Linnda Caporael is a professor at the Science and Technology Studies Department at

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute () (RPI) is a private research university in Troy, New York, with an additional campus in Hartford, Connecticut. A third campus in Groton, Connecticut closed in 2018. RPI was established in 1824 by Stephen Van ...

Educational background

Linnda R. Caporael is a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the department of Technical Studies and Science. She received her PhD in Psychology at the

University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Barbara County, California, Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduate ...

, and she also studied human ethology at the Institute of Child Development at the

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degree ...

. She is a Fulbright-Hayes Scholar and a visiting scientist in the Dept. of Invertebrate Paleontology and in the Dept. of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History. She researches culture from a biological perspective and biology from a cultural perspective.

Hypothesis of ergotism and the Salem witch trials

In the April 2, 1976, weekly issue of ''

Science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...

'' magazine, Caporael debuted a hypothesis that the accusations of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 could have been caused by

ergotism Ergotism (pron. ) is the effect of long-term ergot poisoning, traditionally due to the ingestion of the alkaloids produced by the ''Claviceps purpurea'' fungus—from the Latin "club" or clavus "nail" and for "head", i.e. the purple club-head ...

. A fungus that grows on grains of rye, ergot contains a toxin which resembles

LSD Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), also known colloquially as acid, is a potent psychedelic drug. Effects typically include intensified thoughts, emotions, and sensory perception. At sufficiently high dosages LSD manifests primarily mental, vi ...

, and which can remain toxic in bread baked with flour tainted by it. Her evidence to support this theory includes historic weather reports and other growing conditions that foster the growth of this fungus, and the reported symptoms of several accusers, including hallucinations and crawling sensations in skin, which appear to match symptoms of ergot poisoning. Within days of the article's publication, historian

Stephen Nissenbaum Stephen Nissenbaum (A.B. Harvard College, 1961; M.A. Columbia University, 1963; Ph.D., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1968 ), is an American scholar, a Professor Emeritus of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst's History Department speci ...

, co-author of ''Salem Possessed'', publicly disputed the notion, saying that it "appears unlikely to me that this would not happen in any other year, in any other household and in any other village." In the December 24, 1976, issue of ''Science'', psychologists Nicholas P. Spanos and Jack Gottlieb published a complete review of all the evidence, historical and medical, and concluded that the data did not support Caporael's hypothesis. In 1982, historian, Mary Matossian, defended Caporael by restating that the weather conditions were prime for growing ergot and that the symptoms of ergot matched the symptoms of the victims. A year later, Nicholas Spanos challenged Matossian's defense of Caporael, defending his original rebuttal, stating that her argument was "irrelevant to the ergot hypothesis, incorrect, and presented in a highly misleading manner."Spanos, Nicholas. 1983. "Ergotism and the Salem Witch Panic: A Critical Analysis and an Alternative Conceptualization". Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences. 19, no. 4:358-369.

Published works

* Caporael, L. R. (1976)
Ergotism: The Satan loosed in Salem?
''Science, 192,'' 21-26. * Caporael, L. R. & Atherton, P. R. (1985). A Subjective Judgment Study of Polygon Based Curved Surface Imagery. In L. Borman and & B. Curtis (Eds.), ''Proceedings of the ACM CHI 85 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference''. April 14–18, 1985, San Francisco, California. p. 27-34. * Caporael, L. R. (1986)
Anthropomorphism and mechanomorphism: Two faces of the human machine.
''Computers in Human Behavior, 2,'' 215-234. * Caporael, L. R. (1987)
Homo sapiens, Homo faber, Homo socians: Technology and the social animal.
In W. Callebaut & R. Pinxten (Eds.), ''Evolutionary epistemology: A multiparadigm program'' (pp. 233–244). Dordrecht: Reidel. * Caporael, L. R. (1987)
A window on war: Women and militarism in Ancient Greece.
Paper presented at the American Anthropological Association, Chicago. * Caporael, L. R., Dawes, R. M., Orbell, J. M., & van de Kragt, A. J. C. (1989)
Selfishness examined: Cooperation in the absence of egoistic incentives.
''Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 12,'' 683-739. * Caporael, L. R. (1997)
Vehicles of knowledge: Artifacts and social groups.
''Evolution and Cognition, 3,'' 39-43. * Caporael, L. R. (2001)
Evolutionary psychology: Toward a unifying theory and a hybrid science.
''Annual Review of Psychology, 52,'' 607-628. * Caporael, L. R. (2003)
Repeated assembly.
In S. Schur & F. Rauscher (Eds.), ''Alternative approaches to evolutionary psychology'' (pp. 71–90): Kluwer. * Caporael, L. R. (2007)
Evolutionary theory for social and cultural psychology.
In E. T. Higgins & A. Kruglanski (Eds.), ''Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles'' (pp. 3–18). New York: Guildford Press.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Caporael, Linnda Living people Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute faculty Year of birth missing (living people) Science and technology studies scholars