HAL GOLDBERG listens quietly as the woman pours out her anguish about the
pressures of juggling work, family and home life. She tells of her guilt about
throwing a pizza in the oven because she doesn’t have time to cook, feeling
annoyed with herself that she isn’t able to plan her day better and be more in
control. If only she had a bit more time.
Goldberg is pleased. Those emotional nuances—the guilt, the
frustration, the yearning for something better—are exactly what he’s
after. He wants to understand her situation. Not details about her work, her
domestic responsibilities, or even about herself. Goldberg wants to understand
how she feels about pizza.
Goldberg is a market researcher based in Irvine, California, and has been
moderating consumer focus groups for thirty years. Early in his career, he felt
something was lacking in the participants’ remarks. They were too rational, too
considered. He itched for a way to get beyond these polite comments and persuade
consumers to tell him what was really on their minds. While other researchers
were thinking up cunning questions and designing surroundings to make their
volunteers feel at ease, Goldberg had a much more radical idea up his sleeve.
Why not hypnotise them?
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“I’d always been interested in hypnosis as a kid,” he says, “and one day it
just struck me: maybe if you got people into a hypnotic state, we could get
better information out of them.” So he took a one-year course in hypnosis and
began his search for the secrets that other market-research techniques had
failed to uncover.
For twenty-five years, Goldberg only dabbled in the technique. Then, in 1995,
he struck out on his own, forming a company called Qualitative and Quantitative
Research. Today his company carries out most of its studies under hypnosis. In
just over five years of solo work he has built himself a lucrative client base,
and public interest in his technique has never been greater.
And he’s not the only hypnotist in the marketing business. Bill McDonald and
Dvora Sagi of New Thinking in Sacramento, California, also claim that if you
want consumers to tell you the motives behind their choices, hypnosis is a
powerful tool.
So can hypnosis really offer a different perspective? Researchers cannot
agree if it works, let alone how. But whether hypnosis provides a direct line to
the subconscious, as some theorists believe, or is merely a state of heightened
cooperation, McDonald’s own study of hypnosis focus groups, published in the
Journal of Business Research (vol 42, p 287), supports the view that
people answer questions differently when hypnotised. He interviewed more than
200 volunteers about their thoughts and behaviour as consumers. Half of the
subjects were questioned first under hypnosis and then again without hypnosis.
The others did this in reverse order.
The volunteers’ comments were sorted by a computer program into four
linguistic categories: rational, emotional, object-oriented and cognitive.
McDonald found that the frequency of remarks with emotional connotation shot up
dramatically under hypnosis, while the frequency of rational responses declined.
In other words, hypnotised people explained their behaviour in terms of how they
felt, rather than what made sense.
Goldberg agrees that hypnotised groups give a very different type of insight.
He boasts the following example, in which a pharmaceuticals company was trying
to find out why a group of urologists seemed reluctant to prescribe its new
drug. In standard focus groups, Goldberg says, the doctors tended to talk about
the efficacy, side effects and contra-indications of the drug in question. But
under hypnosis, the urologists said they felt slighted because the firm’s drug
had been marketed to family doctors rather than to them. And they weren’t
impressed by irritating salespeople either. “If the salespeople were friendly I
prescribed the drug,” one of the doctors said. If they were pushy, forget
it.
According to Goldberg, you wouldn’t normally hear this kind of revelation.
Without the relaxation and trust that hypnosis fosters, he says, subjects tend
to skirt around potentially embarrassing or unflattering revelations. He claims
that his stressed-out pizza eater would never have admitted feeling guilty and
inadequate if hypnosis hadn’t smoothed the path from her brain to her mouth.
Goldberg is confident that these confessions are genuine. If his subjects
were making these responses up, he argues, they wouldn’t be able to come up with
them so quickly and easily. He also points to a variety of studies providing
evidence for the “hypermnesic” effects of hypnosis—under some
circumstances, hypnotised people seem able to recall pictures, films, and
stories in greater detail than they do when they’re awake.
However, according to Irving Kirsch, a psychologist at the University of
Connecticut in Storrs and co-editor of the American Psychological Association’s
Handbook of Clinical Hypnosis, these effects are just an illusion. He
says hypnosis only appears to improve memory because hypnotised people volunteer
information far more readily. A study by Jane Dwyan and Kenneth Bowers, then at
the University of Waterloo in Ontario, found that any increase in the ability to
recall accurate memories under hypnosis was matched by an equal rise in
recalling inaccurate memories (Science, vol 222, p 184). In addition,
many studies failed to detect any increase at all in accurate recall under
hypnosis.
Mike Nash, a psychologist at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, shares
Kirsch’s scepticism. Although he believes that hypnotised people usually aren’t
being wilfully deceitful, he says that’s no reason to believe what they say. He
notes that many studies show that hypnotised people can not only recall things
that aren’t true, but they may also express a high degree of confidence in false
memories (Journal of Abnormal Psychology, vol 94, p 195).
But even if the hypnotists haven’t convinced these scientists, they’ve
certainly wowed the advertising world. Stuart Grau, who describes himself as
“head strategy geek” at the New York advertising firm Averett, Free and
Ginsburg, has enlisted Goldberg’s help with high-profile clients selling
everything from hair-care products to hard liquor. He says the comments from
hypnotised focus groups are “much more forthcoming, much more real, much more
coming from the heart” than others he has observed.
In one focus group, for example, young consumers confessed under hypnosis
that they liked drinking whisky because it made them look cool in front of their
friends. In a conventional group, insists Grau, “you’d never get somebody to
admit that was a motivation”. The company used this information to help shape a
marketing campaign aimed at a younger crowd.
