And so when this hypnotist brought people especially susceptible to social pressure on the stage, they were all fucked; they now *had* to obey what he said to do, the alternative being the extremely uncomfortable sensation of breaking a frame and making him feel bad. 11/
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I prolly woulda pretended to sleep when he told me to sleep in that situation too,tbh.
In this particular show though, the hypnotist sort of 'lost control' of those he hypnotized; you could see the stage ppl 'checking in' with each other for social agreement about what to do 12/
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He had a lot more "control" over them when his attention was on them; if he stood in front of a person and looked at them, they were *much* more likely to do what he said to do (mimicking my experience of suddenly not wanting to be aggressive when he looked at me) 13/
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I wouldn't necessarily 'trust' subjective reports from being hypnotized from those on stage, though. Rationalizing "why" you did a thing is one of the most easily manipulated things about our brain in existence, wouldnt be surprised if ppl didn't know/agreed to hypnotic explanati
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The whole thing struck me as a sort of social sleight-of-hand; the thing that was happening was clearly just social pressure, but he built up the narrative of it being "hypnotism" so strongly that everyone was *looking* at the hypnotism narrative. But the truth was mundane. 15/
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Or maybe not! I do think social dynamics are *way* more interesting than people give them credit; in group settings we're constantly doing invisible push/pull, fingers in each other's heads, and it's totally subconscious. It might be cool to experiment with more intentional 16/
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"hypnotism"-esque things; get together with friends and see what strange behaviors we can enact out of each other if we decide to adopt various types of frames.
A *lot* of this is present in circling, also, where dynamics like this are carefully investigated and named. 17/17
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Very interesting analysis. Several years ago I saw a hypnotist perform on audience members, and he got them to do things that seemed beyond the sort of "social sleight of hand" you describe because they'd be embarrassing to do normally. For example...
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He made them act as if they'd received a gift, and asked them what it was. One girl said "a cat", and then asked, in a very bright tone, "can I kill it?"
This seemed to surprise him, and he quickly moved on to the next person.
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At the end of the show he asked them all to dance. One guy started really enthusiastically doing the worm - not necessarily that surprising, but I'd met him beforehand and he really didn't seem like the type of extrovert who'd normally do that.
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