I've been thinking about this phenomenon a lot, for reasons that I would hope are obvious. But maybe they're only obvious to me. I'll keep coming back to this as the day goes by. See what you think.
At times, substantial numbers of the members of societies are subject to intense feelings of concern about a given threat which a sober assessment of the evidence suggests is either nonexistent or considerably less than would be expected from the concrete harm posed by the threat. Such over-heated periods of intense concern are typically short-lived. In such periods, which sociologists refer to as "moral panics," the agents responsible for the threat-"folk devils"-are stereotyped and classified as deviants.
Goode and Ben-Yehuda, "Moral Panics: Culture, Politics, and Social Construction"
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