Wikipedia Deep Dive

Moral panic

16 min read

In 1964, thousands of young Britons descended on seaside resort towns for the Easter holiday. What happened next would become a textbook example of how societies lose their collective minds—and how that loss follows a predictable, almost mechanical pattern.

The "mods" arrived on scooters, dressed in tailored suits and parkas. The "rockers" came on motorcycles, clad in leather. A few scuffles broke out. Some deck chairs were thrown. Windows were broken. By any reasonable measure, it was minor hooliganism—the kind of thing that happens when bored teenagers gather in large numbers with nothing to do.

But the British press had a different story to tell.

Headlines screamed of "battles" and "invasions." Newspapers reported that entire towns were under siege. Politicians demanded action. Courts handed down unusually harsh sentences. The public was terrified that civilization itself was crumbling, that these leather-jacketed and parka-wearing youth represented something deeply wrong with modern Britain.

A young sociologist named Stanley Cohen watched all of this unfold with growing fascination—not at the youth, but at everyone else. He had stumbled onto something far more interesting than teenage subcultures. He had discovered the anatomy of a moral panic.

What Exactly Is a Moral Panic?

A moral panic is a widespread feeling of fear that some person, group, or thing threatens the values, interests, or well-being of a community. It's what happens when society collectively decides that the sky is falling—even when the evidence suggests the sky is doing just fine.

The crucial word here is "panic." Not concern. Not worry. Panic.

Cohen, who would eventually coin the term in his 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics, defined it this way: 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." The key insight is that while the underlying issues may be real, the response is wildly disproportionate. The claims "exaggerate the seriousness, extent, typicality and/or inevitability of harm."

Think of it as society developing a kind of temporary fever—a spike in collective temperature that distorts perception, inflames emotions, and often leads to actions that seem incomprehensible once the fever breaks.

This is different from mass hysteria, which is more of a psychological phenomenon where groups of people develop physical symptoms without a physical cause. Moral panic is sociological. It's about how societies process fear, assign blame, and mobilize against perceived threats. It's about the machinery of collective anxiety.

The Five Stages of Losing Our Minds

Cohen didn't just identify moral panics—he mapped them. He discovered that they follow a remarkably consistent pattern, unfolding in five sequential stages like a fever running its course.

Stage One: Something emerges as a threat. An event happens, a group is identified, a behavior comes to light. It doesn't have to be new—sometimes the "threat" has existed for years before suddenly appearing in the spotlight. What matters is that it gets defined as dangerous to societal values, safety, or interests.

Stage Two: The media amplifies. This is where things get interesting. The press takes the threat and runs with it, presenting it through what Cohen called "simplistic, symbolic rhetoric." Complex situations become simple stories of good versus evil. Nuance evaporates. Headlines need villains, and villains they shall have.

Three specific processes kick in here. First, exaggeration and distortion—who did what gets stretched beyond recognition. Second, prediction—dire warnings about what will happen if nothing is done. Third, symbolization—certain words, images, or styles become shorthand for the threat itself. A leather jacket stops being clothing and starts being a symbol of moral decay.

Stage Three: Public anxiety spreads. The simplified, amplified message creates genuine fear among the population. Parents worry. Neighbors gossip. People who have never encountered the supposed threat become convinced it's lurking around every corner.

Stage Four: The authorities respond. Politicians, religious leaders, law enforcement, and what Cohen called "moral entrepreneurs" swing into action. Experts are consulted. Diagnoses are pronounced. Solutions are proposed. Usually, these solutions involve new laws, new policies, new restrictions. The machinery of social control cranks into gear.

Stage Five: The panic fades. Eventually, public interest wanes. The news cycle moves on. The threat either disappears, goes underground, or simply stops being interesting. Sometimes the panic leaves lasting changes—new laws remain on the books, new attitudes persist in the culture. Sometimes it vanishes so completely that it survives only in "folk-lore and collective memory."

