How overused are terms like “mass hysteria” or “delusion” today?
Terms like “mass hysteria” and “mass delusion” are greatly overused and misunderstood, even among many social scientists. New Guinea “cargo cults,” (a century-long phenomenon among colonized Pacific islanders who created replicas of flagpoles, ports and airports in the expectation that Western goods would arrive as a result) the Dutch tulip mania, the Martian panic, religious flagellants, the Red Scare — each has been loosely labeled as “mass hysteria” yet have little or nothing do with it. The participants are almost never hysterical in a clinical sense. It is all too common to lump behaviors that to the viewers are unfamiliar or strange, into the catch-all category of “mass hysteria.” Q: Is every fad, for example Twitter, a social delusion? A: Most fads are not social delusions but are short-term infatuations. Only time will tell whether Twitter is a fad and will go the way of the CB radio after a year or two of intense interest or if it will become a more permanent fixture of our so
