Reading skills for academic study: Summarising

Test 3

Read the following text and summarise it in 50 words. Show your answers to someone. If you are in one of my classes, e-mail the diagram to me.

Hypnosis

Two further points may be mentioned next in connexion with our discussion of the phenomena characterizing hypnosis, although they are only indirectly related to this topic. One is the question of whether people can be induced to commit criminal acts under hypnosis; the other how many people are capable of being hypnotized. Both are questions probably more frequently asked than any others in connexion with hypnosis. Taking the question of the production of criminal activity in hypnotized persons first, it may be said that until fairly recently the more sober writers tended to discountenance this possibility. They tended to quote the case of Charcot's young assistant who failed to induce the young hypnotized girl to take off her clothes, and to infer that, quite generally, a suggestion urging a person to act in ways which were very much counter to his moral and ethical ideas would not be carried out, but would merely lead to his awakening. 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 unethical 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 framework 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 began to realize 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 methylene-blue water, continuously kept boiling by the presence in it of miniscule droplets of barium peroxide.
The hypnotized subject was then ordered to throw the dish of nitric acid (in actual fact, of course, innocuous water) over the assistant who was present 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 thrown over him.
H. J. Eysenck: Sense and Nonsense in Psychology (Penguin Books, 1957)