Meeting the task halfway

Why this one exists, and it is not really about you

Every exam in this battery that ends by asking “did you feel it?” is measuring, in part, something other than what it says on the tin: your capacity to produce the experience the task implied you should be having. Lush and colleagues showed in 2020 that hypnotisability predicts experiential change on two standard laboratory measures — the rubber-hand illusion and mirror synaesthesia — at magnitudes comparable to its relationship with individual hypnosis-scale items, across samples of 156, 404 and 353 people.

So we measure it and print it next to those results. That is the whole idea. It makes the other numbers more honest rather than less, and as far as we can tell nobody else running tests like these does it.

The finding is contested — see the two 2022 comments in the same journal. We cite the exchange rather than only the claim.

What this is not, and the refusals are the design

• It is not a hypnotisability scale.This is NOT a hypnotisability scale. Those are administered live, by a person, and scored on what your body does — whether your arm actually rose, whether your eyes actually stayed shut. A web page cannot see your arm. We did not build a self-report substitute and put a famous name on it, because that would be a different measurement wearing borrowed psychometrics.
• It is not the Tellegen Absorption Scale, and it contains none of its items.The TAS is licensed through the University of Minnesota Press, and the evidence is not a missing permission notice but an act of enforcement: a long-running academic scale library carries, where the TAS used to be, a line saying it was removed at the publisher’s request. The MODTAS is a rescaling of the same items and inherits the licence. A paraphrase of a licensed item set is a derivative work, so we did not write one.
• There was nothing in the public domain to fall back on.The IPIP is genuinely public domain and is this project’s standing fallback for licensed instruments — and its index of 274 labels across 463 scales has no Absorption entry at all. So these twelve items are ours, written from scratch for a construct we describe in our own words.
• And absorption is a different construct, measured separately.This index is about what a CUE does to you — how far you produce the experience a situation implies you should be having. Being taken over by something actually in front of you, with nobody having said anything about it, is a different disposition and it has its own exam, written from scratch for the same reason this one was. Being taken.
• It is short, and short means noisy.Twelve items and two probes. The best-characterised instrument in this domain retests at r = .56 over two months on its objective scale. Nothing here is a category and nothing here is a type.

This result will never be worded as: “You are highly hypnotisable.”

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Twelve statements

How often is each of these true of you? There is no good answer and no bad one.

And two short passages

Read each one slowly, once, then answer the question under it. Only the difference between your two answers is used; neither number means anything on its own.

Score it

Where this comes from

• Lush, P., Botan, V., Scott, R.B., Seth, A.K., Ward, J. & Dienes, Z. (2020), Trait phenomenological control predicts experience of mirror synaesthesia and the rubber hand illusion, Nature Communications 11(1):4853, doi:10.1038/s41467-020-18591-6 — n = 156, 404, 353.
• Contested: two 2022 comments in the same journal, doi:10.1038/s41467-022-28177-z and doi:10.1038/s41467-022-28178-y. The exchange is the citation, not the claim alone.
• Lush, P., Moga, G., McLatchie, N. & Dienes, Z. (2018), the Sussex-Waterloo Scale of Hypnotizability, Neuroscience of Consciousness 2018(1):niy006, doi:10.1093/nc/niy006; corrigendum 2021(1):niab041, doi:10.1093/nc/niab041 — CC BY-NC, and NOT used here. Its retest of r(66) = .56 objective / .77 subjective is why nothing in this domain may be a category.
• Tellegen, A. & Atkinson, G. (1974), J Abnorm Psychol 83(3):268–277, doi:10.1037/h0036681 — the Tellegen Absorption Scale, licensed through the University of Minnesota Press and NOT reproduced here, in whole, in part or in paraphrase.
• Maurer, R.L., Kumar, V.K., Woodside, L. & Pekala, R.J. (1997), Am J Clin Hypn 40(2):130–145, doi:10.1080/00029157.1997.10403417 — n = 206: drumming trance tracked hypnotic susceptibility, not the drum.

The rules this page is bound by

• Report the measurement, not the category."Your VVIQ score was 19 out of 80. Scores at or below 24 are the range in which most published aphantasia research recruits participants." Never "you have aphantasia."
• Name the reference class, every time.A percentile is meaningless without saying among whom. Ours is: among people who found this page and chose to take the test. That group is systematically enriched for exactly the traits being measured, because people who suspect something about themselves go looking.
• Consistency, not confidence.For every instrument the second administration is part of the instrument. A one-shot result is a reading, not a finding.
• Never route a result to anything consequential.No credential tier, no karma weight, no grant eligibility, no payment. The moment a score buys something, people optimise it and the data dies.