Imagination on the prowl

The past is replete with much publicised instances of delusion and hysteria, many of which seem absurd to those outside the particular historical or cultural setting. The case of the mysterious 'Monkey Man' terrorising Delhi till recently is the latest in the series, says K. ASHOK VARDHAN SHETTY, which was aided by authorities groping in the dark.

"Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable but as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead."

Friedrich von Schiller

BACK in 1938 in the United States, Orson Welles produced a realistic live radio enactment of H.G. Wells' novel, The War of the Worlds, featuring an invasion of Earth by Martians. A farm near New Jersey was the supposed Martian landing site. The play included references to real places, buildings and streets, vivid eyewitness descriptions, convincing sound effects and realistic special bulletins. It was so credible that tens of thousands of people rushed into the streets, made hysterical phone calls to authorities, prayed in churches, and scrambled madly for bus and train transportation. Princeton University psychologist Hadley Cantril (1940) estimated that about 1.2 million listeners became excited or panic stricken by this episode. Orson Welles himself was shocked by the gullibility of the public because the programme had featured several announcements that the broadcast was fictional; apparently people did not pay heed.

A repeat of this episode, but one not so well known, occurred in 1949 in Quito, Ecuador, when a radio play in Spanish of The War of the Worlds resulted in thousands of frantic people fleeing for their lives or preparing to defend themselves against Martian gas raids. Later, when the truth was out, an angry mob burned down the radio station killing 15 people including the programme's mastermind.

History is replete with such instances of collective delusion and mass hysteria, many of which seem hilarious to those outside the particular historical or cultural setting. The episode of the mysterious "Monkey Man" who has been reportedly clawing, biting or otherwise harassing the people of Delhi and adjoining areas for the past few weeks is the latest in the series. Other recent Indian examples, which come readily to mind, are the episodes of Ganesha idols consuming milk and the AIDS syringe panic that resulted in the lynching of innocent persons near Chennai.

Charles Mackay's 1841 classic, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which is still in print, was the first systematic exposition of this topic. It encompasses a broad range of delusions, manias and scams ranging from the Mississippi Scheme to the South-Sea Bubble to Tulipomania to the Crusades to witch manias to haunted houses. Mackay wrote: "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."

The term collective delusion is used to describe the rapid spread of false, but plausible, beliefs within a given population. They can be positive and take the form of wish fulfilment (such as reports of Ganesha idols consuming milk or UFO sightings), but they are usually negative and spread by fear. Collective delusions differ from superstitions and other popular fallacies in that they occur in an unorganised, spontaneous fashion and are usually temporary, although they may occasionally get institutionalised as in the case of organisations chronicling UFO sightings and alien abductions.

Mass hysteria (also called mass sociogenic illness) is different from collective delusion in that it includes a pathological condition. The individuals concerned appear and feel ill, but all the lab tests and physical exams are normal. In other words, the symptoms are perfectly genuine; it is just that they are manifestations of a wholly imaginary threat. This is a very common and an almost normal condition; it does not mean that one is crazy. All mass hysterias involve collective delusions but not vice-versa.

Recognising the various types of collective delusions and mass hysteria is the first line of defence of countering their influence. The knowledge that similar instances have occurred before and elsewhere can greatly help the authorities in reassuring the public and restoring their sense of confidence whenever an episode strikes. I wish to set forth some of the major episodes that have occurred in different parts of the world within the last 60 years.

The Phantom Slasher of Taipei

For nearly two weeks in 1956, the residents of Taipei, Taiwan, lived in mortal fear of a crazed villain who was said to be prowling the city and slashing people at random with a razor. The police received complaints from at least 21 "victims" of this "Phantom Slasher". But a detailed investigation by psychologist Norman Jacobs and the local police revealed that five slashings were innocent false reports, seven were self-inflicted cuts, eight were due to cuts other than razors and one was a complete fantasy. In the wake of rumours amplified by sensational press coverage, lacerations from such mundane causes as bumping into an umbrella in a crowded bus or old wounds reopened due to inadvertent scratching were redefined by the victims as attacks by the "Phantom Slasher".

The Mad Gasser of Mattoon, Illinois

On September 1, 1944, the Mattoon Police received a complaint that a woman and her daughter had been sprayed with "a sweet- smelling gas" by a mysterious figure lurking near their window, after which they felt nausea, dizziness and difficulty in walking. Police investigated but found no evidence of the alleged intruder. However the local press sensationalised the incident by stating that a "Mad Gasser" was on the loose in Mattoon. After seeing the press story, similar complaints poured in from 29 "gas victims" over a period of two weeks. The transient symptoms reported by them were limited to dizziness, nausea, dry mouth, palpitations and difficulty in walking. Donald Johnson, who investigated this episode, concluded that it was a case of mass hysteria; the victims were redefining and attributing to the Mad Gasser, mundane physical reactions that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Construction sacrifices and headhunters

In 1966, when I was a boy growing up in Barkur near Udipi, Karnataka, the government constructed a bridge across the river flowing through the village. At that time, rumours were rife that the bridge contractor and his workers were looking out for a human sacrifice, preferably a young boy, to ensure that no mishap took place during construction and the bridge had a strong, enduring foundation. Initially I thought that this was local lore, but I now find that this delusion is widespread in many remote rural and tribal communities in India and elsewhere.

