributes of people with moderate to high hypnotic susceptibility?

Figure 6 above appears to be the key to decoding the empirically-determined characteristics of those who are susceptible to hypnosis and suggestion. As already related, people who are susceptible to hypnosis and suggestion:

Possess a tendency to have hypnosis-like experiences outside of formal hypnotic settings (according to Barber’s model of hypnosis, however, this purported characteristic is completely tautological);
Exhibit a high level of absorptive imaginative involvement in domains such as reading and drama;
Are present-focused and tend to dislike challenging mental tasks (“high non-planning impulsivity”);
Report themselves as possessing high self-control under conditions of difficulty and hardship (holding the level of high non-planning impulsivity constant, that is);
In the cases of males only, tend to act on the spur of the moment and consequently live an inconsistent lifestyle; and,
Are relatively unaware of when and if they are being externally manipulated or otherwise influenced by others.12

The data provided in Figure 6 suggest that higher psychological absorption, perseverance against adversity, and the greater reliance on posterior brain motor competencies of some males, are all somewhat effective compensatory ‘work-arounds’ to the relative difficulty of ‘sorting things out’ that the presence of a COMT gene marked by one or two valines necessarily imposes on those who are most susceptible to hypnosis and suggestion.

A general distaste of challenging mental tasks also appears as being directly related to the comparative mental difficulty of ‘sorting things out’ caused by the presence of either of the valine-containing COMT alleles illustrated in Figure 6. A high background state of absorption that presumably helps compensate for greater frequency of sorting out errors seems also to explain why those who are more susceptible to hypnosis and suggestion are less aware of external manipulation. Lastly, the reliance on outside authority and suggestion demonstrated by those seized by mass formation hypnosis could be demonstration of a naturally-evolved, emergency-case heuristic work-around to the problem of choosing what to do when placed in sudden, insurmountable doubt about how to respond to a particularly threatening problem.

In this same context, the general “independence of mind” characteristic that Desmet ascribes to those immune to mass hypnosis may only be a side-effect of the hypnosis and suggestion-immune COMT (Met,Met) possessors being easier able to sort things out for themselves without so much otherwise needed resort to external authority or input.

What does this all imply? What, if anything, does it add to the Desmet mass hypnosis model?

Suggestion is the intrusion into the mind of an idea; met with more or less opposition by the person; accepted uncritically at last; and realized unreﬂectively, almost automatically.

--Boris Sidis, 1898

The general, overarching implications of both the old and newer scientific observations summarized above are that variation in susceptibility to hypnosis and suggestion are constant, prevalent, and active characteristics within all human populations, and that these influences have both their upsides and their downsides. This ‘constant, prevalent, and active’ narrative of scientific findings provided here contradicts the alarmist mass-hypnosis-is-an-extraordinary-social-and-psychological-ailment caused by social and psychological malaise viewpoint conveyed by Desmet.

In the young, a naturally high susceptibility to outside influence clearly helps adults (and their peers) acculturate and/or teach them. In middle-aged humans, a long period of relatively low susceptibility to hypnosis and suggestion likely helps mature members of human populations better (i.e., more appropriately and effectively) handle the varying decentralized problems that they are personally responsible for as individual adults. In older unhealthy people, however, the generally increasing hypnotic susceptibility to suggestion that often takes place with physical aging can be problematic for them and their caretakers.

Granting credence to the rs4680 COMT genotype explanation of differing human hypnotic susceptibility to suggestion, it can be interpreted that material native differences in hypnotic susceptibility at the individual scale are likely associated with moderately different problem-solving strategies. COMT (Met,Met) problem-solvers with apparently relatively low susceptibility to hypnosis and with (stubborn/skeptical) relative close-mindedness to external suggestion are able to afford that marginally greater “independence of mind” of theirs because of an at least slightly greater cognitive ability to relatively rapidly and more accurately ‘sort things out’ for themselves. On the other hand, COMT (Val,Val) and COMT (Met,Val) problem-solvers marked by higher hypnotic susceptibility and openness to suggestion seem to, on average, take more time and effort, and therefore necessarily exhibit more tenacity and absorption, to carry out the tasks of making decisions and addressing new problems. Their lesser “independence of mind” and associated greater ‘hypnotic’ receptivity to inputs from others could, in fact, represent an evolved mechanism that -- more often than not -- compensates for their occasional inability to ‘sort things out’ for themselves in a timely fashion, an inability potentially caused by the presence of dopamine-decreasing valine in their personal versions of the rs4680 COMT gene.

Figure 3 provided above of Hilgard’s 1965 data show with certainty that hypnotic susceptibility dominates the population of North America and, probably, people of similar European heritage. Moreover, assuming the Figure 7 evidence of COMT enzyme involvement in determining human susceptibility to hypnosis and suggestion is valid, susceptibility to outside influences and laggardly problem-solving ability can be said to overwhelmingly dog all human populations — some possibly much more than others. See Figure 8.

Figure 8. Except for Austrian, German, and Israeli data, source of this rs4680 COMT genotype information is Palmatier et al. (1999), their Figure 2. Data for other three populations were gleaned from genotype data for control groups (mentally normal individuals) in studies relating the three rs4680 COMT genotypes to the frequencies of different mental illnesses in the three national populations.

Figure 8 indicates that hypnotic susceptibility and suggestibility, marked by the high percentages of COMT (Val,Val) and COMT (Val,Met) are dominant characteristics in all human populations. Yellow shading marks the dominant genotype of each world population. European populations are evidently dominated by individuals with intermediate hypnotic susceptibility, while in Asian populations people that are highly susceptible to hypnosis and suggestion predominate. This distribution of dominant hypnotic susceptibilities may explain the historically greater importance of hierarchy and strongly centralized, more totalitarian-like government in Asian societies, as well as the relatively greater frequency of mass movements in the countries concerned. For more discussion in this general direction, see Piffer 2013.

It is interesting to see in Figure 8 that only the European populations (Russia included) and the Mayan Indians appear to evidence very anomalous percentages of the independently-minded, stronger problem-solving rs4680 COMT (Met,Met) genotype.13 See the green-shaded genotypes in Figure 8. The former Mayan culture and recent European cultures are or were distinguished from surrounding populations by higher rates of innovation and relatively advanced mathematical/scientific knowledge and technology. It seems possible that these distinguishing cultural characteristics of the Mayans and European-heredity populations may have been exogenously ‘grafted onto’ the dominantly suggestible COMT (Val,Met) and COMT (Val,Val) populations courtesy of the ‘outside’ influences of their less prevalent COMT (Met,Met) sisters and brothers.

All that to the side, this general picture painted by psychological and biochemical research into the distribution of the phenomena of hypnotic susceptibility and suggestibility within human populations still ultimately confirms the soundness of Desmet’s (and Gustave Le Bon’s) recommendation that “…it is very important: you can make the [mass] hypnosis less deep by continuing to talk – so that is what we all have to do, I think.”

With so many people susceptible to the mental intrusion of poor problem-solving ideas and their subsequent consequences, actively competing with those ideas by speaking out with sounder ones in non-offputting manners can certainly do no harm. Rather than passively sit by and let the signal to noise ratio drop to the point where confusion and error come to dominate whole cultures as they do now, those who have — quickly or slowly, with difficulty or with ease — found out better solutions to common problems, should certainly take the trouble and effort, like Desmet counsels, to let other people know about it. After all, nearly all of us humans are very impressionable and will sooner or later listen to what others have to say.

Grundvilk

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