It took a perfect storm of factors, ranging from religious discord and frontier warfare to political factionalism and the worst weather of the century, to create the greatest witch hunt in American history in Salem in 1692, resulting in the deaths of 25 innocent people.

In essence, this is a historian’s way of describing what social psychologists call the power of the situation. Witch hunts are very much about scapegoating. Those who do not conform to social norms are blamed for the problems of individuals and the community. There is no single answer to what the afflicted were suffering from in Salem. Some surely exhibited signs of mass conversion disorder, while others were suffering from PTSD, and there certainly was some faking of symptoms as well.

In the patriarchal Puritan society of Massachusetts, where obedience to authority was expected, it was easy for groupthink and group polarization to take over, resulting in a growing number of innocent and respected members of the community being accused.