For example, R.A. Drake (1989) has described similar construction sacrifice, kidnapping and head hunting rumour panics - triggered by the construction of a government bridge or building - in Indonesia, Malaysia and other parts of South East Asia, during which entire villages were paralysed with fear, travel was severely restricted and schools were closed for months together.

Shrinking genitalia

Mass hysteria can also have a humourous side, like the koro epidemic. Men are convinced that they are the victims of a contagious disease which causes their penises to shrink and retract into the body. A. Chakraborty, S. Das and A. Mukherji investigated one such outbreak in North East India in 1982 when panic was so great that medical authorities toured the region with loudspeakers to reassure anxious residents, and took the drastic step of measuring penises at regular intervals to demonstrate that no shrinkage was taking place.

A. L. Gwee has described a koro episode in Singapore in 1967 when thousands of citizens were affected, forcing the government to declare an emergency. Anxious men rushed to hospitals clamping their penises between two chopsticks lest they retracted into the body. Public education allowed the mass hysteria to abate leaving in its wake no deaths, but many bruised private parts. A similar episode occurred in Hainan Island, China in 1984-85 affecting nearly 3,000 people.

"Penis snatching", a mass hysteria similar to koro, has affected countries along the west coast of Africa from Cameroon to Nigeria. A Nigerian psychiatrist, Dr. Sunny Ilechukwu, describes one such episode, which caused widespread fear in 1990. Men could be seen in the streets of Lagos holding on to their genitalia either openly or discreetly with their hands in their pockets. It was stated that if someone shook hands with a "penis snatcher", he felt "an electric current run through him, and a feeling that his manhood had retracted into his stomach. The "accused" was often threatened or beaten, and in some cases lynched to death. The "victims" usually claimed that the penis had been "returned" after the alarm was raised but it was now "shrunken" or "a wrong one".

The Belgian Coca Cola hysteria

In June 1999, 112 school children in Belgium became ill with such reported symptoms as headache, stomachache, nausea, shivering and dizziness after they had drunk Coca Cola from cans or small bottles. More than 70 children were hospitalised. Coca Cola recalled all its products and its chairman apologised to the Belgian people. Belgian health officials tested the contents for 15,000 suspect toxins but found nothing. They concluded that this was yet another case of mass hysteria and that what the "victims" needed was "social healing and not medical cure". The outbreak was apparently triggered by a faint, rotten egg type of smell due to traces of sulphides in some bottles, but their concentrations were a thousand times less than what was required to cause the reported symptoms. In four out of the five schools where the bad Coke allegedly struck, half the children who fell ill had not drunk any Coke that day.

Schools are ideal settings for the appearance of mass hysteria because of the stressful environment and the susceptibility of young and adolescent children to word-of-mouth epidemics - a fact which teachers, parents and administrators should take particular note of. Dr. Simon Wessely, an English psychiatrist, has documented 115 cases of mass hysteria involving school children over the past 300 years. In my opinion, the occasional episodes of school children in Tamil Nadu falling sick after consuming food under the Noon Meal Programme may not all be cases of food poisoning ("lizard falling into the cooking vessel is the most commonly cited reason"); most of them could well be cases of mass hysteria of the kind described above.

The cattle mutilation non-mystery

This collective delusion plagued west United States on and off for about 10 years from 1969. A rash of dead cattle was found on the range with "surgically sharp incisions" on their bodies and with parts of their anatomy like eyes, ears, tongue and genitals missing. Some people thought that extra-terrestrials were doing this to study the physiology of cattle or simply to terrorise human beings. Others felt that Satanic cults whose ceremonies required the blood and parts of animals were at work. So great was public outcry that, in 1979, the Federal government appointed ex-FBI agent K. Rommel to investigate the problem. Rommel reported that there was no noticeable increase in cattle deaths; the cattle had died only of natural causes such as eating poisonous plants; and their bodies had been preyed upon by small scavengers. As scavengers find it difficult to chew through tough cowhide, they first attack the soft parts of the body which were just the parts found missing in the mutilated cattle. What about the "surgical precision" of the incisions? Well, they were not surgically precise at all; it was simply media hype. Soon after Rommel's report was made public, the episode witnessed a precipitous decline.

