Can People Be Induced to Commit Criminal Acts Under Hypnosis

It may be said that until recently sober writers tended to discountenance this possibility. They tended to quote the case of Charcot''s young assistance who failed to induce the young hypnotized girl to take off her clothes, and to infer that, a suggestion urging a person to act in ways which were counter to his moral and ethical ideas would not be carried out.

Can people be induced to commit criminal acts under hypnosis? It may be said that until recently sober writers tended to discountenance this possibility. They tended to quote the case of Charcot''s young assistance who failed to induce the young hypnotized girl to take off her clothes, and to infer that, a suggestion urging a person to act in ways which were counter to his moral and ethical ideas would not be carried out. There are, indeed, many observations of this kind to be found in the experimental literature, and it may be said with a reasonable degree of confidence that in many cases an explicit suggestion to do something un-ethical or immoral will not be carried out by the subject.

More recently, however, a number of experiments have been conducted to show, first, that this conclusion is not universally true, and secondly, that the whole frame-work of the type of experiment on which it is based is much too narrow. One example may suffice to show the kind of experimentation involved. The experimenter demonstrated the power of nitric acid to the subject by throwing a penny into it. The penny, of course, was completely disintegrated and the subject realized the tremendous destructive power of nitric acid. While the subject''s view of the bowl of acid was cut off by the experimenter, an assistant substituted for it a like-sized bowl of ethylene-blue water.

The hypnotized subject was then ordered to throw the dish of nitric acid (in fact, innocuous water) over the assistant in the same room. Under these conditions it was possible to induce, under hypnosis, various subjects to throw what they considered to be an extremely dangerous acid into the face of a human being. It might be argued that perhaps they had noticed the difference between the acid and the water. Actually, in this particular experiment, the person in charge made what he calls "a most regrettable mistake in technique" by forgetting to change the nitric acid to the innocuous dish of water, so that in one case the assistant had real nitric acid throw over him.

Even if we were to magically stop all greenhouse-gas emissions tomorrow the impact on global climate would continue for decades. Delay will simply make the problem worse. The fact is that some of us are doing quite well the way things are. In the developed world prosperity has been built on 150 years of cheap fossil fuels.

Material progress has been linked to energy consumption. Today 75 per cent of all the world''s energy is consumed by a quarter of the world''s population. The average rich world resident adds about 3.2 tons of dioxide a year to the atmosphere, more than four times the level added by each Third World citizen. The US, with just seven per cent of the global population, is responsible for 22 per cent of global warming.

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