- Mass hysteria, also known as epidemic hysteria, occurs between two or more people who share beliefs related to symptoms suggestive of organic illness.
- Research suggests that real pandemics can lead to mass hysteria.
- A key factor that creates hysteria around pandemics is that the population's ability to remain calm and react logically to the situation at hand is blurred and unfocused due to the anxiety and fear felt by large groups of people.
A pandemic, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) is defined as a "global outbreak of a new virus". When dealing with a pandemic such as COVID-19, we need to be extremely cautious in the information we share. Pandemics (such as the Swine Flu pandemic of 2008) can very easily turn into mass hysteria cases, even though the threat is very real.
Mass hysteria, also known as epidemic hysteria, is a constellation of symptoms suggestive of organic illness but without an identifiable cause. It occurs between two or more people who share beliefs related to those symptoms, and has been described as a "social phenomenon involving otherwise healthy people."
Mass hysteria has been well-documented throughout history, below are two separate cases from the 1900s that better explain what it's like to be in the midst of mass hysteria.
The June Bug Epidemic (1962)
60 workers in an American textile factory reported symptoms that included numbness, nausea, dizziness, and vomiting. Originally, the patients thought they had contracted a virus that was transmitted by the bugs in the factory.
However, several doctors and health care experts from the U.S Public Health Service Communicable Disease Center could find no evidence to support this theory. Eventually, they concluded that the "illness" was really a case of hysterical contagion and that the symptoms were caused by the anxiety that surrounded the factory over potentially contracting this virus that didn't really exist.
The Kosovo Student Poisoning (1990)
More than 4000 young students became ill with symptoms such as dizziness, fainting, and even convulsions. Their eyes were inflamed and faces flush. The first area to be affected was a high school in Podujevo, only a few students at first - but in the days passing this number grew exponentially. Soon, it passed to many other schools, some even in cities as far away as one or two hours by car. During this time, a mass panic arose that spread throughout the nation.
The Faculty of Medicine at the University of Pristina organized a group of doctors to announce it was epidemic disease, but they could not give any other information, simply because they didn't have it. The toxicological reports (analysis of blood and urine of the affected patients) were unclear. The samples did not appear to contain any poison. The Chief of Epidemiology of Kosovo Jusuf Dedushaj explained in a letter that he wrote later that year that the disease had psychic causes. The Federal Commission Head (a Slovenian doctor by the name of Anton Dolenc) agreed, declaring the incident having nothing to do with poisoning, but instead calling it a "psychological reaction", as this was the only explanation for what happened.
In many cases, hysteria is caused by some kind of incident. This can anything - a news story about contaminated water supply or a virus that's going around (similar to what we're experiencing in 2020 with COVID-19.)
The mind is a powerful and complex thing - it can play tricks on you.
Consider the Mandela Effect, for example. The Mandela Effect is a collective misremembering of common events or details named after the 2010 notion and rumors that spread when the online masses falsely remembered Nelson Mandela to have died. Many people at this time believed that Nelson Mandela died in prison during the 1980s, when in reality, he was actually freed from prison in 1990 and didn't die until a few years after the Mandela rumors, in 2013.
The internet was ablaze with people who claimed to remember seeing clips of his funeral on TV or news articles about the man's death, even though none were ever found (because he hadn't in fact passed away).
Mass hysteria is quite similar to the Mandela Effect in that you unwittingly trick your brain into believing something that isn't real...however, in the case of mass hysteria surrounding very real infections or viruses, we can convince ourselves we have the symptoms of the disease or that the disease is more deadly than it really is.
Can a real pandemic (such as COVID-19) turn into mass hysteria?
Pandemics (such as the Swine Flu pandemic of 2008 or COVID-19 outbreak of 2020) can very easily turn into mass hysteria cases, even though the pandemic is very real.
Image by Gustavo Frazao on Shutterstock
A study conducted by the University of Michigan proved that Swine Flu, also known as H1N1, did lead to mass hysteria. The experiment, conducted in May 2009, found that people perceived the H1N1 disease to be even more deadly than the Ebola outbreak in Africa, when the opposite was true.
