DANGER! Why MORAL PANICS(!) Are Irresistible to Your Brain

Humans are meerkats, kids are on social media, and dogs are dizzy

KIDS ARE DYING!!! KIDS ARE ANXIOUS!!! KIDS AND SATAN!!! ALSO, DOGS ARE SO DIZZY (more on that later)!!! AHHHHH!!!

Moral panics are the very best time for using ALL CAPS, because people are shouting and terrified—and people seem to be shouting a lot these days. Slate magazine named 2014 the “Year of Outrage,” charting a new moral panic every day, but four years and one election cycle later, The Atlantic issued a correction: “Every year is the year of outrage.”

From witch trials to “reefer madness,” moral panics have been around forever, but they are especially easy to foment today in the age of social media. The recipe is simple: 1) Take a human mind, which is wired to focus on danger. 2) Take a potential threat, and then “socially amplify” it by having other people “like” or “retweet” it. 3) Let people’s sense of danger push them to publicly express moral outrage, the core element of a moral panic.

In this post we’ll explain why moral panics happen, and how you could even create your own if you wanted. Understanding this will help us make sense of people's worries today, like the harm of social media—is it destroying kids’ brains?? We’re not sure, but one thing is certain: social media is the best place to create a moral panic, because of the structure of our evolved minds.

How to Make a Moral Panic (Humans are like Meerkats)

Moral panics have existed for as long as humans have been afraid of danger and had the capacity to tell their friends about it—in other words, a really long time. 

The first step is that our brains are fundamentally wired to focus on threats—a feature that makes us much like meerkats, a prey animal from the African savanna that stands tall to scan for danger. Just like meerkats, we evolved as prey, using our big hominid brains to figure out clever ways to prevent big cats, birds, and bears from eating us. The result is a mind trained to react to danger.

Meerkats stand tall to scan for danger over tall grass. Image source here

In fact, the calculus of evolution often pushes our minds to overreact to danger. From the standpoint of survival, it’s better to mistakenly scream and run from an imagined predator than to stoically shrug off the threat of a real predator. The cost of looking silly while panicking is small compared to the cost of getting eaten. Our ancestors—the people whose minds we inherited—are those who remained exceptionally vigilant for danger. 

The second step is a clever threat-avoiding adaptation that we (and many other prey animals) evolved: paying attention to social information from our group mates. As a social species, we rely on others to figure out what clothes to wear and which music is good, but social information is especially important when it comes to danger. If the people around us are freaking out and running, there is likely a good reason for us to do the same. The fearful reactions of others give us social proof of the danger. 

Moral panics happen when these two elements—a potential threat + social proof of it—combine. Panicking helped our ancestors escape the outstretched jaws of real predators, but in the modern world, panicking over nothing can be costly. Misplaced panic resulted in tragedy when a man mistakenly shouted “fire!” at a Michigan union miners’ Christmas party in 1913—73 men, women, and children were fatally trampled as they rushed for the exit. 

Humans and meerkats both freak out about the threat of being harmed, but unlike meerkats, humans also worry about the threat of evil. Of course, the two go together: evil people harm our kids. But our intricate sense of morality means that we panic about physical danger and also abstract threats to society, like witchcraft, rock n’ roll, and even role-playing games.

That’s right—one of the biggest American moral panics was the 1980s hysteria about kids playing Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), a tabletop role-playing game. In the game, the players create a fantasy world where they go on exciting quests, battle monsters, and solve puzzles. This fun was put to an end when the conservative Christian organization B.A.D.D. (Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons) launched an intensive media campaign falsely linking D&D to youth suicide, drug use, and Satanism. After an interview on the widely watched news program 60 Minutes, moral panic ensued. Horrified suburban parents started writing letters to Congress and the game became contraband among teens. 

Moral panics have popped up throughout history, but they appear almost daily on social media. This is no coincidence—social media provides the perfect conditions for moral panics to spread.

Online Moral Panics

Social media provides the perfect setting for moral panics, pairing an endless source of threats—from evil clowns to the destruction of democracy—with social proof of danger via “likes”, shares, and fearful comments. In a recent set of studies, our former postdoc Curtis Puryear wondered whether online moral panics happen when threatening content gains social proof by going viral. 

Curtis analyzed a massive set of over 200,000 real tweets about three threatening topics—climate change, immigration, and COVID-19—to see if viral tweets received more outraged comments. The design was simple enough: virality was measured by the number of times a post had been retweeted. Outrage was measured by a machine learning algorithm that detected the proportion of comments that expressed morally outraged language.  