Cohen noted something profound about this cycle: "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." The threat doesn't have to be new. It just has to feel new.

Folk Devils and Moral Entrepreneurs

Every moral panic needs its cast of characters. Cohen identified two essential roles that recur across different panics in different eras.

The "folk devils" are the villains of the piece. They're the people or groups designated as threats to decent society—outsiders, deviants, the dangerous other. In the 1960s mod and rocker panic, it was teenagers in certain clothes. In other panics, it's been immigrants, drug users, video game players, or practitioners of unfamiliar religions. Folk devils are, in Cohen's words, "labelled as being outside the central core values of consensual society."

What's fascinating is how folk devils are created. The labeling itself becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Once a group is marked as deviant, Cohen argued, its members may actually be "invited to embrace deviant identities and behavior." Tell someone often enough that they're a threat to society, and some of them might start acting like one.

The "moral entrepreneurs" are the heroes—or at least they see themselves that way. These are the individuals and groups who sound the alarm, demand action, and position themselves as defenders of virtue. They might be politicians looking for a cause, religious leaders protecting their flocks, journalists chasing a story, or activists genuinely convinced they're fighting evil. Their motivations vary, but their function in the panic is consistent: they keep the pressure on, they demand that something be done, they won't let the issue fade quietly into the background.

Between the folk devils and moral entrepreneurs sits the public—confused, anxious, trying to figure out what to believe. Cohen found that during the mod and rocker panic, the public initially distrusted media messages. But eventually, most people came to believe them. The weight of repetition, the authority of official pronouncements, the fear of being caught unprepared—all of it wore down skepticism until the panic's narrative became accepted reality.

The Media's Triple Role

You cannot understand moral panics without understanding the media's role in creating and sustaining them. Cohen identified three distinct functions the media serves in these dramas.

First, the media sets the agenda. Not every deviant act or social problem becomes the subject of a moral panic. The media acts as a filter, selecting which events are deemed newsworthy and then applying finer filters to determine which of those events might be candidates for moral panic treatment. An act of vandalism in one town might be ignored; the same act in another context might become a national crisis. The selection process is neither random nor transparent.

Second, the media transmits the images. Once a story is selected, it's packaged using what Cohen called "the rhetoric of moral panics"—simplified narratives, dramatic language, visual symbols that communicate threat. A complex social phenomenon gets reduced to a story with clear villains and innocent victims.

Third, the media breaks the silence and makes the claim. Sometimes the media doesn't just report on existing concerns—it creates them. It names things that were previously unnamed, identifies patterns that may or may not actually exist, and gives shape to anxieties that were previously formless.

Here's the unsettling part: the media doesn't have to be consciously engaged in sensationalism or muckraking for this to happen. Simply reporting a subset of factual statements without contextual nuance can be enough to generate concern, anxiety, or panic. Every fact is true. The overall impression is completely misleading.

What Makes Something a Panic Rather Than Legitimate Concern?

This is the question that critics of moral panic theory inevitably raise, and it's a fair one. After all, sometimes threats really are serious. Sometimes alarm is justified. How do we distinguish between reasonable concern and irrational panic?

In the 1990s, sociologists Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda developed a more rigorous framework for identifying moral panics. They proposed five essential criteria, and the most important one is disproportionality.

A moral panic exists when "public concern is in excess of what is appropriate if concern were directly proportional to objective harm." The response is out of whack with the actual threat. Statistics are exaggerated or fabricated. The existence of other equally or more harmful activities is ignored or denied. As Goode and Ben-Yehuda put it, "the concept of moral panic rests on disproportion."

The other criteria flesh out the picture. There must be a heightened level of concern about a group's behavior and its consequences. There must be increased hostility toward the supposed deviants, with a clear division between "them" and "us." There must be consensus—at least among significant segments of society—that the threat is real and serious. And moral panics tend to be volatile, appearing quickly and disappearing just as fast when public interest moves elsewhere.

