jgnat: If a person says a lie often enough, they start to believe it. So the WTS pattern of "faking" belief in front of strangers helps the brain come up with reasons why they might believe. The put-on belief system is reinforced. Not for the sake of the poor househlder, but for the poor fuller brush salesman.
Autosuggestion and hypnotism are used a lot in JW life in a negative way. It's ironic that the governing body counsel against seeing a hypnotist and yet many of their meeting arrangements use elements of NLP and hypnotism with autosuggestion for homework.
Perhaps if Witnesses understood a bit more about these topics they would see how the meetings actively use the same techniques and see the hypocrisy of the governing body in stating that Witnesses should not use them - they do this by mystifying and demonising a natural psychological phenomenon.
I do not believe that autosuggestion or hypnotism are necessarily always bad (e.g. the placebo effect), indeed I am grateful that I learned about and became aware of these techniques as I have also employed them (along with other therapies) to deprogram myself from the cult's way of thinking. Safe to say I am very much a believer in a 'plastic' changeable brain - it sure beats the alternative!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autosuggestion
Coué still believed in the effects of medication, but he also believed that our mental state was able to affect and even amplify the action of these medications. He observed that his patients who used his mantra-like conscious suggestion, "Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better", (French: Tous les jours à tous points de vue je vais de mieux en mieux), replacing their "thought of illness" with a new "thought of cure," could augment their medication plan. According to Coué, repeating words or images enough times causes the "subconscious" to absorb them.