Witches, Satanic Cults in the 80's, & Accelerating Toyotas

After government review of crash data, it's turning out that the runaway Toyota threat to America was just another mass delusion, one in long line of collective freak outs. The individual cases of unchecked acceleration are appearing to be cases of people stepping on the gas instead of the brakes. These type of accidents are not uncommon, and can result in tragic losses of life, but what i find interesting is our reaction to these events. It became an accepted truth. It permeated our culture. There were Congressional hearings. Fines were assessed. Lawsuits filed, and for what? Because some people regrettably stepped on the gas pedal instead of the brake? It just points to how subjective our reality can really be. Our belief that the runaway Toyota meme was real in some respects made it real. The billions of dollars spent by Toyota in recalls, and fines were certainly real. Whether the belief that your vehicle could suddenly rocket out of control actually resulted in a higher likelihood that you might accidentally step on the wrong pedal, i don't think anyone could say, but the heightened media attention caused any accident of this sort among the thousands of motor vehicle accidents happening daily to be reported on at a national level thereby providing real accidents as evidence for the belief. It's classic confirmation bias.
This isn't a new trend. Our national history, as I'm sure any people's history, is littered with embarrassing events where we all collectively believed something that was completely false, and acted on that falsehood, sometimes quite brutally. We've hanged people and crushed them with stones during the Salem witch trials, because we were sure as a community that people were being hexed by witches. In 1984 a trial in California began that lasted seven years and ended up costing $15 million due to a runaway fear in the community that satanist were abusing children in a preschool. In 1993 three teenagers were tried and convicted absent any evidence for the murder of three boys in Arkansas, based on the fervent belief of the community that the murderers were satanists who had killed the children in a satanic ritual. In all these cases we believed something absent any credible evidence, and acted on it with sometimes horrific results.
I like to think that we live in a world where we predominately make rational decisions based on knowledge, and these events where we let our beliefs be the sole arbiter are few and far between, but I recognize that it's a matter of progression, that we're learning. I guess at this point Akio Toyoda should be somewhat relieved that he wasn't crushed to death beneath rocks for the possessed Toyotas.