The results of the experiment proved that when the perception of risk increases, the feelings and anxiety around our risk also increases, even if there is no actual increased risk involved.
We can see the same Swine Flu-esque hysteria beginning to happen in 2020 with COVID-19.
Mass hysteria isn't only about your mind convincing you that you have symptoms of a non-existent disease or virus – it's a collective state of mind that can convince entire populations of things that aren't based in evidence or logic.
This is dangerous when the virus doesn't exist like with most mass hysteria cases, but it's even more dangerous when we're talking about a real virus that does exist. The fear and paranoia around catching the virus leads to panic-purchasing and the spread of misinformation, which furthers the anxiety and fear in the general public.
Staying calm and logical during the COVID-19 pandemic
Stay calm, be vigilant, take care and most importantly, stay logical.
Photo by tockfotografie on Shutterstock
Staying calm and logical during a pandemic can help prevent mass hysteria, panic-purchasing, and product shortages, and can ultimately help curb the spread of infection.
Find real facts from trusted sources - don't share information you haven't fact-checked.
According to Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, the trajectory of COVID-19 suggests people will be exposed to this virus over the next two years, however, most will not develop serious illness.
The CDC has explained that, as with most other viruses, the elderly and those with underlying health conditions or people who have impaired immune systems are at the highest risk.
To find relevant information on COVID-19 and stop the spread of misinformation, you can trust sources such as WHO (World Health Organization) or the CDC (Center for Disease Control). This interactive map from a team at Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) also shows up-to-date progress on the virus with real statistics.
Perspective matters - influenza compared to COVID-19 helps us understand more about the statistics.
While COVID-19 has taken the world by storm this year, it's important to understand everything we can about this specific strand of coronavirus in regards to other diseases in order to stop the spread of panic and fear.
Coronavirus has 7 other strains that commonly infect millions of people each year. COVID-19 is a new strain that used to solely infect animals but has now been transmitted to humans (CDC estimates that 3 out of every 4 emerging infectious diseases around the world are Zoonotic diseases, meaning they occurred first in animals and then were transmitted to humans).
The Johns Hopkins map shows 184,407 confirmed cases worldwide (as of March 17, 2020) with 7,154 total deaths. While these numbers seem daunting, it's important to note other factors as well - 79,433 people have fully recovered from the virus, and the CDC has issued a statement explaining that elderly people ages 80+ are at the highest risk.
Compare these numbers with the influenza statistics released by the CDC: In the U.S alone, the flu has caused an estimated 350,000 illnesses and over 20,000 deaths this flu season alone. Researchers have suggested the new panic around coronavirus stems mainly from the fact that while we have studied the flu for years, this strand is new to humans, therefore many people consider it more dangerous.
Stop contributing to societal panic - stay vigilant but remain calm.
Another key factor in pandemics is that the population's ability to remain calm and react logically to the situation at hand becomes blurred and unfocused.
Instead of taking the recommended precautions set forth by reputable places such as the CDC, people are panic-buying weeks worth of groceries and spreading information online that hasn't been verified. This only leads to more panic and hysteria.
At times like this, it's human instinct to be anxious, to feel fear and to worry about what the outcome of this fast-spreading virus could be. However, take a moment to consider the consequences of panic buying or spreading misinformation without fact-checking. There are real-world consequences, such as a lack of product for those who need them.
Stay calm, be vigilant, take care and most importantly, stay logical.
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Excavation of a triceratops skull in South Dakota.
David Schmidt, a geology professor at Westminster College, had just arrived in the South Dakota Badlands in summer 2019 with a group of students for a fossil dig when he received a call from the National Forest Service. A nearby rancher had discovered a strange object poking out of the ground. They wanted Schmidt to take a look.
"One of the very first bones that we saw in the rock was this long cylindrical bone," Schmidt told St. Louis Public Radio. "The first thing that came out of our mouths was, 'That kind of looks like the horn of a triceratops.'"
After authorities gave the go-ahead, Schmidt and a small group of students returned this summer and spent nearly every day of June and July excavating the skull.
Credit: David Schmidt / Westminster College
"We had to be really careful," Schmidt told St. Louis Public Radio. "We couldn't disturb anything at all, because at that point, it was under law enforcement investigation. They were telling us, 'Don't even make footprints,' and I was thinking, 'How are we supposed to do that?'"
