A synthetic emergent definition of panic would recognize it as a precipitated encounter typified by the spontaneous and synchronized collective behaviors of people pursuing new norms and or social relations while responding to perceived or actual threats under conditions of felt time scarcity. People’s responses are impacted by the size of their collectivity and its average human density, their degree of social cohesion and shared emotions, and the prevailing extent of interdependence and uncertainty. Panics vary by size, institutional context (essential to mass hysteria), and the presence of complex organizational actors, as is the case with moral panics and epidemics of deviance. Panic involves more than individuals’ behaviors, for even in the case of a panic attack or psychiatric illness affecting a person, the individual’s mental disorder links to a social context, which is a partial source of the unresolved anxiety. Quarantelli (2008) [1] and other scholars have documented that panic, referred to below as panic flight behavior, rarely occurs during disasters. However, the panic concept, when used in contexts other than disasters, requires examining the more prominent of these other conventions. The resulting typology is not intended to be exhaustive but rather an attempt to summarize the most frequent usages of the panic concept to contextualize its use in the disaster literature. One way to make sense of panic is by noting the precipitated gatherings’ size and social complexity, from persons to groups, collectivities, organizations, communities, nations, and international-level aggregates.

Table 1 gives a short synopsis of the types of panics described here. One meaning panic occurs in medical literature; it conceptualizes panic as a psychological illness or medical condition, defining a panic attack as a “(a) discrete period of intense fear or discomfort…which…reach a peak within 10 min: (with) palpitations; rapid heart rate; sweating; trembling or shaking; shortness of breath; the feeling of choking; chest pain or discomfort; (APA, 2025 [2]. Panic hysteria in individuals, a recognized condition in psychiatry. The term originates in Freud and Breuer’s “Studies of Hysteria” (1895), which led to catharsis in psychoanalysis in treating mental illness (Scheff, 1979, 26–45) [3]. Approximately 1.7 percent of the U.S. population suffers panic attacks during a given year. Women are more likely to experience them; young people less than 24 years old are also overrepresented. A second use of the concept is known as mass hysteria. It also uses medical criteria, but not in reference to individuals, but to collectivities of people claiming uncorroborated symptoms of physical illnesses (Bartholomew, 2001 [4], Section 2). An example is the mass hysteria among young women that brought about the nefarious witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, 1692–1693, in which the authorities executed twenty women from the two hundred, mostly older women, accused. Elsewhere, those impacted during the Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962 in Tanzania experienced uncontainable laughter, accompanied by fainting, respiratory problems, and crying. The hysteria spread from a group of schoolchildren to the entire school, neighboring schools, and entire villages. Other cases are the hysteria of “penis becoming smaller” common in Asia and Africa in 1967, and the 2012 episode of mass hysteria in Sri Lanka, when one thousand nine hundred children from fifteen different schools in the nation suddenly experienced cough-induced vertigo and skin rashes. Even more recent incidents occurred among personnel working in the American Embassy in Havana and elsewhere who exhibited a mysterious, initially unexplained illness syndrome (still under scientific exploration by federal government agencies). Other incidents are the 2011–2012 Tourette syndrome mass hysteria in New York that involved students from LeRoy High School who started showing symptoms of Tourette syndrome (Bartholomew, 2001 [4]; Wikipedia gives an extensive list of these incidents starting in the Middle Ages). Mass hysteria incidents occur in categories of people densely distributed in well-defined and circumscribed settings such as schools, religious institutions, embassies, offices, and factories, and typically involve young people. Both panic attacks and mass hysteria are straightforward usages of the panic concept. However, in cases of collective delusions described below, instances of mass hysteria may involve hundreds if not thousands of people spread over broad areas. It is possible to venture the guess, based in part on the literature collection at ResearchGate, that these two types of panic account for the majority, 75 to 80 percent of the current research literature on panic.