The results showed that highly viral posts (tweets in the 84^th percentile or above in terms of retweets) had a far higher proportion of outraged comments (~40%) compared to low virality posts (~25%). As Figure 1 shows, viral tweets also showed an increase in outrage over time (as they became more viral), whereas low virality posts did not show this trend. 

Figure 1. Viral tweets receive more outrage than low virality tweets and show an increase in outrage over time (from Puryear et al., 2024).

These studies suggest that when a perceived threat gains social proof through online virality, it makes people so agitated about the danger that they spew outrage at the threat. But these Twitter analyses weren’t perfect—they were about real topics that people already had strong opinions about, and it’s possible that the tweets were posted by political opponents, who the commenters already disliked. To provide a more controlled test of the panic-inducing power of virality, Curtis decided to concoct his own moral panic about an entirely new threat: #dizzydogging.

You’ve never heard of #dizzydogging!? It’s a new terrifying social media trend (invented by Curtis) where people use laser pointers to get their dog so dizzy that it whacks into things. Curtis wanted to see if he could get people riled up about the threat of dizzydogging by giving them social proof that it was dangerous: virality metrics.  

In the experiment, he showed participants a fake tweet of a person dizzydogging (pictured below), with the caption “I got him dizzy as hell with this laser pointer. Wait till he starts crashing into everything at the end haha. #dizzydogging.” Participants were randomly assigned to see slightly different versions of the tweet—some participants saw a viral version with 4,367 retweets, but others saw a non-viral version with just 1 retweet. As expected, people who saw the viral version of dizzydogging rated it as significantly more dangerous and were more likely to express outrage about it. 

Figure 2. A fake tweet about the viral trend #dizzydogging that was shown to participants in Curtis’ study.

It might be funny to imagine people freaking out about fake dizzy dogs, but moral panics on social media have real consequences. Feelings of outrage, though sometimes warranted, make us lust for punishment, which is why many have rightly warned about social media facilitating “cancel culture” and “witch hunts.” 

So far we’ve painted a picture of people as fearful and worried, but you might be wondering whether all this outrage is authentic. Do people really raise hell because they are scared of danger, or is our panic merely performative?

Outrage for Points or for Panic?

There are many reasons we might rage on social media. Shouting about the ongoing collapse of society is a surefire way to gain attention, which many people crave. We also want others to think that we are good people, and that means cheering (loudly) for the right team.

One popular theory argues that people express outrage not because they are scared, but to broadcast their virtues and gain social status. To test this, psychologist Joshua Grubbs and some colleagues measured the tendency to engage in what they call moral grandstanding. They asked people to rate their agreement with statements like “When I share my moral/political beliefs, I do so to show people who disagree with me that I am better than them.” The people who agreed with this statement were more likely to say they get into fights on social media because of their moral or political beliefs. 

Moral grandstanding explains some social media outrage, but not all of it. Our work shows that online moral outrage often reflects a genuine desire to prevent harm and injustice. In his studies about online moral panics, Curtis asked Twitter users how often they posted about politics and how frequently they expressed outrage. He also asked them about their perceptions of societal danger, like whether they thought society was on the verge of collapsing and their best guesses about the percentage of Americans who belonged to extremist groups. 

People who frequently posted about politics and expressed lots of online outrage also thought that society was filled with dangerous extremists and reported shockingly high levels of distress, often meeting the clinical threshold for PTSD. In other words, many people panicking on social media authentically feel panicked. 

The presence of real feelings of danger and distress within moral panics suggests that we should seriously consider people’s worries before accusing them of virtue signaling. When you see someone venting about “woke culture” or ranting about systemic racism in society, there is a good chance they are genuinely distressed.

But just because panic is genuinely felt doesn’t mean that it is grounded in fact. Dungeons and Dragons didn’t convert teens to satanism, and reefer madness didn’t kill millions of kids. Of course, some threats are more supported by science. The trick is determining which threats are real, but mass hysteria makes it hard to dispassionately examine complicated issues…like the impact of social media on kids. 

Is Social Media Killing Kids?

Moral panics happen when warnings about a potential threat go viral, and few threats are more viral right now than how social media is harming children. In his new book The Anxious Generation, Jon Haidt makes the case that social media is causing epidemic levels of anxiety, depression, loneliness and suicide among adolescents (particularly teen girls).

