It has always intrigued me that people in Salem were actually lynched. I never knew the bit about the 2 dogs being killed for witchcraft. I cannot even imagine how unsafe everyone must have felt at the time, whether it was the fear of accusation or the irrational fear of your town being overrun by witches. I searched for other instances of mass delusion to find that they have been occurring forever and everywhere.
https://listverse.com/2016/08/18/10-bizarre-instances-of-mass-delusion/
This link includes some of those covered in the lecture, but a new one that I found fascinating was in Europe during the 14th century, people became fearful of tarantulas. The only way, apparently, to rid the victim of the venom would be to dance a special dance. On top of this, there was not usually proof of a tarantula bite, it was merely fear of having been bitten.
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The link you provided was crazy. There are so many instances in which people believed in these mass hysteria instances. Most likely these events occurred because of fast thinking heuristics. But regarding the witch trials people probably did not know the concepts of slow thinking in order to see the harm they caused to "witches"
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