things catch up eventually...

I heard a radio story in the last few days about an experiment which was something to the effect of the following: the researcher laid in an hypnotic command to associate a single word with something unpleasant.

Then, two different versions of a story was told to the person who had be given the command. One version included the word, the other did not and it was found that the subject felt differently about the story which contained the "charged" word.

This was kind of a big deal apparently.

Funny thing is the same phenomenon was described years ago in great detail in 1950 in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health and, more importantly, the underlying mechanism behind it was also described as was the way to undo the effect.

But it wasn't just the fact that a big deal was being made of out something that has already been thoroughly investigated that struck me, it was that the clue to an important mechanism was not followed up.

Once again, psychology seems to shine as a collection of stupid human tricks and uncoordinated phenomenon without diving in and trying to answer the interesting questions posed by the phenomenon -- where's the search for underlying causes? Perhaps they feel all that is handled over in the philosophy department and so ain't their job.

Did the researcher not get interested in such things as: how does this mechanism really work? What makes it work? Where is the hidden hypnotic command stored and does this possibly imply the existence of a more general repository of similar hidden things? And, most importantly, if people can be manipulated this way, what can we do to undo the manipulations and put them in such as state that they can't be so manipulated?

I suspect that if the researchers intention was to help people instead of finding new quirky things you can do to them, he/she might have looked into it further and come up with something useful.