The headline in Monday’s Guardian read: ‘Stillness falls on St Michael’s on Wyre, a village that came under siege.’ But why would a tiny English village in Lancashire come under siege in 2023? Despite rampant inflation, the remnants of Covid, and a government that still can’t ‘get Brexit done’ we are still a relatively peaceful society.
A village under siege
The article goes on to elucidate, describing residents hiring external security over concerns about a flood of people entering the village both day and night, some engaging in amateur detective activities that ranged from the ridiculous, to the intrusive, to the dangerous. Extra powers were granted for police to remove social media influencers from the area, resulting in at least one arrest, none of which stopped the flow.
Some of the strangers in the village smashed up the toilets in the local petrol station; some ghoulish sightseers took selfie photographs at a bench where a missing mother had left her phone; and a message was left on a bunch of flowers marked for her two children: “You are soo brave with what’s going on. I can’t wait to see your sausage dog.”
The night before she was found, nearly 4,000 people joined a live webchat on Twitter dedicated to sharing conspiracy theories about the mother’s disappearance. The day after, the family spoke of their anguish, having not only to deal with her disappearance but also “the media and the sections of the public who had accused her partner of wrongdoing and ‘misquoted and vilified friends and family’”.
They poignantly commented “Do the press and other media channels and so-called professionals not know when to stop? These are our lives and our children’s lives”.
Does psychology have any answers to this? Well, yes. But it involves society becoming fully conscious of the way human minds perceive reality; how social media continues to potently influence this, and being willing to engage with collective efforts to deal with such emergent problems.
First of all, we need to look to history for copious examples of previous mass hysteria, which has been an enduring feature of all human cultures through time.
Mass hysteria
Examples of mass hysteria exist from long before the national and international press permeated human societies. The Salem witch trials are a celebrated example, dramatised in Arthur Miller’s still popular play The Crucible.
The Smithsonian reports that events in Salem were only one example of what was happening in the fledgling US and across Europe at that time:
“A ‘witchcraft craze’ rippled through Europe from the 1300s to the end of the 1600s. Tens of thousands of supposed witches – mostly women – were executed … the Salem trials took place just as the European craze was winding down.”
In 1938, as radio hit its stride as the world’s major mass media, an adaptation of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds was broadcast in the US. The script writers had converted the then 40-year-old novel into fake news bulletins describing a Martian invasion of New Jersey. This unleased a panicked flood of phone calls from the public to police, newspaper offices and radio stations, wanting information on evacuation arrangements.
The broadcasters, led by 23-year-old Orson Welles, were stunned. They had no intention to deceive, and had believed the original contents of the novel too fantastical to be of much interest to their intended audience. They’d therefore constructed the broadcast in that way to try to make the content (originally set in London) more relevant to Americans and less “silly and improbable”.
Finally, stories of visits to earth by aliens in the 1950s, and their alleged suppression by the US government at the time are still cause for speculation, which has moved into social media. In 2019, it was a source of a viral Facebook event “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us”.
Making human meaning: the power of the story
My PhD was rooted in the study of how human beings make their reality through narrative and story. My research focused principally on how children learn to do this during the early developmental period. I later explored how ancestry narratives may impact on how adults construct and reconstruct their identity.
In terms of how current affairs narratives impact on us, Lisa Feldman-Barratt introduces the idea of the way that reality is negotiated in the famous Monty Python dead parrot sketch, as a pet shop owner and customer negotiate (for comic effect) whether the parrot the customer was sold was, in fact, dead at the time.
She argues that one of the “superpowers” of the human mind is “social reality”; the ability to construct external events within a frame that makes sense and appeals to us, which may then be linguistically shared with and espoused by others. “Faced with ambiguous data, your brain must somehow guess the causes of that data as it plans what to do next, so it can keep you alive and well.”
‘Keeping us alive and well’ is the key point here. In general, human beings are inclined to exaggerate the extent of a perceived threat, because ancestors who did so were more likely to remain alive to reproduce. In this sense, it is an evolved feature of the human mind.
