The World Stampeded: From Mass Hysteria to Prolonged Mass Hysteria

Panagiotis Karadimas

Chapter Chapter 3 in The Covid-19 Pandemic, 2023, pp 59-70 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract During the Covid-19 pandemic, people were constantly under the delusion of an exaggerated threat. When Sars-Cov-2 started circulating, the public was inundated with warnings (primarily due to media coverage) that serious disease and death are around the corner, and mass hysteria was ignited. The irrational fear that everybody faces high likelihood of death was taken as gospel, and this belief led to the development of emergent norms in the society which in turn helped spread the hysteria across the population. While episodes of mass hysteria in the past suggest that mass hysteria wanes sooner rather than later, in the Covid-19 crisis, governmental interventions, mainly lockdowns, exacerbated the effect by leading to a novel kind of mass hysteria, what I would like to call as prolonged mass hysteria.

Keywords: Mass hysteria; Prolonged mass hysteria; Risk-perception (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:stpchp:978-3-031-24967-9_3

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-24967-9_3

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