12 Facts About Moral panic

Moral panic is a widespread feeling of fear, often an irrational one, that some evil person or thing threatens the values, interests, or well-being of a community or society.

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".

Many sociologists have pointed out the differences between definitions of a moral panic as described by American versus British sociologists.

Moral panic 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.

Moral panic thereby identified five sequential stages of moral panic.

Cohen maintained that "Moral panic" is a suitable term when used as an extended metaphor.

Sometimes the object of the Moral 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 Moral 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.

Moral panic further argued that moral panic gives rise to the folk devil by labelling actions and people.

Series of moral panic is likely to recur whenever humans migrate to a foreign location to live alongside the native or indigenous population, particularly if the newcomers are of a different skin color.

Once it became clear that this was not the case, the moral panic created by the media changed to blaming the overall negligence of ethical standards by the younger generation, resulting in another moral panic.

Paul Joosse has argued that while classic moral panic theory styled itself as being part of the "sceptical revolution" that sought to critique structural functionalism, it is actually very similar to Emile Durkheim's depiction of how the collective conscience is strengthened through its reactions to deviance .