How does suggestion work? Why does it indicate a weak mind and how does it affect our ideas of responsibility? Let us see.
We have already seen that Roland Pennington was under the control of another mind; we do not mean that he was actually hypnotized—a nonsensical plea that is sometimes brought into court cases. Roland Pennington was a victim of suggestion. An illustration will make this clear.
If I were to take a city man to a third-rail electric road and ask him to stand on one rail and put his hand on the third rail, he would resist the suggestion, because there would immediately come into his mind visions of himself burned to a crisp or instantly killed. But suppose I take a man who has come from the rural districts and who never heard of third rails. He has lived, let us assume, in my house and worked under my direction a month and has come to regard me as a friend. We have worked together and talked together; I take him out and say, “Touch that third rail.” Will he resist the suggestion? Not at all. Why not? What is the difference between the two men? The first has ideas about third rails. His past experience has filled his mind and memory with thoughts and with knowledge which instantly come to consciousness when I suggest touching the third rail. The other man has no such experience. He has known me long enough to have some faith in me. In fact from the very nature of things he is in the habit of doing what I tell him. I tell him to do this, and he does it.
Coming back to the first case, one perhaps can conceive that the city man and I might come upon the third rail under such conditions that he was not thinking of it. Instead of saying “third rail” to him I might say, “My! that rail is hot” and he would almost instinctively put his hand upon it to verify my remark. If he survived and could talk about it afterwards, he would say, “Of course I ought to have known and did know that was the third rail, but I did not think.” That is the way suggestion works.
To illustrate still further, we may speak of hypnotism itself. All of the wonders that are produced under hypnosis are to be explained in exactly this way. The subject is so nearly asleep that nothing gets into his consciousness except the ideas suggested by the operator. Accordingly he is utterly unable to resist any suggestion that is given him.
Now coming nearer to our problem, children are naturally very suggestible because they have not the experiences, the ideas. One may easily believe that an eleven-year-old child could be induced to touch the third rail. Furthermore, authority plays an enormous rôle with children. I might take my ten-year-old boy out for a walk. He knows all about third rails and would not touch one. But if I were to say to him, “Son, you can put your hand on this, because there is no current on,” he would probably obey without question, because of his implicit trust in me. That confidence in a superior, either in age, intelligence, or position, is one of the characteristics of immature minds and one of the conditions that makes us all suggestible. In the hypnotic terminology again, this is the being en rapport. The hypnotized subject obeys the operator and no one else because it is the operator with whom he is en rapport—in other words, in whom he has confidence.
Now let us come to the situation. It is perfectly clear that Roland Pennington was under strong suggestion and that any vague concepts that he might have had of the wrongfulness of murder or of killing a man were very carefully allayed by the man who had the influence over him and who had the motive for this homicide.
The whole statement shows that Roland recognized George as a superior, as one in authority over him and at the same time as a friend, as one on whose word he could absolutely rely. It is a perfect picture of the child following the man.