Fundamental attribution error
Another feature of the human mind that oils the wheels of our functioning in society is the ‘fundamental attribution error’. This is the tendency to attribute other people’s problematic behaviour to internal factors such as their character or personality, and to attribute our own problematic behaviour to situation – that outside events forced us to make errors of judgement.
This, too, is adaptive. It helps us to be cautious about others when we are unsure of their motives (ancestors who did this were also more likely to live to reproduce) whilst allowing us to maintain the confidence to operate within the world without beating ourselves up for every mistake we make.
Unfortunately, this then disposes us to presume that, for example, while we might understand that we interviewed poorly on a broadcast interview because we were under conditions of extreme stress, another person interviewed under the same conditions may be construed as being ‘shifty’ of appearance because (we then presume) they may have ‘something to hide’.
The fundamental attribution error is closely related to the oft-cited ‘Dunning Kruger effect’ in which people are inclined to greatly over-exaggerate their own skills in an area in which they in fact, have very incomplete knowledge; for example, why amateur sleuths may think that they are doing something very useful, when in fact they are doing more harm than good.
Other people as less real
And of course, because we exist in our own minds, immersed within our own narratives, the temptation to frame other people as somehow less real than ourselves is always present.
A father who lost his son in the Manchester Arena bombings explained on Newsnight that before his son’s death was confirmed to him, people on social media were already speculating that the young man had died, and reporters from various national media companies were knocking on their front door seeking interviews, adding considerably to the trauma suffered by the family.
Clearly none of the individuals involved in such speculation online, or banging on the family’s door, had considered how they would feel in the same situation; they had removed other people from the same reality as the self and objectified them into the subject of sensational gossip, which for the journalists, was additionally the source of competition for the first ‘scoop’ on the event. Sadly, both of these factors subsequently reoccurred in the Lancashire case.
Social media and mass hysteria
So, what can we do about this? First of all, we have to grasp that human perception of reality lies not ‘out there’, but ‘in here’ deep within the brain. The Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University attempts to show us this through the example of visual illusion, concluding that while “illusions and political thinking don’t involve the same brain processes … they follow the similar overarching way the brain works”.
The advent of social media has made it crucial that we understand more about ourselves in this way; that we become more self-conscious in the sense that the reality in our own minds is only one version of reality, and most importantly, that it will not mirror exactly how other people are thinking and feeling about ongoing events.
There is also a need to raise public consciousness about the fact that social media – on which anyone can post anything, and band together with others all over the world to discuss and further construct shared narratives on current events – has become the most potent fuelling agent for conspiracy theory and mass hysteria that humanity has ever known.
This phenomenon started slowly on earlier versions of the internet, as forums and newsgroups arose, but these tended to remain within the niche in which they were created. Social media then exploded such discussion into the mainstream, where all manner of mass hysteria is immediately funnelled algorithmically into timelines.
Politicians are aware that human beings think in these ways, and unscrupulous ones use the situation to distort public opinion. This has been very much to the fore over the previous decade with Boris Johnson in the UK and Donald Trump in the US, to cite just two examples. Over this period, social media has played an increasingly big part in political reality shifting initiatives, both in terms of direct and indirect influencing.
State education initiatives that purport to rely upon ‘hard facts’ rather than analytical and critical thinking have also had a part to play.
So what now?
We cannot put the social media genie back into the bottle. The only enduring way that we can address this situation is through public education on human modes of reality construction, and ways to avoid mass hysteria, both for existing adult populations, and ongoing, for young people of secondary school age. We must also question how powerful ‘social influencing’ has become, and how we may need to address this.
Whether or not politicians will espouse such solutions, given that they find social media so useful for carrying and instilling their own self-serving narratives is, at present, unclear. Finland has already started to engage in such education initiatives, however.
Sooner or later, if we are to avoid widespread social deterioration in public human relations, we must learn to engage with social media in a critical adult fashion; to become fully aware of its potential to incite mass hysteria and build psychic defences against this. It is only then that we will to be fully able to utilise its many useful communication features, whilst resisting its pernicious potential to incite destructive behaviour.
