Question

TCO 6. In April of 2003, health officials in Toronto, Canada's largest city, started seeing cases of an acute respiratory disease of unknown origin. The onset of the disease was sudden and deadly. Dubbed SARS (sudden acute respiratory syndrome), the disease killed 30 people in two different outbreak waves. The origins of the viral disease were unknown for weeks, as was how SARS spread. Even though the victims were clustered in healthcare and elder care facilities, everyone in Toronto, a city of three million people, grew increasingly anxious and fearful. Conventions and public events were cancelled, and people watched each other with suspicion to detect any signs of the illness. Discuss this with respect to the effects of suggestibility that Myers writes about in Chapter 6. Be specific as to what aspects of suggestibility apply to the case.

Answer 1

Suggestibility simply means the act of conforming to something said or done, which could be false but is nevertheless perceived to be cogent, and hence believed to be true. This suggestion regarding a particular instance is shot in the form of cues to distort the perception of a given incidence and fill the required lacuna with a given memory that serves the purpose of a purpose. Suggestibility is something that is used quite prolifically from a pedestrian social level, from person to person and also at a large political level, mass suggestions, also called propaganda.

Suggestibility hones certain aspects inherent to itself that can be adhered to different situations based on their innate nature and channel. In the aforementioned scenario it is quite apparent that the suggestibility of the disease SARS has had an impact on mass level, making people, as a result, extremely cautious as well as weary of others due to the threat it harbors.  

Mass Suggestibility is an aspect of suggestibility which festers mass hysteria.The key terms to look for in the above excerpt are 'anxious' and 'fearful,' which are the chief culprits for the spread of the disease. It is said in context that the disease started 'suddenly and the origins of it were unknown' and also how it was contracted by people. This goes onto show that suggestibility when creeps on a macro level, that is, mass level, it is then a collective delusion.

The anxiety with respect to a certain situation exacerbates the given condition further - festering the symptoms in the given individuals. Psychosomatic display of symptoms has been long studied by psychologists across, which start to appear but without the trace of any concrete anatomical base. "People watched each other with suspicion to detect any signs of the illness," in this line from the excerpt given above clearly demonstrates that even ordinary problems/conditions observed by people or individuals are perceived to be of serious intent, bloated out of proportion due to suggestions - amidst the news that is available.  

Note: A suggestion for future questions: it would be better to list down the aspects that a given chapter from a certain textbook covers, which you allude to in a question, as experts do not know which book you might be referring to.