Halloween: An Evolving American Consumption Ritual By Russell W. Belk

Halloween is theoretically the most dangerous holiday celebrated in America. The practice of trick-or-treat allows criminals the opportunity to hurt children by tampering with their Halloween sweets. For decades, many Americans have understood that this traditional practice of door to door candy collection was absolutely unsafe, and still many today aim to abolish it completely. Nevertheless, they have failed to recognize that theoretical dangers do not always apply to real life scenarios. For example, Black Friday shopping poses as more of a danger than Halloween due to the excessive traffic, colder weather conditions, and larger crowds of people; yet, people still participate in the event. As for Halloween, the children can participate in an activity to collect free candy under lesser hardships, such as being involved

with ideal adult supervision and facing fewer confrontations.
Although Americans are presently well-aware of the dangers of Halloween, the nationwide cynical behavior was actually brought up from an indirect source.

In the article “Halloween: an Evolving American Consumption Ritual”, Russell W. Belk, a professor of marketing at the University of Utah, explained that the real source of the scare came about during and after the Vietnam War era. In addition to his explanation, Belk wrote: Halloween treat rumors have actually flourished because we felt surrounded by non-actionable threats with the U.S. loss in Vietnam, the Arab oil embargo, increased crime, the Tylenol poisonings, and increased reports of various forms of child abuse. As a reference, the Tylenol poisonings were a series of events that occurred in Chicago of 1982 when multitudes of people died from traces of laced potassium cyanide in regular Tylenol bottles. In retrospect, Halloween used to be celebrated without severe warning up until U.S. loss in the Vietnam War. Of course, the Tylenol poisonings brought into realization that the dangers of tampering that were yet to be mitigated may lurk into other common products, such as

candy.
Even though medicinal drug and candy poisonings are two different threats, people could only accept the fact that if one death occurred from tampering, then everything else that is unguarded are relevant to that situation. In this case, Jordan Lipka and Frank Giordanella, graduates of Harvard Law School, confirmed in their article “The Right to Trick-or-Trick: Constitutional Implications of Halloween Ordinances” that the Tylenol poisonings negatively affected the reliability of food and drug products throughout the nation. Furthermore, Lipka and Giordanella included that the drastic decline in the behavioral aspect of the situation responded to several local communities banning the practice of trick-or-treating and to some extremes – ignoring the holiday entirely. Communities that banned the practice verified their actions by claiming to protect children from the threats but failed to consider the statistics. According to Belk, many headlines and other reports that were related to contamination of Halloween sweets were proven to be false with the exception of one occurrence. Ironically, one father was accused of murdering his eight-year old son by feeding him candy that was laced with cyanide. However, under many circumstances, children who suffered anxiety from the possible threats may have falsely accused certain candy-givers, which the false accusations promoted the scare even further. With this proposal, adults and children could have labeled these certain types of candy-givers in order to identify suspects. As a consequence, ethnic backgrounds may have been affected.
Accordingly, the scare that constrained the enjoyment of trick-or-treating became known as the product of confirmation bias. With the Tylenol poisonings at hand, people tend to misinterpret the distinction between controllable and uncontrollable variables. In other words, the risk of Halloween candy being tampered is at a considerate level and should be dealt with maturely through simple and domestic actions, for instance, properly identifying obvious signs of alteration. As for the Tylenol, the content of the bottle is a liquid and with the lack of a seal is significantly harder to identify as contaminated. Thus, the fallacy ideas of “we think everyone is out to get us” and “our brains don't understand probability” come into play. As was previously stated, people are always prone to labeling strangers as a way to classify who are possible suspects to any case. For the Halloween rumor in particular, the communities that banned the practice of treat-or-treating proved to the matter that people viewed everyone else as a suspect of candy poisoning. However, when statistical studies have shown that Halloween candy poisonings were in fact rare, the Tylenol murders were brought back into the argument. In most cases, people will only believe a fact partially while the other part is completely blocked from their listening zone. For instance, Halloween candy poisoning is possible, but the probability of it happening is rare. Those that support the abolishment of trick-or-treating will only listen to the first part of the statement, whereas those that do not support the ban will focus on the second part. Again, this is what is called confirmation bias. Fortunately, there are people who will always have a tendency to place truth before the word fact, but with the world as humongous as it is, sometimes a little statistical preference can change more than one’s expectations.