This framework gives us a way to evaluate specific cases. Is the response proportional to the evidence? Is there a clear "folk devil" being demonized? Is the consensus real or manufactured? These questions don't always have easy answers, but they give us a starting point for critical analysis.

Where Do Moral Panics Come From?

Goode and Ben-Yehuda examined three competing theories about the origins of moral panics, and each captures something true about how these phenomena emerge.

The grass-roots model locates the source of panic in genuine widespread anxiety. Something is bothering a lot of people—a real change in society, a real threat to their way of life—and the panic emerges from the bottom up as an expression of those anxieties. The media and politicians are responding to public concern, not creating it.

The elite-engineered model takes a more cynical view. According to this theory, powerful groups deliberately manufacture or amplify panics to serve their own interests. A moral panic about crime distracts attention from economic inequality. A panic about immigration shifts blame for job losses from corporations to foreigners. The folk devils are scapegoats, and the real beneficiaries are those at the top who avoid scrutiny.

The interest group theory splits the difference. It suggests that moral panics originate in what the researchers called "the middle rungs of power and status"—professional organizations, advocacy groups, mid-level politicians, journalists. These groups have their own agendas and interests, and moral panics can serve those interests even without a grand conspiracy from above or genuine panic from below.

The truth is probably that all three mechanisms operate in different cases, and sometimes all three operate simultaneously in the same case. A genuine public anxiety can be seized upon by interest groups and amplified by elites until the original concern becomes unrecognizable.

The Usual Subjects

Over more than forty years of research, scholars have identified certain topics that generate moral panics with striking regularity. These are the subjects that seem primed for disproportionate response, the areas where societies repeatedly lose their heads.

Children in danger. Few things trigger panic faster than threats to children. Exceptional cases of physical or sexual abuse have driven sweeping policy changes regardless of how common such cases actually are. The "stranger danger" panic of the 1980s and 1990s convinced a generation of parents that predatory strangers were constantly lurking, ready to snatch children—despite evidence that the vast majority of child abuse is committed by people the children know. The later revelations about abuse within the Catholic Church and among celebrities has somewhat complicated the stranger narrative, but the fear of the unknown predator persists.

Drugs and alcohol. Substances used for pleasure are perpetual targets for moral panic. New drugs regularly become the focus of intense concern—methamphetamine, mephedrone, synthetic cannabis—with claims about their dangers often outpacing scientific evidence. The pattern repeats: a drug emerges, media reports sensationalize its effects, politicians demand action, laws are passed, and only later does anyone pause to assess whether the response was proportional to the actual harm.

Immigration. When groups of people move to new places, moral panics almost inevitably follow. Newcomers—especially those of different skin colors or religions—are accused of refusing to integrate, straining public services, and committing crimes at elevated rates. These panics recur across centuries and continents with remarkably similar rhetoric, even as the specific groups cast as folk devils change.

New technologies. Every new medium of communication produces anxieties. Novels were once feared as corrupting influences on young minds. Comic books. Rock and roll. Television. Video games. Social media. Each new technology triggers concerns—often from people who don't actually use or understand the technology—about its effects on children, culture, and civilization itself. The concerns are sometimes legitimate, but they're also sometimes wildly disproportionate to demonstrable harms.

Street crime. Crime reporting drives news ratings, and crime panics drive political careers. The perception of rising crime often has little correlation with actual crime rates. Researchers have documented numerous cases where panic about crime intensified even as crime was actually declining.

A Modern Diagnosis Tool

Researcher Benjamin Radford, studying recent phenomena like the "Blue Whale Challenge" and "Momo Challenge"—supposed online games that allegedly encouraged teenagers to harm themselves—identified common themes in modern moral panics:

The hidden dangers of modern technology. There's always some new app, platform, or feature that parents don't understand and therefore fear.

Evil strangers manipulating the innocent. The threat comes from outside, from people with malevolent intentions targeting vulnerable victims.

