Ernest Hilgard and laboratory hypnosis
Ernest R. Hilgard’s Stanford laboratory made hypnotisability a measurable trait and argued for neodissociation. That is the modern lab story.
Last reviewed 27 August 2026
Ernest R. Hilgard (1904–2001), and Josephine Hilgard built the Laboratory of Hypnosis Research at Stanford. The point of that lab was to make hypnosis measurable: who responds, to what suggestions, how reliably.
Key evidence
The Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale programme (with Weitzenhoffer and colleagues) gave the field a shared yardstick. A 1961 monograph reported the distribution of susceptibility in a student sample on that scale.
Hilgard’s neodissociation account (later Divided Consciousness, 1977) treated hypnotic phenomena as splits in cognitive control, not as Mesmer’s fluid and not only as social compliance. A 1975 PNAS paper tested whether hypnotic analgesia behaved like opioid analgesia (naloxone did not reverse it in that design): a laboratory question, not a clinic package.
This measurement tradition is the ancestor of “who is a high hypnotisable?” debates. It is not the same as Erickson’s case literature.
Limitations
Student samples are not clinic samples. Scale scores are not treatment outcomes.
What we don't know yet
How much of later clinical response is predicted by Stanford-type scores is still a research question, not a settled filter.
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