Many core claims of the book have received substantial pushback from academics who view social media as just another moral panic. According to critics, television, comic books, and violent video games have all driven panicked claims about harm to kids—claims that were eventually debunked. These critics point out that the negative effects of social media are often statistically small, and some studies even find positive effects of social media, like better social connection. 

Our goal in this post is not to settle the debate about social media’s impact on teen mental health, but instead highlight how current discussions about it show all the telltale signs of a moral panic.

First, we have strong claims of danger. Haidt cites a mounting body of research, both experimental (see examples here and here) and correlational (see examples here and here), that links social media use to adverse mental health outcomes. He warns that social media is wreaking untold havoc on the mental health of our children, even driving them to harm and kill themselves.

Second, we have social proof of the danger. Since hitting the shelves three weeks ago, the book has become an instant bestseller, was highlighted on the most popular podcast in the world (The Joe Rogan Experience), and even has a standing art exhibit on the National Mall in the nation’s capital. The art exhibit (pictured below) is a powerful play on the 1980s milk cartons that warned about children being abducted. Instead of “missing: kids,” it reads “missing: childhood,” referring to the danger that social media poses to children.

Pictured left: An Anxious Generation art exhibit warns about the danger of social media. Pictured right: A milk carton from the 1980s warns about the danger of child abduction.

We are sympathetic to Haidt’s concerns about social media, and there’s no doubt that claims of danger help to sell books. But given the historical track record of panicked claims about new technology, it might make sense to have a clearer scientific picture of this topic before jumping to conclusions about the “complete rewiring” of children’s brains. Fearful parents are now pushing for full scale government bans on youth social media use despite many academics insisting that the jury is not yet out on its psychological impact.

And even when there is a legitimate threat to kids, spreading panic is unlikely to yield the best solution. For example, despite some kids getting abducted in the 1980s, Haidt has argued (in his previous bestselling book The Coddling of the American Mind) that the campaign to spread fear by picturing missing kids on milk cartons (stranger danger!) ended up doing more harm than good. If we want to calm parents' knee-jerk urge to (over)protect their kids, perhaps we should pump the brakes on overwrought claims of danger until we know the truth.

Escaping a Moral Panic (To the Government, You’re a Nice Wristwatch)

Making effective policy decisions about societal risks requires compromise and tradeoffs, but when fear takes over (“kids are being harmed!”), compromise becomes impossible. No tradeoff seems acceptable so long as the image of suffering children fills our minds.

The psychologist Phil Tetlock uses the term “taboo trade-offs” to describe any situation where even thinking about a rational cost-benefit analysis seems immoral. In a set of studies, Tetlock asked people to choose between a hospital spending $1 million dollars on a life-saving kidney transplant for a 5-year-old kid, or using that money to hire more talented doctors and better equipment. Many participants viewed withholding the transplant as morally reprehensible, and were outraged by anyone who would even hesitate to consider the cold-hearted utilitarian option. But here’s the thing—more talented doctors and better equipment could save many lives.

Contemplating trade-offs involving human well-being (especially the suffering of children) seems taboo, but trade-offs are inherent in every policy decision we make. Should we raise the speed limit from 65 to 70? If we do, the economy might benefit from increased efficiency (ultimately improving well-being), but more people will die from traffic accidents. 

The U.S. government has a price that they place on human life in order to weigh trade-offs like these: about $12.5 million dollars. That’s roughly the price of this shiny Patek Philippe wristwatch that was auctioned off in 2016—if someone ever tells you that you look like a million bucks, you can let them know they are sorely undervaluing you. The government may seem callous for assigning monetary value to human life, but money can also help improve or save lives. 

When it comes to moral panics and kids—whether about D&D or social media—it can feel taboo to ask the hard questions like “how many kids are suffering?” or “how strong is the evidence?” But carefully evaluating the scientific evidence for a potential threat before acting is not the same thing as advocating harm to children. In fact, to best protect children, we need to evaluate which threats are most pressing and which are not—and feeling panicked gets in the way of this evaluation. 

Summary

Our minds are fundamentally wired to feel threatened, especially when people around us are also threatened. Moral panics happen when a potential threat is validated and amplified by other people, leading people to express outrage to try and combat the threat.

Moral panics occur especially easily on social media, where explicit metrics of social concern (likes, retweets, and comments) provide proof of collective fear. But although fear and outrage are reasonable responses to danger, they can cloud our judgment, preventing us from accurately evaluating what is actually hurting kids.