Construct · 1 fields · 3 citations

moral panic: a standalone construct

One name. One construct. A landmark on the map.

● anchor · a standalone construct Nearest construct by meaningamplificationcompare the meanings
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moral panic1 CONSTRUCTMoral panicCOHEN · FOLK DEVILS

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Sociology and criminology

Disproportionate collective alarm over a group or issue framed as a threat to social values

The phrase moral panic first appeared in print in Jock Young's 1971 study of drug users, but it was Stanley Cohen's 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics that established it as a working concept in sociology and criminology. A moral panic is an episode in which a group, condition, or event comes to be defined by many people as a threat to a society's values and interests, and the alarm it provokes runs well ahead of the actual harm involved. Cohen traced how the media, public officials, and interest groups amplify the perceived threat and cast the accused as folk devils, stock villains who come to stand for a wider anxiety. Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda's 1994 review refined the idea into a set of identifying marks: heightened concern, hostility toward the offending group, a measure of consensus that the threat is real, disproportion between the reaction and the objective danger, and a tendency for such episodes to flare up and then subside. What makes the construct a landmark is that it links how a society labels deviance to the workings of media and moral authority, giving researchers one frame for studying reactions that range from crime scares to public-health alarms.[1][2][3]

Unit
A collective reaction, identified across an episode of public alarm rather than in a single individual
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Identified through content analysis of media coverage and public discourse, checked against Goode and Ben-Yehuda's criteria of concern, hostility, consensus, disproportion, and volatility

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Nearby constructs

deviance3 fields · 3 citationsjingle · one word, three constructslabeling3 fields · 5 citationsjingle · one word, three constructsstigma2 fields · 3 citationsjingle · one word, two constructs

References

  1. Young, J. (1971). The drugtakers: The social meaning of drug use. MacGibbon and Kee.
  2. Cohen, S. (1972). Folk devils and moral panics: The creation of the Mods and Rockers. MacGibbon and Kee.
  3. Goode, E., & Ben-Yehuda, N. (1994). Moral panics: Culture, politics, and social construction. Annual Review of Sociology, 20, 149–171. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.so.20.080194.001053

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