The effect of demands for honesty on reports of visual and auditory hallucinations

Ss, unselected for hypnotic susceptibility and simply told to hallucinate, made pretest ratings on the reality of visual and auditory hallucinations. All 5s were then task motivated to hallucinate. Before the retest ratings were made, half of the Ss were confronted by a second E with demands for report honesty; the other half of the Ss made their ratings under the same situational demands characterizing the hallucinatory episode itself. For both sensory modalities, the mean change in ratings from pretest to retest was significantly greater for the task-motivated than for the honesty-report condition. Ratings of the reality of hallucinations are evidently highly susceptible to the context of demands in which the report is made. It is argued that, in this and previous experiments utilizing unselected Ss, reports of hallucinatory activity are less apt to reflect perceptual alterations than response modification in accordance with regnant experimental demands.