Mass delusions
Cracked had an entertaining article this week called The 6 Most Humiliating Public Failures by Celebrity Psychics . It's a great read just to see a lot of these sham artists exposed for the frauds they are, but I was particularly struck by one particular video which I had originally seen on Sam Harris' blog in which a martial arts 'master' apparently kicks the crap out of a room full of students without so much as touching them: This is appended by another video showing the same old man getting the crap kicked out of him by an unnamed "MMA fighter" who subjects martial arts mysticism to the roundhouse kick of skepticism. The above video caught my interest because of the mass participation. These students appear to be completely absorbed in the delusion. It's entirely possible that they were all just humoring the old fart, but I think that's the vastly less likely scenario. There are far too many documented cases of mass delusions to simply dism