Erich Goode

Erich Goode

Erich Goode is an American sociologist of deviance, emeritus professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. With Nachman Ben-Yehuda he wrote Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance and the 1994 Annual Review of Sociology article that turned Stanley Cohen's idea into five criteria and three accounts of where a panic comes from.

Who they are

Goode took a BA at Oberlin College in 1960 and a PhD in sociology at Columbia University in 1966. He has taught at Stony Brook, where he is professor emeritus, and at the University of Maryland, and has also taught at Columbia, New York University, Florida Atlantic University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. These details come from a secondary encyclopaedia entry, which gives no year of birth.

His work takes a constructionist approach to deviance, studying how societies define and react to behaviour as much as the behaviour itself. His early books were on cannabis: Marijuana (1969) and The Marijuana Smokers (1971). He later wrote on paranormal beliefs, including UFOs, ESP and creationism, in Paranormal Beliefs: A Sociological Introduction (1999). He also studied moral panics, including witch hunts and the panic over Satanic ritual abuse, and is described as committed to harm reduction without value judgements.

Key papers

Goode, E., & Ben-Yehuda, N. (1994). Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance. Blackwell. A second edition followed from Wiley-Blackwell in 2009.

Goode, E., & Ben-Yehuda, N. (1994). Moral panics: Culture, politics, and social construction. Annual Review of Sociology, 20, 149-171. The vault has read the abstract in full.

Key ideas

Five criteria. The vault's record of the framework lists concern, hostility, consensus, disproportionality and volatility. All five are required, and disproportionality is the one that carries the weight and is hardest to apply, because it needs an agreed measure of the real harm.

Three accounts of origin. The review article sets out a grassroots account, an elite-engineered account and an interest-group account of where a panic begins. Its abstract also separates panics from fads: both are short-lived, but a panic leaves an informal legacy and often an institutional one.

A checklist for a loose idea. Cohen's concept was built on one case. Goode and Ben-Yehuda made it testable enough to be applied to others, which is also what exposed its main weakness, the problem of measuring proportion.

Sources

  1. Biographical details: encyclopaedia entry for Erich Goode, read 24 October 2026; secondary.
  2. Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1994), Annual Review of Sociology, 20, 149-171: abstract read. The second-edition front matter and preface of Moral Panics were read; the body has not been.