"Beans!" In 2021, thousands of teenagers suddenly developed the same violent tics, every medical test came back clean, and the real cause turned out to be hiding on their phones.

It was more subtle and interesting than just a fad. It accidentally hijacked a number of our social instincts. In this case, it was disruptive and obvious. It's likely the effect is happening to everyone, just more subtly.

It becomes the mechanism through which a very old human phenomenon — the tendency of a stressed group to adopt a shared physical response to that stress

Basically, our stress responses are subconscious, but learnt. Think swearing when you hurt yourself. It's common, but it's not universal.

In this case, the girls, due to existing stress formed a pseudo social group. The group "leader" had an unusual 'stress' venting method (due to tourettes). The other girls synced to this without conscious involvement. It's the same mechanism that makes us pick up a local accent, or adopt local habits, when we move somewhere new.

In short, fads include this mechanism, but generally have a far more conscious aspect. This was an interesting short circuit, exposing some of the underlying mechanics of the human mind.

Fads tend not to cause physical illness.

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For a second I wondered if you were talking about tourette guy.

Maybe I'm going out on a limb here but I'm not sure people on the fediverse are the best to be criticizing others because of a meme about beans.

Mass sociogenic illness happens when a group of stressed, socially connected people are exposed to a symptom template that the brain and body can, in a real physiological sense, adopt without any conscious decision to fake anything. The symptoms are genuinely experienced. They are not consciously produced.

No need to be condescending. Stupidity has nothing to do with it, which you might’ve known had you bothered reading some of those words in the article.

to help expose people with tourette's to those who don't know what people with tourette's live like so that more people can treat them with dignity.

Because people with tourettes also have right to be content creators if they want to be?

So it was Munchausen's by internet?

Or, you know, talk to them.

Why are you saying beans? Where did you see that?

Mass sociogenic illness is one of the oldest documented patterns in medicine. Historians have traced examples back to the dancing plagues of medieval Europe, when whole villages spontaneously began dancing to the point of collapse and death