Another difficulty was the mammoth size of the skull: about 7 feet long and more than 3,000 pounds. (For context, the largest triceratops skull ever unearthed was about 8.2 feet long.) The skull of Schmidt's dinosaur was likely a Triceratops prorsus, one of two species of triceratops that roamed what's now North America about 66 million years ago.
Credit: David Schmidt / Westminster College
The triceratops was an herbivore, but it was also a favorite meal of the Tyrannosaurus rex. That probably explains why the Dakotas contain many scattered triceratops bone fragments, and, less commonly, complete bones and skulls. In summer 2019, for example, a separate team on a dig in North Dakota made headlines after unearthing a complete triceratops skull that measured five feet in length.
Michael Kjelland, a biology professor who participated in that excavation, said digging up the dinosaur was like completing a "multi-piece, 3-D jigsaw puzzle" that required "engineering that rivaled SpaceX," he jokingly told the New York Times.
Morrison Formation in Colorado
James St. John via Flickr
The Badlands aren't the only spot in North America where paleontologists have found dinosaurs. In the 1870s, Colorado and Wyoming became the first sites of dinosaur discoveries in the U.S., ushering in an era of public fascination with the prehistoric creatures — and a competitive rush to unearth them.
Since, dinosaur bones have been found in 35 states. One of the most fruitful locations for paleontologists has been the Morrison formation, a sequence of Upper Jurassic sedimentary rock that stretches under the Western part of the country. Discovered here were species like Camarasaurus, Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Allosaurus, to name a few.
Triceratops illustration
| Credit: Nobu Tamura/Wikimedia Commons |
As for "Shady" (the nickname of the South Dakota triceratops), Schmidt and his team have safely transported it to the Westminster campus. They hope to raise funds for restoration, and to return to South Dakota in search of more bones that once belonged to the triceratops.
Studying dinosaurs helps scientists gain a more complete understanding of our evolution, illuminating a through-line that extends from "deep time" to present day. For scientists like Schmidt, there's also the simple joy of coming to face-to-face with a lost world.
"You dream about these kinds of moments when you're a kid," Schmidt told St. Louis Public Radio. "You don't ever think that these things will ever happen."
Pixel art scene
- YouTube www.youtube.com
The human brain is a pretty lazy organ. Although it's capable of remarkable ingenuity, it's also responsible for nudging us into bad behavioral patterns, such as being impulsive or avoiding difficult but important decisions. These kinds of short-sighted behaviors can hurt our finances.
However, they don't hurt the video game industry. In 2020, video games generated more than $179 billion in revenue, making the industry more valuable than sports and movies combined. A 2021 report from Limelight Network found that gamers worldwide spend an average of 8 hours and 27 minutes per week playing video games.
Good at gaming, bad at saving
It's not necessarily bad that Americans spend millions of dollars and hours on video games. But consider another set of statistics: 25 percent of Americans have no retirement savings at all, while roughly half are either living "on the edge" or "paycheck to paycheck," according to a recent report on the Financial Resilience of Americans from the FINRA Education Foundation. Meanwhile, experts predict that Social Security funds could dry up by 2035.
So, why don't people save more? After all, the benefits of compounding interest aren't exactly a secret: Investing a few hundred bucks every month would make most people millionaires by retirement if they start in their twenties. However, the recent FINRA report found that many Americans have alarmingly low levels of financial literacy, a topic that's not taught in most public schools.
Even for the financially literate, saving money is psychologically difficult
But what if we could infuse the instant gratification of video games into our long-term financial habits? In other words, what if finance looked less like an Excel spreadsheet and more like your favorite video game?
A growing number of finance applications are making that a reality. By using the same strategies video game designers have been optimizing for decades, gamifying personal finance could be one of the most efficient ways to help people save for the future while reaping instant psychological rewards. But it doesn't come without risks.
What is gamification?
In simple terms, gamification takes the motivating power of video games and applies it to other areas of life. The global research company Gartner offers a slightly more technical definition of gamification: "the use of game mechanics and experience design to digitally engage and motivate people to achieve their goals."
