Moral panic


A moral panic, also called a social panic, is a widespread feeling of fear that some evil person or thing threatens the values, interests, or well-being of a community or society. It is "the process of arousing social concern over an issue", usually elicited by moral entrepreneurs and sensational mass media coverage, and exacerbated by politicians and lawmakers. Moral panic can give rise to new laws aimed at controlling the community.
Stanley Cohen, who developed the term, states that moral panic happens when "a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests". While the issues identified may be real, the claims "exaggerate the seriousness, extent, typicality and/or inevitability of harm". Moral panics are now studied in sociology and criminology, media studies, and cultural studies. It is often academically considered irrational.
Examples of moral panic include the belief in widespread abduction of children by predatory pedophiles and belief in ritual abuse of women and children by Satanic cults. Some moral panics can become embedded in standard political discourse, which include concepts such as the Red Scare and terrorism.
It differs from mass hysteria, which is closer to a psychological illness rather than a sociological phenomenon.

History and development

Though the term moral panic was used in 1830 by a religious magazine regarding a sermon, it was used in a way that completely differs from its modern social science application. The phrase was used again in 1831, with an intent that is possibly closer to its modern use.
Though not using the term moral panic, Marshall McLuhan, in his 1964 book Understanding Media, articulated the concept academically in describing the effects of media.
As a social theory or sociological concept, the concept was first developed in the United Kingdom by Stanley Cohen, who introduced the phrase moral panic in a 1967–1969 PhD thesis that became the basis for his 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics. In the book, Cohen describes the reaction among the British public to the rivalry between the "mod" and "rocker" youth subcultures of the 1960s and 1970s. Cohen's initial development of the concept was for the purpose of analyzing the definition of and social reaction to these subcultures as a social problem.
According to Cohen, a moral panic occurs when a "condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests." To Cohen, those who start the panic after fearing a threat to prevailing social or cultural values are 'moral entrepreneurs', while those who supposedly threaten social order have been described as 'folk devils'.
In the early 1990s, Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda produced an "attributional" model that placed more emphasis on strict definition than cultural processes.

Differences in British and American definitions

Many sociologists have pointed out the differences between definitions of a moral panic as described by American versus British sociologists. Kenneth Thompson claimed that American sociologists tended to emphasize psychological factors, while the British portrayed "moral panics" as crises of capitalism.
British criminologist Jock Young used the term in his participant observation study of drug consumption in Porthmadog, Wales, between 1967 and 1969. In Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order, Marxist Stuart Hall and his colleagues studied the public reaction to the phenomenon of mugging and the perception that it had recently been imported from American culture into the UK. Employing Cohen's definition of moral panic, Hall and colleagues theorized that the "rising crime rate equation" performs an ideological function relating to social control. Crime statistics, in Hall's view, are often manipulated for political and economic purposes; moral panics could thereby be ignited to create public support for the need to "police the crisis".

Cohen's model of moral panic

First to name the phenomenon, Stanley Cohen investigated a series of "moral panics" in his 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics. In the book, Cohen describes the reaction among the British public to the seaside rivalry between the "mod" and "rocker" youth subcultures of the 1960s and 1970s. In a moral panic, Cohen says, "the untypical is made typical".
Cohen's initial development of the concept was for the purpose of analyzing the definition of and social reaction to these subcultures as a social problem. He was interested in demonstrating how agents of social control amplified deviance, in that they potentially damaged the identities of those labeled as "deviant" and invited them to embrace deviant identities and behavior. According to Cohen, these groups were labelled as being outside the central core values of consensual society and as posing a threat to both the values of society and society itself, hence the term folk devils.
Setting out to test his hypotheses on mods and rockers, Cohen ended up in a rather different place: he discovered a pattern of construction and reaction with greater foothold than mods and rockersthe moral panic. He thereby identified five sequential stages of moral panic.
Characterizing the reactions to the mod and rocker conflict, he identified four key agents in moral panics: mass media, moral entrepreneurs, the culture of social control, and the public.
In a more recent edition of Folk Devils and Moral Panics, Cohen suggested that the term panic in itself connotes irrationality and a lack of control. Cohen maintained that panic is a suitable term when used as an extended metaphor.

Cohen's stages of moral panic

Setting out to test his hypotheses on mods and rockers, Cohen discovered a pattern of construction and reaction with greater foothold than mods and rockersthe moral panic.
According to Cohen, there are five sequential stages in the construction of a moral panic:
  1. An event, condition, episode, person, or group of persons is perceived and defined as a threat to societal values, safety, and interests.
  2. The nature of these apparent threats are amplified by the mass media, who present the supposed threat through simplistic, symbolic rhetoric. Such portrayals appeal to public prejudices, creating an evil in need of social control and victims.
  3. A sense of social anxiety and concern among the public is aroused through these symbolic representations of the threat.
  4. The gatekeepers of moralityeditors, religious leaders, politicians, and other "moral"-thinking peoplerespond to the threat, with socially-accredited experts pronouncing their diagnoses and solutions to the "threat". This includes new laws or policies.
  5. The condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible.
Cohen observed further:
Sometimes the object of the panic is quite novel and at other times it is something which has been in existence long enough, but suddenly appears in the limelight. Sometimes the panic passes over and is forgotten, except in folk-lore and collective memory; at other times it has more serious and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such changes as those in legal and social policy or even in the way the society conceives itself.

Agents of moral panic

Characterizing the reactions to the mod and rocker conflict, Cohen identified four key agents in moral panics: mass media, moral entrepreneurs, the culture of social control, and the public.
  • Media – especially key in the early stage of social reaction, producing "processed or coded images" of deviance and the deviants. This involves three processes:
  • # exaggeration and distortion of who did or said what;
  • # prediction, the dire consequences of failure to act;
  • # symbolization, signifying a person, word, or thing as a threat.
  • Moral entrepreneurs – individuals and groups who target deviant behavior
  • Societal control culture – comprises those with institutional power: the police, the courts, and local and national politicians. They are made aware of the nature and extent of the 'threat'; concern is passed up the chain of command to the national level, where control measures are instituted.
  • The public – these include individuals and groups. They have to decide who and what to believe: in the mod and rocker case, the public initially distrusted media messages, but ultimately believed them.

    Mass media

The concept of "moral panic" has also been linked to certain assumptions about the mass media. The mass media have become important players in the dissemination of moral indignation, even when they do not appear to be consciously engaged in sensationalism or in muckraking. Simply reporting a subset of factual statements without contextual nuance can be enough to generate concern, anxiety, or panic. The media plays a crucial part in delivering social reaction. The state where a social or community group reacts negatively and in an extreme or irrational manner to unexpected or unforeseen changes in their expected social status quo.
Cohen stated that the mass media is the primary source of the public's knowledge about deviance and social problems. He further argued that moral panic gives rise to the folk devil by labelling actions and people. Christian Joppke furthers the importance of media as he notes shifts in public attention "can trigger the decline of movements and fuel the rise of others."
According to Cohen, the media appear in any or all three roles in moral panic dramas:
  • Setting the agendaselecting deviant or socially problematic events deemed as newsworthy, then using finer filters to select which events are candidates for moral panic.
  • Transmitting the imagestransmitting the claims by using the rhetoric of moral panics.
  • Breaking the silence and making the claim.