We check the popular story about psychologist James Rogers, whose technique was banned, and he himself was sentenced to death.

In May 2013, a story began to circulate on the RuNet about the American psychologist Dr. James Rogers and his Massachusetts experiment. It began: “The photograph shows Dr. James Rogers. In 1965, he was sentenced to death in the electric chair for the so-called “Massachusetts experiment,” but two days before his execution, while in his cell, he committed suicide by poisoning himself with potassium cyanide, an ampoule of which was brought to him by one of his patients.”

Further in the text, details of Dr. Rogers’ technique were given. Allegedly, he intensified the patients’ paranoia so much that a new round of it corrected the previous one. “In other words, if a person thought there were bugs crawling around him, Dr. Rogers would tell him that there were. The whole world is covered in bugs. Some particularly sensitive people see them, while others are so used to it that they simply do not notice them. The state knows everything, but keeps it secret in order to prevent panic. The man left completely confident that everything was fine with him, resigned himself and tried not to notice the beetles. After some time, he most often stopped seeing them.”

But American colleagues did not appreciate the innovative approach. The experiment was allegedly considered inhumane, and Dr. Rogers was considered a charlatan. And the poor fellow was sentenced to death. He retracted his last word, handed the letter to the judge, and then committed suicide. The story was completed by a touching paragraph from the mentioned letter: “Living in harmony with your faith, you are completely healthy, but as soon as you start defending your point of view, faith in God will make you kill, faith in UFOs will make you afraid of abduction, faith in a cup of coffee in the morning will become the center of your universe and destroy your life. A physicist will begin to give you arguments that the sky is not blue, and a biologist will prove that the grass is not green. In the end, you will be left alone with an empty, cold and completely unknown world, which our world most likely is. So it doesn't matter what kind of ghosts you populate your world with. As long as you believe in them, they exist, as long as you don’t fight them, they are not dangerous” (the original spelling has been preserved in all quotes).

A basic check immediately shows that the whole story is made up from beginning to end. There was no such doctor, no such experiment. In addition, there are no traces of this story on the English-language Internet either. And the photo shows a journalist and writer Hunter Thompson. The first refutations on the Internet date back to 2013. However, they did not prevent the story from going viral, gaining tens of thousands of reposts and becoming one of the most popular fakes in the history of the Runet. It can be found even in one book real doctor of legal sciences.

Interestingly, dozens, if not hundreds of users of social networks and blogs published the story without links to the original source, in their own name, essentially stealing someone else’s text. And time after time they received a warm response from the audience and caused a new wave of reposts. And the author was not difficult to find. The original text appeared on May 21, 2013 on the Facebook page of Muscovite Alexander Shamarin. Here's how the author himself a week later explained its creation:

Another interesting point is connected with this text. The fact is that when I tried to find that same starting post on Shamarin’s Facebook, I was unsuccessful - it wasn’t there. As a result, I decided to contact the author and ask him a question directly. It turned out that Alexander himself did not know that the original post no longer existed. He offered a completely plausible explanation for this. The post probably received a lot of complaints, and the Facebook administration deleted it. And numerous clones still live because, apparently, there were no complaints about them or there were not enough.