Or, as the hypnosis researcher Graham Wagstaff28 put it, ‘there is a strong case for arguing that much of the special status that has been awarded to hypnosis may have resulted from a failure to consider the power of social pressures and the normal capacities of ordinary human beings’. He argues, as do many psychological scientists, that the positive effects we sometimes see when people have supposedly been hypnotised may result from regular phenomena such as relaxation, imagination and expectation.
