Why We Keep Falling For Moral Panics
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. When you were a kid, your parents probably told you not to get in a car with a stranger. That was one of the foundational rules of childhood safety for more than one entire generation. Don't talk to strangers.
Leslie Poston:Don't take candy from strangers, and definitely don't get into a stranger's car. And then Uber launched, and within a few years, these same people were handing teenagers and kids a phone and saying, your ride's here. Get in the car with this stranger. Nobody organized a protest. There were no congressional hearings or op eds about how ride sharing was endangering children.
Leslie Poston:People just quietly stopped believing the thing they'd been loudly insisting was a matter of life and death because a new thing was more convenient. This should tell us something important about how deeply held that belief actually was. So today, I want to talk about why we do things like this. Why we grab onto manufactured moral panics with both hands, treat them like moral convictions, and then drop them the moment they stop being useful? I think moral panics serve a psychological function that has very little to do with the thing we're supposedly panicking about and a lot to do with what that panic allows us to avoid.
Leslie Poston:A criminologist named Stanley Cohen coined the term moral panic in his book Folk Devils and Moral Panics, which was based on his research into how British media and the public reacted to clashes between the Mods and the Rockers, two youth subcultures at seaside towns in the sixties. Cohen determined how relatively minor incidents were amplified by media coverage into symbols of total cultural collapse. Even though the actual violence was minimal, Cohen identified a pattern that has repeated itself consistently. A grouper behavior gets identified as a threat. Media coverage amplifies far beyond what the evidence supports, the public develops disproportionate concern about it, politicians respond with calls for action, and then eventually the panic fades, usually without the real underlying issues ever being addressed.
Leslie Poston:What Cohen was describing sociologically, I want us to examine psychologically, because I'm not just interested in how moral panics get manufactured, I'm also interested in understanding why people are so eager to participate in them. I think one answer is that moral panics function as effort shields. They give people a way to feel like they're engaging with a serious problem, while avoiding the much harder, slower, less emotionally satisfying work of actually addressing the problem. The panic becomes a substitute for action and a pretty comfortable one because outrage is easy, socially rewarding, and makes you feel like you're on the right side of something. What endorsing a moral panic doesn't require is that you change anything about yourself or your circumstances.
Leslie Poston:This connects to several well documented psychological patterns. System justification theory, which we've talked about on earlier episodes in more depth, describes how people are motivated to perceive existing social, economic, and political arrangements as fair, legitimate, and necessary. Research shows that this motivation operates even when the existing system actively disadvantages the person defending it. People will work to protect the status quo because changing it is psychologically expensive. A moral panic about something new, whether it's a technology, a social behavior, or a cultural shift offers a way to justify someone's resistance to change by framing the new thing as dangerous rather than simply unfamiliar or effortful to engage with.
Leslie Poston:Last week we talked about the Semmelweiss effect the tendency to reflexively reject new evidence when accepting it would require costly changes in behavior, self-concept, or professional identity. A moral panic is what the Semmelweis reflex looks like at scale. It's a similar psychological impulse, but organized, then amplified by media, validated by authority figures, and given a community. Instead of a cadre of doctors from the 1800s rejecting evidence that their hands are carrying disease when going from something like serving as a coroner to assisting a birthing mother, you get an entire society rejecting evidence that a new technology isn't actually destroying children because accepting that evidence might mean the adults have work to do. I want to walk you through four examples of this.
Leslie Poston:Two from technology and two from the offline world. Because this pattern isn't limited to how we respond to new tech. It shows up anywhere that genuine engagement with a problem would cost more emotionally or psychologically than performing outrage about a simpler, scarier version of it. Let's start with the example I opened with. Because it's one of the simplest recent illustrations of a moral panic functioning as an effort shield also one of the easiest to see in hindsight, the stranger danger movement took hold in The United States in the seventies and eighties.
Leslie Poston:Driven heavily by a handful of high profile kidnapping cases and an enormous amount of media coverage. The message was simple. Strangers are the primary threat to your children. Teach them not to interact with unknown adults, and they'll be safer. If you're Gen X or a boomer, you might remember there were even commercials about this.
Leslie Poston:It's 10PM. Do you know where your children are? The problem is that the evidence never supported this. According to government statistics, only seven percent of sexual abuse cases involving juveniles were committed by strangers. That means ninety three percent of child sexual abuse victims knew their abuser.
Leslie Poston:Thirty four percent were abused by family members. Fifty nine percent by acquaintances. People like their coach, their teacher, family friends, or neighbors. The FBI's data on kidnapping shows a similar pattern. Only twenty four percent of kidnappings were by strangers.
