I wouldn’t say you need to, it seems you have your mind made up and as the theory suggests, no amount of true, real irrefutable evidence will change your mind.
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somebody get the mods in here to make a new thread for this theory
Rules for thee and not for me… 
I actually don’t mind…not anal retentive like certain, uh…members.
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Oh, there’s also the “Mindspace” document, published by the British government, describing exactly how to use crowd-behaviour insights to manipulate the public towards specific goals. However this doesn’t address mass hysteria as such.
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Yeah they were fucking with our minds, but for the right reasons.
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my opinion is that a few funny quips here and there is OK, as long as there is some milking of the humour of a picture, and as long as it is kept minimal. in this case there seems to be an awful lot of not funny at all discussion with no end in sight, they might as well make it a thread. but, since we’re all here, i’m will to discuss it for several posts…
Done, the new thread is in temp.
why not make a non-temp thread with the name of the theory? people might be interested…
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happy?
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No, I just have the notion that a theory should be backed by evidence and not a couple of anecdotes. You apparently have a different standard of evidence for some odd reason. I would suggest strongly that it is you who would not be swayed by evidence, as you seem totally uninterested in investigating any.
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“There is no royal road to geometry”
– Euclid
The same is true for psychology. To get where you want to go, you’ll have to start at the beginning and work your way through. The specific historical instances of mass psychosis that Mick quotes are indisputable, but there is no single paper that anybody can quote for you that “proves” the mechanisms that caused them; the general principles of human behaviour that offer the most likely explanations are understood. The fact is, they’re so well understood that they’ve become technology rather than science - ie., a set of tools that can be used to achieve a desired result.
You might want to start with the literature on brainwashing. That’s a rich seam of scary stuff.
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No, they’re nothing of the sort. They’re anecdotes. I’ve seen no one even begin to demonstrate how the theory explains them. Anyway, if you guys believe it fine. I’m just interested in how the creator(s) of the theory demonstrated it. I’ll just try to pin that down, cheers.
You can’t be serious. The cultural revolution, Russian revoltution etc are some of the most well-documented events in modern history. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood - are you suggesting these things were not described accurately?
There is no “creator” of this “theory”. It’s just textbook stuff that you study in year 2 (IIRC) of undergrad psychology. Personally, I never thought it was particularly interesting until COVID hit; something similar probably explains why Desmet had to go back to his textbooks to get his thoughts in order.
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Yes, I’m serious. You must be missing my point. From what I heard from Malone, there are 4 specific conditions needed for this “mass formation psychosis” to occur. I want to know how the creators of the theory decided on those 4 conditions and how they demonstrated them. That can’t really be that hard to understand, can it?
In that case it’s not a “theory”. Did it appear magically out of the air?
Ah, OK, I thought you were referring to the historical facts. I’ll try to find some references for those four points he refers to, but they’ll be rabbitholes, not papers.
No, it dropped out of decades of research by different people, just like most of the body of knowledge we call “science”. The science of crowd behaviour and mass psychosis is a huge, wibbly field of study which had thousands of contributors. Desmet was trying to boil that down into a soundbite. He wasn’t creating a “theory” as such.
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Yeah, that’s all I’m interested in. If you can point me to anything, thanks! I’ll try to look around for what Desmet has done.
I’ll try to find something from other scientists, but you might want to watch this rather more focused interview, where he explains what’s going on in a lot more detail:
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Hmmmmmm… the headlines promises and the news can’t really deliver…
You can basically call it mass hysteria, and it’s evident every time you see people wearing masks on the beach.
Governments don’t realise what a massive hole they’ve dug in regards to mental health. People have lost their minds, and it won’t be an easy solution bringing them back, and some might never move on from what happened.
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There’s this. Interesting, but also just seems like a mass of assertions in general. Beyond describing what it is, he more or less just tries to tie some strings to elements he perceives in the current situation, which is something I noticed people do to apply it to other situations, in a quick look, and as Malone did with the Nazis. This is what Malone listened to perhaps, he seems to echo this closely.
I’ll listen to that talk tomorrow. I get that there are some general principles that have some general application in a lot of situations, but the way he’s saying “there are four conditions that have to be met and when they are met x will occur” is clearly going much farther than that.