Dissociating the wheat from the chaff in theories of hypnosis: Reply to Kihlstrom (1998) and Woody and Sadler (1998).

Although there are noteworthy commonalities among disparate theories of hypnosis, they are neither as readily integrated nor as complementary as J.F. Kihlstrom (1998) and E. Woody and P. Sadler (1998) implied. All current theories of hypnosis, including our social cognitive model, are provisional and incomplete, and each has something of value to offer. However, the multiple streams of consciousness hypothesis and the hypnotic state hypothesis should be abandoned because they are neither well supported by data nor consistent with current research and theory in social and cognitive psychology. In their place, the authors propose theoretical formulations based on such concepts as response sets, hierarchical control systems, associative memory networks, automatic activation of behavior, motivation, intention, and response expectancy.