Leslie Poston:Nearly half were by family members. So the actual threat to children was overwhelmingly from the people already in their lives. And the actual work of protecting children from that threat would have required something much harder than teaching them a catchphrase. It would have meant scrutinizing your own family and your own social circle. Having those uncomfortable, age appropriate conversations with your kids about bodily autonomy and boundaries.
Leslie Poston:Building the kind of trust as a family where your child would actually tell you if something was wrong and paying attention to warning signs from relatives, family friends, church leaders, and community members. That requires years of sustained, emotionally difficult, consistent parenting. Meanwhile stranger danger offered an alternative that cost almost nothing: a thirty second conversation and one simple rule. In exchange parents got to feel like they'd done something protective. The panic absorbed their anxiety without addressing the actual risk or keeping their children safe.
Leslie Poston:And the uber detail exposes how thin that conviction really was. If strangers are dangerous, were a deeply held safety principle or belief rather than a convenient heuristic, ride sharing apps would have faced massive cultural resistance, but they didn't. The moment getting a car with a stranger became convenient, people stopped treating it as dangerous because the danger was never the real point. The feeling of having addressed the danger was. The moral panic over violent video games follows the same structural pattern just with a different cast.
Leslie Poston:After the Columbine shooting in 1999, video games became a primary scapegoat in American media and politics. The shooters had played a game called Doom. That fact was treated as though it explained something. For the next two plus decades, politicians, media figures, and advocacy groups insisted that violent video games were creating violent children, and every subsequent mass shooting renewed that cycle. But research has never supported this causal claim.
Leslie Poston:Chris Ferguson, a psychologist at Stetson University, conducted a meta analysis examining over 100 studies on the relationship between violent video games and aggression. He found that violent video games had little measurable impact on aggression, mood, helping behavior, or grade. He also found evidence that publication bias had distorted the scientific record, meaning that studies finding effects were much more likely to be published than studies finding none, which skewed the overall picture in the direction of the panic. Ferguson's work also noted something that should have been obvious spikes in violent video game popularity correlated with substantial declines in youth violence, not increases. If the causal story were true, you would expect the opposite, but the manufactured was useful.
Leslie Poston:For parents, it provided a visible external enemy that required nothing from them. You didn't need to monitor what your child was actually experiencing emotionally or talk to them about what they were seeing or pay attention to whether they had friends or were struggling in school. The video game was the problem, so take it away and you've parented. Politicians. The utility of the moral panic about video games was even more direct.
Leslie Poston:If video games cause violence, you don't have to touch gun policy, which is politically expensive. Fund mental health services, which costs real money, or address school climate, which is complex and doesn't fit on a bumper sticker. You get to hold a press conference, point at an entertainment product, and perform concern. The moral panic absorbed all of that political energy into something that felt like and could be marketed like action, but that changed nothing. The Supreme Court eventually weighed in.
Leslie Poston:In 2011, the court struck down a California law banning the sale of certain violent video games to minors, noting that the evidence for harmful effects was minimal and couldn't be distinguished from the effects of other media like cartoons and movies. The panic didn't survive contact with the standard of evidence, but it had served its purpose for many years by then. If you've listened to PsyberSpace before, you've heard me dig into this next one in detail, so I'll be more concise here. But it's important in context because it's the most active current example of the pattern. The claim that social media is destroying children's mental health has become one of the dominant cultural narratives of the past several years.
Leslie Poston:Jonathan Haidt's book The Anxious Generation is probably the most commercially successful version of it, but the research just doesn't support the narrative he's selling. Candace Odgers, a developmental psychologist whose work involves longitudinal data tracking actual kids over time, has systematically challenged the social media panic with evidence. The effect sizes in the research are small. Correlations between social media use and mental health outcomes hover around 0.08 to 0.12. To put that in perspective, a correlation of 0.08 means social media use explains less than one percent of the variance in youth mental health outcomes.
Leslie Poston:Compare that to the known effects of poverty, family instability, food insecurity, and educational stress on children's mental health whose effect sizes are dramatically larger. But we're not building surveillance infrastructure to address poverty, are we? Research published in 2024 argued that simple narratives about social media causing youth mental health problems produce biased interpretations, particularly when researchers ignore confounding variables pre existing mental health conditions, family stress, or socioeconomic instability. Height has a book to sell. Odgers has longitudinal data.
Leslie Poston:These are not equivalent positions. And the policy response to the manufactured moral panic tells you everything about how it functions as an effort shield. COSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, up for vote now again, would impose what the Electronic Frontier Foundation has described as a censorship regime across the entire country disguised as a duty of care. It would require age verification systems that create universal identity surveillance for every Internet user, not just minors. The legislation does not address algorithmic manipulation.