A "hidden world" of anonymous evil people. Behind the visible threat lurks an invisible network of malefactors, coordinating their predatory behavior away from public view.

These themes recur because they tap into deep anxieties about modernity itself—the sense that the world is changing too fast, that invisible forces are at work, that the innocent are always at risk from sophisticated predators.

The Irrationality Problem

Cohen himself acknowledged something uncomfortable about the term "moral panic." The word "panic" connotes irrationality and loss of control. It suggests that the people caught up in the panic are, in some sense, not thinking clearly—that they've been carried away by emotions that override their better judgment.

This creates an analytical problem. Who gets to decide what counts as "rational" concern and what counts as "panic"? The researchers studying moral panics are usually educated professionals, often politically liberal, often skeptical of the concerns they're studying. Are they objective analysts, or are they dismissing legitimate concerns held by people unlike themselves?

Cohen argued that "panic" remains a useful term when understood as an extended metaphor. We're not literally saying that every person involved is in a state of psychological panic. We're saying that the social system as a whole is behaving in ways that resemble panic—disproportionate response, impaired judgment, contagious fear.

British criminologist Jock Young and cultural theorist Stuart Hall took the analysis further, connecting moral panics to larger questions of political economy. Hall, writing about the panic over "mugging" in 1970s Britain, argued that crime statistics are often manipulated for political purposes. Moral panics, in his view, could be deliberately ignited to create public support for authoritarian measures—to "police the crisis" in ways that served powerful interests.

This Marxist-influenced analysis points to something important: moral panics don't happen in a political vacuum. They emerge in specific historical moments, they serve specific interests, and they have specific consequences for the distribution of power in society.

Why This Matters

Understanding moral panics isn't just an academic exercise. These phenomena have real consequences.

Laws passed in the heat of panic often remain on the books long after the panic fades. People labeled as folk devils carry that stigma with them. Resources devoted to fighting imaginary threats are resources not available for addressing real problems. And the cycle of panic can become self-reinforcing—each panic makes the next one easier to trigger, as the public learns to expect and even crave the dramatic narrative of threat and response.

Cohen observed that while some panics pass quickly and are forgotten, others "produce such changes as those in legal and social policy or even in the way the society conceives itself." The satanic ritual abuse panic of the 1980s, for example, sent innocent people to prison and traumatized countless families—all based on recovered memories that were later shown to be fabricated through suggestive therapeutic techniques. The damage persisted long after the panic ended.

The concept of moral panic gives us a framework for stepping back and asking hard questions when society's alarm bells start ringing. Is this threat real? Is the response proportional? Who benefits from the panic? What are we not seeing while we're focused on this particular fear?

These questions don't make legitimate threats go away. But they might help us distinguish between the threats that deserve our attention and the ones that are mostly serving someone else's agenda.

The Permanent Questions

Cohen developed his concept in the early 1970s, but moral panics didn't stop happening. If anything, the accelerated news cycle and social media amplification have made them more frequent and more intense. We live in an age of permanent potential panic, where any story can go viral, where outrage spreads faster than analysis, where the folk devils of the moment can be created and destroyed in a matter of days.

The question isn't whether moral panics will continue to occur. They will. The question is whether we can learn to recognize them while they're happening—not just in retrospect, when it's easy to see the disproportion and the manufactured fear.

That recognition requires a kind of cognitive discipline that doesn't come naturally. It means pausing when you feel fear and asking: Is this fear proportional to the evidence? It means noticing when a story has perfect villains and perfect victims and asking: Is reality really this simple? It means being suspicious of claims that demand immediate action and refuse to tolerate skepticism.

None of this means that threats aren't real or that concern is always misplaced. But Stanley Cohen, watching those teenagers on scooters and motorcycles cause minor mayhem on the British seaside, saw something important: our collective response to threats can itself become a problem, sometimes a bigger problem than the threat that triggered it.

Understanding that mechanism—really understanding it—might be one of the most useful things we can learn.