Techniques · Appeals

Moral panic

Amplifying a minor or unrepresentative behavior into a threat to society's values, so that fear and outrage sweep in measures that would not survive a calm look at the facts.

Family Appeals First documented 1972 Exploits Availability heuristic, Negativity bias Related fallacy Hasty generalization
How it works

A moral panic has a cast. There is a folk devil, a group whose behavior is made to stand for everything wrong; there are the media, which report the threat in a rising register; there are the moral entrepreneurs, who explain what the threat means and what must be done; and there is the public, whose alarm, once raised, licenses the response. Stanley Cohen described the sequence in 1972 from the British press's treatment of Mods and Rockers, seaside scuffles reported as a collapse of order.

The device is fear appeal at the scale of a society and with a moral charge: the threat is not to your body but to your values, and the remedy is not a product but a law, a ban, or a crackdown. Exploits Availability Heuristic and Negativity Bias.

Historical examples

1954 · comic books

Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent argued that comic books caused juvenile delinquency, and Senate hearings that year put publishers under oath. The industry adopted the Comics Code to survive. Later examination of Wertham's own files found his case material selectively presented and in places altered; the delinquency the panic addressed had no demonstrated connection to comics.

Wertham, Fredric. Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Rinehart, 1954; Tilley, Carol L. "Seducing the Innocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications That Helped Condemn Comics." Information & Culture 47, no. 4 (2012): 383–413; Hajdu, David. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

1964 · Britain

Cohen's study followed the press coverage of Mods and Rockers at Clacton over Easter 1964: a wet weekend of minor disorder became, in the headlines, a "day of terror" and the collapse of a generation. Magistrates, MPs, and editorials supplied the moral commentary; the sentencing that followed was out of proportion to the offenses. The book named the pattern.

Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1972.

In advertising and commerce

1980s–present · media and products

Panics sell. The 1980s "satanic ritual abuse" scare ran through daytime television, paperback memoirs, and training seminars for therapists and police, most of it commercially produced and none of it substantiated by the investigations that followed. Protective products and services arrive with every panic, from comic-book substitutes to monitoring software.

Victor, Jeffrey S. Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend. Chicago: Open Court, 1993; Lanning, Kenneth V. Investigator's Guide to Allegations of "Ritual" Child Abuse. Quantico: FBI Behavioral Science Unit, 1992.

Classroom prompt

Find a story describing a behavior among young people as a crisis. What number would tell you whether it is one? Is that number in the story?

In the wild

Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.

1
"A wave of teenage vandalism is sweeping our schools. Three incidents this month alone. We need cameras in every corridor now."

What to notice. Three incidents become a wave, teenagers become the folk devil, and the measure was ready.

2
"This game is turning a generation into killers. Parents, wake up before it's your child."

What to notice. A pastime is cast as a threat to society's values, with an anecdote in place of a rate.

3
"Everyone agrees this trend is out of control. The only question is how fast we act."

What to notice. The crisis is asserted as consensus and the debate is moved to the speed of the crackdown.

Sources

  1. Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1972. ISBN 978-0415610162
  2. Goode, Erich, and Nachman Ben-Yehuda. Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance. 2nd ed. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. ISBN 978-1405189347
  3. Tilley, Carol L. "Seducing the Innocent." Information & Culture 47, no. 4 (2012): 383–413. doi:10.1353/lac.2012.0024
  4. Hajdu, David. The Ten-Cent Plague. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. ISBN 978-0374187675