Leslie Poston:It does not fund digital literacy education. It does not do anything about the parenting capacity crisis or the economic pressures that leave parents without the time or resources to actually engage with their kids' online lives. What it does is give parents and politicians something external to point at. If they say the phone is the problem, take the phone away and you've protected the children. Meanwhile, nobody's had to learn how these platforms actually work, or sit with their child and talk about what they're seeing online, or push for childcare funding, living wages, or school counselors.
Leslie Poston:None of the hard, expensive, unglamorous work that would actually make kids' lives better ever gets done. But there's been a panic, so that feels like enough. My last example isn't a tech panic. It's the somewhat thorny topic of the anti abortion movement and it illustrates the effort shield dynamic at its most extreme. Advocating for a fetus requires no material sacrifice.
Leslie Poston:You show up, you hold a sign, you harass women and men seeking regular health care, you vote, you post online, and you feel righteous about it. That fetus makes no demands on you. It doesn't need housing or healthcare or food or education. It doesn't cry at 3AM or need you to be home from work. The moral position there feels simple, emotionally clear, and costs you nothing psychologically.
Leslie Poston:The moment that child is born and becomes an actual person with actual needs, that pattern reverses. The states with the most restrictive abortion laws consistently rank among the worst for child welfare outcome. A 2022 analysis from the Commonwealth Fund found that states with the most restrictive abortion policies showed the weakest maternal and child health outcomes across a range of measures, including infant mortality, child poverty, low birth weight, and adverse childhood experiences. Mississippi, whose abortion ban was at the center of the Dobbs case, ranked last in the Commonwealth Fund's composite score for health system performance. Nine of the 10 states with the highest child poverty rates currently ban abortion according to a 2024 analysis.
Leslie Poston:In nearly half of the states with bans, one fifth or more of the children live below the federal poverty level. Nearly 40% of counties in abortion restricted states are maternity care deserts, meaning they have no hospital or birth center offering obstetric care. These states have consistently refused to expand Medicaid, which would provide prenatal and postpartum care and improve health care coverage for the exact population they claim to be protecting. Research from Johns Hopkins published in 2025 found that restrictive abortion policies were associated with increased infant mortality and with larger increases among Black infants in Southern states. A separate time series analysis found that in the year after Texas implemented its six week ban, infant mortality rose seventeen percent over expected levels.
Leslie Poston:And while these facts are important, this particular instance of the effort shield is a very emotional topic. The moral panic over abortion gives people psychological permission to perform moral concern for children without following through on any of the material commitments that actually keeping children alive and healthy require. It's the effort shield in its purest form. The concern is loud, public, and emotionally satisfying, and the follow through is nonexistent. So here's how it shapes up across all four examples.
Leslie Poston:In each case, there's a disproportionate or manufactured fear that gets amplified by media and validated by authority figures. There are identifiable people and institutions who profit from the panic, whether through book sales, political capital, or regulatory power. And there's a population that embraces the panic because it's psychologically cheaper than engaging with the actual problem. Stranger Danger lets parents avoid confronting the people already in their children's lives. The video game panic gave parents and politicians a scapegoat that didn't require addressing the actual determinants of youth violence.
Leslie Poston:The social media panic lets everyone skip the harder conversations about parenting capacity, economic pressure, platform algorithmic manipulation, and digital literacy. And anti abortion activism lets people perform care for children without funding any of the systems those children need to survive. The civilized reflex is an individual psychological tendency. A moral panic is that tendency organized with spokespeople, funding, media infrastructure, and political leverage. It gives the reflex to avoid change, a community to belong to, and a vocabulary of righteousness.
Leslie Poston:And there's a few things that make it sticky. Questioning a moral panic makes you look like you don't care. Push back on social media is destroying our kids, and people hear you don't care about kids. Challenge stranger danger, and you sound soft on predators. Question the video game narrative after a school shooting, and you seem callous.
Leslie Poston:The manufactured moral panic insulates itself by making descent feel immoral. That's part of its function. It's hard to point out that an effort shield is a shield when the person holding it genuinely believes it's a sword. But panics don't protect anyone or make anything better. They absorb the energy and attention that could go toward the harder less satisfying work of actually addressing the problems they claim to be about.
Leslie Poston:And the people who profit from manufacturing them know this. The question is whether the rest of us are willing to notice it and talk about it out loud. The next time you feel the pull of a moral panic, the next time some simple story with a clear villain makes you feel certain a little too quickly, stop and ask yourself what work am I avoiding by joining in. That's your diagnostic question, and it's the one the panic is specifically designed to keep you from asking. Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace.
Leslie Poston:I'm your host, Leslie Poston, signing off. Until next time, stay curious, and don't forget to subscribe.
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