The odds are you have encountered gamification already. It's utilized by many popular apps, websites, and devices. For example, LinkedIn displays progress bars representing how much profile information you have filled out. The Apple Watch has a "Close Your Rings" feature that shows how many steps you need to walk to meet your daily goal.
Brands have used gamification to boost customer engagement for decades. For example, McDonald's launched its Monopoly game in 1987, which essentially attached lottery tickets to menu items, while M&M's gained consumer attention with Eye-Spy Pretzel, an online scavenger hunt game that went viral in 2010.
In addition to marketing, gamification is used in social media, fitness, education, crowdfunding, military recruitment, and employee training, just to name a few applications. The Chinese government has even gamified aspects of its Social Credit System, in which citizens perform or refrain from various activities to earn points that represent trustworthiness.
Finance is arguably one of the best-suited fields for gamification. One reason is that financial data can be easily measured and graphed. Perhaps more importantly, financial decisions occur in the background of almost everything we do in modern life, from deciding what we eat for lunch to where we are going to spend our lives.
Gamification doesn't just make boring stuff fun; it's also an effective way to change our behavior. Used properly, it can also disrupt our habits.
The nature of habits
It's tempting to think that we make our way through life by thoughtfully considering the information before us and making sensible choices. That's not really the case. Research suggests that about 40 percent of our daily activities are performed out of habit, a term the American Journal of Psychology defines as a "more or less fixed way of thinking, willing, or feeling acquired through previous repetition of a mental experience."
In other words, we spend much of our lives on autopilot. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that we rely on habits: our brains require a lot of energy, especially when we're faced with tough decisions and complex problems, like financial planning. It's relatively easy to rely on learned behavioral patterns that provide a quick, reliable solution. However, those patterns don't always serve our long-term interests.
Saving money is a good example. Imagine you have $500 with which to do whatever you want. You could invest it. Or you could go on a shopping spree. Unfortunately, the brain doesn't process these two options the same way; in fact, it actually processes the investing option as something like a pain stimulus.
Why gamification works
Saving is painful. But can't people simply choose to be more financially responsible? In short: Yes, but it takes a lot of effort. After all, when it comes to changing behavior, willpower is only part of the equation.
Some psychologists think willpower is a finite resource, or that it's like an emotion whose motivational power ebbs and flows based on what's happening around us. For example, you might establish a monthly budget and stick to it for a couple weeks. But then you get stressed. The next time you're out shopping, you might find it harder to resist making an impulsive purchase in your stressed-out state.
Pixel Art Lootvlasdv via Adobe Stock
"A growing body of research shows that resisting repeated temptations takes a mental toll," the American Psychological Association writes. "Some experts liken willpower to a muscle that can get fatigued from overuse." In the terminology of psychology, this is called ego depletion.
Gamification offers a way to outsource your willpower. That's because games offer psychological rewards that can motivate us to perform certain actions that might otherwise have seemed too boring, taxing, or emotionally draining. What's more, gamifying parts of your life is less of a change of mind and more of a change of environment.
A 2017 study published in Computers in Human Behavior noted that "enriching the environment with game design elements, as gamification does by definition, directly modifies that environment, thereby potentially affecting motivational and psychological user experiences."
The study argued that games are most motivational when they address three key psychological needs: competence, autonomy, and social relatedness. It's easy to imagine how games can tap into these categories. For competence, games can feature badges and performance graphs. For autonomy, games can offer customizable avatars. And for social relatedness, games can feature compelling storylines and multiplayer gameplay.
Gamification and the brain
Games can motivate us by satisfying our psychological needs and giving us a sense of reward. From a neurological perspective, this occurs through the release of "feel-good" neurotransmitters, namely dopamine and oxytocin.
"Two core things have to happen in the brain to influence your decision-making," Paul Zak, a neuroscientist and professor of economic sciences at Claremont Graduate University, told Big Think. "The first is you have to attend to that information. That's driven by the brain's production of dopamine. The second thing, you've got to get my lazy brain to care about the outcomes. And that caring is driven by emotional resonance. And that's associated with the brain's production of oxytocin."
