Can anyone recommend good sources on the social dynamics of witch-hunts?
Not necessarily about witches, of course. I’m interested in the hand of Moloch in these situations: social incentives to go along, status rewards for being more morally outraged than your fellow citizen, self-protection by avoiding looking insufficiently outraged, the not necessarily intended but still unescapable prosecutorial traps, the social impossibility of denying the actual existence of the outrageous facts...
Can anyone recommend good sources on the social dynamics of witch-hunts?
Not necessarily about witches, of course. I’m interested in the hand of Moloch in these situations: social incentives to go along, status rewards for being more morally outraged than your fellow citizen, self-protection by avoiding looking insufficiently outraged, the not necessarily intended but still unescapable prosecutorial traps, the social impossibility of denying the actual existence of the outrageous facts...
In sociology literature this will show up as ‘moral panic’.