Goldberg says that group hypnosis creates an environment that not only
encourages openness, but also puts everyone on an equal footing. Focus groups
are often dominated by a handful of loudmouths who suppress the opinions of the
group’s quieter members, he says. Under hypnosis, Goldberg finds it much easier
to rein in overzealous respondents and encourage the others to speak out:
“Everybody, even the shyest person in the room, is in a way forced to give their
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But even if Goldberg and McDonald are getting more honest responses, maybe
hypnosis isn’t the only way to get them. “There’s no question that [hypnotised
people] would give different answers,” Nash says. “But then again, they would
give different answers if you did nothing else but put the interviewer in a
police uniform.”
Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist at the University of Washington in Seattle,
speculates that Goldberg and McDonald might get similar results if they gave
everyone in the focus group a drink before questioning. McDonald is not
uncomfortable with this analogy, as he sees hypnosis as a state of enhanced
relaxation, but Goldberg insists that most of his subjects enter an altered
mental state that can’t be compared to a beer buzz. To support his view, he
points to one of his firm’s signature services: age-regression.
This technique, which has been used controversially in psychotherapy, is
supposed to allow people to recall long-forgotten events by hypnotically taking
them back to an earlier age. “We can get people to actually go back in time and
relive buried experiences, things that are in their subconscious that even in a
relaxed state they couldn’t possibly remember,” Goldberg claims.
The possibility of direct access to past experiences is tantalising for
advertisers. Want to know how people felt about their first bite of a certain
chocolate bar? Want to create an ad that taps into the nostalgia for a
particular brand of bicycle? Goldberg says age-regression is the answer, and
many major clients have taken him up on it. Under hypnosis, his subjects have
vividly recalled such distant and mundane childhood experiences as their first
bite of a particular pudding (for the Jell-O company), or getting their hair
washed in the bath by their mothers (for a shampoo manufacturer).
For Goldberg and his clients, the proof that these memories are real is the
level of detail. He says that age-regressed subjects describe their childhood
experiences so precisely and effortlessly that they can’t be making it all up.
In a study for Shell, for example, people who had regressed to age three or four
were asked about their first memories of being at a petrol station. They not
only described the car they were in and the brands of fuel being sold, but also
recalled specific incidents like fighting with a brother in the back seat, or
receiving a balloon from the station attendant with a dinosaur
insignia—the old logo for Sinclair Oil. “I’m sure you would agree that the
vast majority of people in the awake state cannot possibly remember their first
time at a gas station,” Goldberg says. “Ask your friends as a test.”
Nash agrees that few people could remember such an experience while awake,
but he doesn’t agree with Goldberg’s conclusion. In a comprehensive review of 80
age-regression studies spanning 60 years (Psychological Bulletin, vol
102, p 42), he concludes that no well-designed study of age regression has
managed to show that it improves recall of genuine childhood memories. He also
notes that age-regressed people have often been shown to fabricate explicitly
false memories which they nevertheless believe are real.
Loftus’s own research suggests that people can create false memories even
without hypnosis. She found that when subjects are asked to describe an imagined
childhood event, such as a minor injury, they often later become convinced that
the fictitious event really happened—even if they originally knew it was
false. She suspects Goldberg’s age-regression exercises may achieve something
similar. “Do you really think people are remembering the first time they had a
Crunchie bar?” she asks. “Or even any time? They’re probably imagining a typical
experience they might have had.”
Nash goes on to suggest that many of the memories Goldberg claims to retrieve
probably aren’t even there to begin with. “You have to get completely out of
your mind the notion that everything that has ever happened to you is recorded
somewhere in your brain,” he explains. “That is nonsense.” Many memories simply
vanish, he says, and even those that linger are distorted by our clouded, adult
perspective. In other words, there’s no such thing as a “pure” childhood
memory.
But do the marketing people really care about how genuine these memories are?
Would a kite manufacturer prefer to learn about the reality of consumers’ first
experiences with kites—sullied by weak winds, rain and string getting
tangled in trees—or would they prefer to exploit an imaginary experience
of running through lush, rolling meadows on a breezy spring day?
Although he firmly believes that hypnosis brings back accurate short-term
memories, Grau allows for an element of fantasy in age-regression studies. “In
the ideal world, I would like to have my best guess as to their early experience
with Jell-O pudding. That notwithstanding, getting to what they think it might
be like or what they imagine it to be like is a pretty good approximation, ” he
says. “Their memories don’t just come from thin air.” But even if they do, the
fact that they help his clients sell their products may be all that matters. As
Grau puts it: “Advertising is an art, not a science.”
PROSPECTIVE focus group members are selected from databases of volunteers,
and are asked to give their permission to be hypnotised before coming in.
McDonald uses preliminary interviews to screen out volunteers who seem like poor
candidates for hypnosis—typically about half, while Goldberg uses whoever
is willing to try it.
As in most focus groups, the participants sit in a room with the moderator,
in this case the hypnotist, while the client and other parties watch through a
one-way mirror. The hypnotist explains the process to the participants and then
gradually hypnotises them with suggestions to focus, relax and listen closely to
the sound of his voice. It takes about ten to twenty minutes to hypnotise the
group.
McDonald relies on instinct to judge whether his subjects are properly
hypnotised. Goldberg doesn’t perform any formal tests, but he checks for clues
such as rapid eye movements, which he takes as a marker of hypnosis, heavy
eyelids (he suggests to people that they can’t open their eyes), and
responsiveness to arbitrary age-regression suggestions.
After the questioning is over, Goldberg simply tells the participants that
they will be fully awake and refreshed by the time he has counted to five. They
are not left with any post-hypnotic suggestions once the process is over.