Folk devils without moral panics: discovering concepts in the sociology of evil
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this theoretical ‘think piece’, I question whether Stanley Cohen’s (1972) ‘folk devil’ and ‘moral panic’ concepts are as inseparable as current sociological and criminological research suggests. Thus far, the vast majority of crime and deviance scholars have treated the folk devil as just one sub-part of the moral panic concept, rather than considering it to be a distinct concept. Consequently, the social processes leading to the creation of folk devils have been largely under-theorized compared to the social processes underlying moral panics. I propose that folk devils and moral panics be conceptualized as two distinct social phenomena. I present evidence from news articles published in the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest circulated newspaper, which illustrates how individuals can be labeled as folk devils when moral panics are not taking place. I conclude by considering how a distinct, folk devil research program can contribute to studies in the sociology of ‘evil’.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it