The day before Charlie Kirk was assassinated, I was teaching a college class on science, religion and magic. Our class was comparing the Salem witch trials of the 1690s with the McCarthy hearings of ...

A moral panic is the pervasive belief that some great wickedness is threatening society and must be stopped. Calling something a moral panic is a way to argue that people's fears or concerns are silly ...

Moral panics also trigger responses that lack sufficient evidence — a process, wrote future Nobel laureate George Stigler, that tends to result in rules that are “capricious and arbitrary in high ...

The moral panic currently sweeping America about critical race theory (CRT) has been covered ad nauseam by the press and commentators across the political spectrum. That’s what typically happens with ...

“Moral panics” are popular explanations that spread at times of change and uncertainty, particularly when the order of things seems to be threatened and the privileged groups start getting worried ...

American actress Vera Miles stars as Lila Crane in the horror classic 'Psycho', directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1960. (Photo by Archive Photos/Getty Images) Between 2006 and 2009 a Moral Panic situation ...

Whenever a new technology comes along that creates a revolutionarily new means of communication, the young glom onto it and their elders, or a highly vocal group of them, believe it is leading to the ...

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) The aim of the class was to better understand the concept of moral panics, which are ...