Definition
A moral panic is a period in which public concern about a perceived threat to social values rises far beyond what the underlying behaviour warrants, producing exaggerated demands for control and lasting changes in policy or culture. The threat is personified in a folk devil — a marginal group portrayed as the source of the danger — and the reaction is propelled by a coalition of journalists, campaigners, experts, and officials.
The framework was formalised by Stanley Cohen in Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972), his study of the Mods and Rockers seaside disturbances in 1960s Britain. Later scholars — Goode and Ben-Yehuda among them — codified five attributes that distinguish a panic from ordinary concern: heightened concern, hostility, broad consensus, disproportion between reaction and threat, and volatility over time.
Why it matters
How it works
Cohen modelled the escalation as a sequence. An initial incident is selected and dramatised; the offenders are typified as a recognisable social type; the typification is amplified through coverage; public concern grows; campaigners and officials respond with new measures; and the response sometimes generates more of the conduct it sought to suppress — a feedback loop known as deviance amplification.
The framework travels well across cases — mugging in 1970s Britain, satanic abuse in the 1980s, MDMA and rave culture in the 1990s, knife crime, gang grooming, and online radicalisation more recently — but it has been criticised for being applied loosely. The five-attribute test exists precisely to discipline that looseness: a panic must show disproportion, not merely public attention.