We have so far seen the power of false ideas gone berserk. Throughout history, people of all cultures, irrespective of their level of advancement, have shown themselves to be susceptible to word-of-mouth epidemics. Such episodes can and will happen over and over again. Only the mediums and forms will change as better technologies evolve and old delusional themes give way to new ones - in the past it used to be demons and witches; nowadays it is toxins and gases. It is important to understand collective delusions and mass hysterias because they can teach us a lot about the psychology of lynch mobs, mass suicides, "moral" witch hunts, real witch hunts, unfounded fears about the casual transmission of AIDS, organ snatching scares, runs on banks, stock market crashes, money multiplication schemes and other such things which hold tremendous potential for mischief and destruction.

Why do they occur?

Almost all cases of mass delusions and hysterias fit a pattern. Suddenly people begin to perceive the mundane in a new, bizarre fashion and everyday occurrences (e.g. not feeling well, or dead cattle, or an idol absorbing a liquid) are given a new, exciting, anxiety-producing definition. Ambiguous events are redefined according to the emerging definition of the situation, creating a self-fulfiling prophecy. Sometimes paranormal or pseudoscientific causes are proposed and accepted. Most of the episodes share a single, overwhelming trigger - an unusual sighting or smell or sound.

According to noted social psychologist Robert Bartholomew, many factors contribute to the spread of collective delusions and mass hysterias - the mass media, rumours, low education levels, cultural superstitions and stereotypes, group conformity, situations of stress, ambiguity and uncertainty, the fallibility of human perception and memory reconstruction, and insufficient reassurances from figures of authority such as community leaders or civil servants or the police.

The last mentioned point needs further elaboration. It is often seen that authorities are clueless about handling such cases, and unwittingly reinforce the very problem that they are trying to control. For instance, in the "Monkey Man" episode, instead of firmly scotching the rumours, the authorities added to the crisis by warning people to be on the lookout for strange incidents in their area, by showing the image of a "monster-like thing" on TV, and by offering monetary rewards for information about the elusive "Monkey Man". As the authorities could not come up with a precise, well-defined explanation of the cause of the problem, bizarre explanations (evolutionary throwback, Pakistan's Inter Service Intelligence agent) became increasingly popular.

In the words of noted psychiatrist Dr. Marc D. Feldman: "Mass delusions and hysterias are best countered through prevention or very early intervention. The most powerful tool is for a calm figure of authority to give clear and accurate information repeatedly, and to remain visible and available to provide updates and reassurance".

In his brilliant book, The Tipping Point (Little Brown & Co., 2000), Malcolm Gladwell points out that ideas, messages, products and behaviours spread through a society in much the same way as infectious diseases do, and the best way to understand them is to view them as "social epidemics". A distinctive feature of epidemics is that even the smallest change, such as one child with a virus, can get them started. They spread rapidly, blow up and then die out quickly - just as mass delusion and hysteria do. An epidemic "tips", i.e. suddenly shoots up (or down) when the virus reaches a "critical mass".

Another feature of epidemics is that the epidemic agent constantly evolves; the strains of flu that circulate at the end of each winter are hardier than those that circulated in the beginning. In a similar vein, mass delusions and hysterias begin small and become more refined and devastating as they travel and pick up stories.

We also know that in the spread of medical epidemics, a tiny percentage of carriers do most of the damage. (Remember the so- called Patient Zero of AIDS, a French flight attendant, who claimed to have 2,500 sexual partners and was linked to at least 40 of the earliest cases of AIDS in the U.S.?). Likewise, word-of-mouth epidemics occur when a few exceptional, charismatic people pick up an idea, and through their social connections and energy and enthusiasm spread the word around.

Gladwell poses (and answers) two simple questions: Why is it that some ideas, messages, products and behaviours start epidemics and others do not? And what can we do to deliberately start and control "positive epidemics" of our own? He recounts a number of case studies of positive epidemics; one of them is the children's TV show called "Sesame Street" which started "learning epidemics" in pre-schoolers, turned children onto reading and "infected" them with literacy.

Starting positive epidemics should be of great interest to all of us in India from educators trying to reach students, to businessmen trying to spread the word about their products, to government policy makers trying to bring about attitudinal changes regarding literacy, birth control, AIDS control, environmental protection and sustainable agriculture. To do so, we must learn the right lessons from epidemics of the medical or social variety. And we may have to thank the "Monkey Man" for opening our eyes to these possibilities.

Tailpiece

My advice to the hapless Delhi Police still trying to catch the elusive "Monkey Man" is to give up the search, cast their IPC and CrPC law books aside, and instead read Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds and Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point.

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