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What it Wasn't - Or How I Learned to Stop Dismissively Categorizing Potentially Paranormal Events as Mass Hysteria

What it Wasn't - Or How I Learned to Stop Dismissively Categorizing Potentially Paranormal Events as Mass Hysteria

Astonishing Legends vor 4 Jahren

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2:45:23

Often when one hears about some group of people claiming to
experience a highly strange event or similarly acting out in
bizarre and irrational manners, it's easy and common to dismiss
the episode as a case of "mass hysteria." Phenomena like the
audience reaction to Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio
broadcast, "The Dancing Plague of 1518," the "Windshield-Pitting
Mystery of 1954," and "The Mad Gasser of Mattoon" are considered
by much of the public to be examples of mass hysteria. In the
late 1930s and decades after, some sociologists used occurrences
like those to help model their theory of "Social Contagion." Like
the idea that one or several people claim to experience something
unusual, others hear about it and start to see the same thing.
Soon it all spirals into an epidemic of vast numbers of people
all testifying to the same weirdness with no real, mystical
cause. But is the potentially antiquated term of mass hysteria or
even its modern descendant "mass psychogenic illness" accurate or
helpful? When explaining how some collectives of people can
declare to see the same impossible thing, or how communities
usually react in predictable patterns when faced with the
Fortean, are they all just "hysterical" or "ill?" Are these
events all the same? With the Enfield Monster, sociologist David
L. Miller used the incident as a case study for what seems a more
suitable way to think about many of the stories we cover, not as
contagion or hysteria, but as "Collective Action and Behavior."
We may never know what these cryptic creatures and mysterious
happenings genuinely are, but at least we can better understand
how people react to them and each other when they show up.
Regarding the experiencers, we can know what it wasn't. These are
important considerations because, after all, what is the value to
humans if a paranormal event occurs and no one is around to
witness it?

Visit our webpage for this episode for a lot more information!