Mass Hysteria In The Crucible By Arthur Miller

In The Crucible, the young girls in the town lie about their actions in the woods, which cumulates into a witchhunt and the death of innocent people. The girls were only a small portion of the town, but as they continued to condemn their neighbors, the panic grew, and continued to grow as important people in the town pushed it. Arthur Miller reveals that mass hysteria is caused by a small part of the whole in The Crucible, and this concept is still relevant today as shown through the media and the refugee crisis. In The Crucible, Miller indicates that mass hysteria is caused by only a small portion of the whole society, but quickly spreads to encompass the whole of society. In the first act, the Putnams visit Reverend Parris, claiming that

During the 2014 Ebola panic, a research group consisting of scholars from Arizona State University, Purdue University, and Oregon State University found that, as each news report relating to the ebola virus was released, an increase in ebola related searches within social media bases, like Twitter, occured (Towers, Afzal, Bernal, Bliss, et al., 1). These searches consisted of the symptoms and spread of the virus. The increase shows that the news, a trusted entity in American society, constantly running articles gives rise to panic of disease in people’s daily life. Even though there were only a few people to contract the Ebola virus, the news played segments on the disease as if a pandemic was inevitable, thus increasing the fear in American citizens. In addition to the Ebola virus panic that swept the nation in 2014, a malfunction with an online epidemic tracker caused widespread hysteria over the influenza virus (Towers, Afzal, Bernal, Bliss, et al., 1). Most likely caused by overcoverage by the news, the disease tracker overestimated the concern of the virus causing the state of New York to call a public health emergency. This overestimation generated fear, thus creating more news coverage which continued the vicious cycle of hysteria caused by the trust in major media companies. The belief in society that the media is always credible and reliable causes mass panic when dangerous conditions