Cheerful Father And Son Competing In Video Games At HomeProstock-studio via Adobe Stock
When released simultaneously, these neurotransmitters can put us into a state that Zak calls "neurologic immersion." In this state, our everyday habits have less control over our behavior, and we're better able to take deliberate action. It's an idea Zak and his colleagues developed over two decades of using brain-imaging technology to study the nature of extraordinary experiences.
As he wrote in an article published by the World Experience Organization, neurologic immersion can occur when experiences, including video games, are unexpected, emotionally charged, narrowing one's focus to the experience itself, easy to remember, and provoking actions.
"The components of the extraordinary come as a package, not in isolation from each other," Zak wrote. "It's the 'action' part that is key to finding immersion. Extraordinary experiences cause people to take an action, whether it's donating to charity, buying a product, posting on social media, or returning to enjoy an experience again."
Games can invoke these types of immersive experiences.. But how exactly are financial organizations using gamification to help people "level up" their financial futures?
Gamifying personal finance
Banks and financial companies have been using gamification for years. What started with simple concepts, like PNC Bank's "Punch the Pig" savings feature, has evolved into a diverse field of games that are helping people stick to budgets, save money, and pay off debt.
What's surprising about the gamification of personal finance is that some of the most successful apps are redirecting destructive financial behaviors, like buying lottery tickets, toward positive outcomes. One example is an app called Long Game, which uses an approach called "lottery savings."
"People actually really love the lottery," Lindsay Holden, co-founder and CEO of Long Game, told Big Think. "The lottery today is a $70-billion-dollar industry in the U.S., and the people that are buying lotto tickets are the people that least should be buying lotto tickets. And so how can we redirect that spend into something that's helping them in their lives?"
Long Game's answer is to encourage users to make automatic or one-time investments into a prize-linked savings account. As users make investments, they earn coins that can be used to play games, some of which offer cash prizes. But unlike the real lottery, the prize money comes from banks that are partnered with Long Game, meaning users can't lose their principal investment.
Blast is a savings app aimed at traditional gamers. The platform lets users connect a savings account to their video game accounts. Users then set performance goals in the video games, such as killing a certain number of enemies. Accomplishing these goals triggers a pre-selected investment into the savings accounts. In addition to earning interest, users can also win prize money by accomplishing certain missions or placing high on public leaderboards.
"Gamers tell us they feel better with the time they spend gaming when they know they are micro-saving or micro-earning in the background," Blast co-founder and CEO Walter Cruttenden said in a statement.
Young gamer playing a video game wearing headphones.sezer66 via Adobe Stock
Fortune City takes a different approach to gamified finance. The app encourages users to track their spending habits, which are represented by visually appealing graphs. As users log expenses, they're able to build buildings in their own virtual city. The expense categories match the types of buildings users can construct; for example, buying food lets users construct a restaurant. It's like "SimCity" meets certified public accountant.
The risks of gamification
Gamifying your finances might help you save money, but it doesn't come without risks. After all, receiving extrinsic rewards when we perform a behavior can affect our intrinsic motivation to repeat that behavior both positively and negatively. It's a phenomenon called the overjustification effect.
In addition, gamified finance apps can also be addictive and encourage risky financial behavior. Robinhood, for example, uses visually appealing performance metrics and lottery-like game elements to incentivize the trading of stocks and cryptocurrencies. But while investing in these assets might be a good financial decision for some people, Robinhood arguably encourages its users to be "players" in the difficult world of trading, not necessarily rational investors.
What's more, gamification doesn't seem to work for everyone.
"From social psychology and behavioural economics, we know that the most likely [result of] gamification [is that you] will motivate some people, will demotivate other people, and for a third group there'll be no effect at all," noted a 2017 study on gamification and mobile banking published in Internet Research.
But given that 14.1 million Americans are unbanked, and millions more struggle with financial literacy, it's reasonable to think that gamified finance apps could help many people work toward financial independence.
"One of the most interesting things we've found is that people want help when it comes to making difficult decisions," Zak told Big Think. "In my view, any app that helps you be a more effective saver is probably a good app. But I think we have to do a lot more work to really understand the underlying neuroscience of gamification. And so we need to continue to design games that teach you more about how to 'level up in life,' not just level up in the game."
