Moral Panics: Culture, Politics, and Social Construction
Goode and Ben-Yehuda take a constructionist view of social problems, in which what counts as a problem is the concern that parts of the public feel about a condition, which need not match the concrete harm it causes. At times large numbers of people feel intense concern about a threat that a sober assessment finds nonexistent or much smaller than expected. Such short-lived, over-heated periods are what sociologists call moral panics, and the book develops this idea. It is cited as a book.
Goode and Ben-Yehuda take a constructionist view of social problems, in which what counts as a problem is the concern that parts of the public feel about a condition, which need not match the concrete harm it causes. At times large numbers of people feel intense concern about a threat that a sober assessment finds nonexistent or much smaller than expected. Such short-lived, over-heated periods are what sociologists call moral panics, and the book develops this idea. It is cited as a book.
Written from the abstract as shown on the OpenAlex record, read 2026-11-04.
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Goode, E., & Ben-Yehuda, N. (1994). Moral Panics: Culture, Politics, and Social Construction. Annual Review of Sociology, 20, 149-171. doi:10.1146/annurev.so.20.080194.001053