A third convention considers panic as flight behaviors of people’s collectivities, either in close spaces or in unrestricted (or open spaces), responding to what they perceive as a threatening force (Moss Haber 1980, 156 [5]). Panic flight in close quarters, such as during evacuations from building fires, which involves collectivities of people responding to either real or imagined dangers and impending risks, is the main topic of the subsequent sections of this report. My guess is that it accounts for a small number of science publications, 5 percent or less of the total general literature on panic. Still, it is an unresolved issue whether the participants in massive flights are fleeing away from the perceived hazard or, as affirmed among others in A. Mawson’s affiliation hypothesis (2007: 233–252) [6] is seeking safety by moving toward perceived psychological support and well-being from friends, spouses, and groups to which they belong. Such seeking implies mean-to-end rationality, rendering the widespread assumption of irrational behavior misplaced (see below). In unrestricted, open spaces, this type of panic is referred to by various names in the literature, from collective delusions (Bartholomew 2001 [4], Section 4), such as in the European mad cow panic of 2000, to the generic label of groupthink. One of the most representative examples of panic flights in unrestricted spaces is the military panic, in which an army overtaken by fear and aggression either flees from the battlefield in what is known as military routs or charges headlong, what Collins (2009) [7] called forward panic, as it happened in the First Battle of Manassas (21 July 1861) of the American Civil War in which southern troops attacked and brought about a momentary collapse of the Union troops, putting at risk of invasion Washington, D.C. Panic flight behavior is different from moral panics. The first occurs in collectivities that may not share lasting institutional memberships. In contrast, such membership is a fundamental aspect of moral panic (see next).

Yet another usage of the panic concept refers to moral panic and deviance epidemics (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 1994 [8]; see also Thompson 1998 [9]). This type of panic attracts 15 to 20 percent of the scientific publications on this topic. In both waves of moral panic and epidemics, a population segment clamors for protection from categories of people perceived as dangerous. They advocate for the need for state officials to adopt protective responses against presumed dangerous categories of people, claims that are often unfounded. Their success brings about punitive actions against those who ostensibly threaten them. Moral panics express the unorganized fears of communities. Very often, however, organizations and moral entrepreneurs orchestrate epidemics. In these cases, the public and organizations amplify, if not create community anxieties, transforming them into politically advantageous currents of public opinion. Thus, moral panics and deviance epidemics are like collective delusions but with the added components of culture and politics. A present-day example is a moral panic and epidemic against people seeking refuge in the U.S. through the country’s southern border. Organizations and moral entrepreneurs often create or amplify community anxieties against them, thus creating politically valuable public opinion against the would-be immigrants. The two forms commingle: moral panic often facilitates the emergence of organizations trying to bring about the desired change, or the organizations create moral panic as part of their efforts to elicit public approval for their corporate goals and actions. Moral panics and epidemics are widespread. Importantly, each shows means-end rationality irrespective of their often-harmful effects on society. A fifth and final use of the panic concept focuses on macro units such as societies and cultures. Its focal points are the environmental catastrophes and the uncontrollable hazards and disasters increasingly faced by societies in the post-industrial epoch of the world system (Giddens, 2002 [10]; see also Beck, 1992 [11]), which brings about panic as a product of people’s widespread anxieties and insecurities about the world and their places in it (Tester 2013, 11, 92–93 [12]). Examples abound (Masters, 2022 [13], such as the cow disease panic in Europe, the resulting distrust of scientists and government agencies, and the extensive fear it engendered. Comparatively, until now this type of panic has not attracted as much scientific attention as it requires given its extraordinary importance.

As ideal types, the links among these various definitions and usages of the concept of panic, offered here for heuristic purposes, have received scant attention. There are few studies of how one type of panic coexists or is transformed by another, for example, the extent to which moral panic brings about the physical and psychological effects postulated by the medical model. Similarly, except for the first two types based on medical diagnoses, there is no consensus about the relative validity of critical constructions and how to develop standard metrics to measure them. Nor are there enough rigorous comparative studies, such as the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (1945, 16) [14]. It concluded that despite considerable losses and disruptions, panic attacks, hysteria, and flight behaviors among German civilians were rare: the majority continued to participate and function as full members of their communities and workplaces amid the withering Allied bombing raids of their cities during 1944–1945.

Given these multidimensional aspects of the panic concept and the unanswered questions, rather than abandoning its study (compared to Clarke 2002, 21 [15]), it seems preferable to conduct rigorous comparative studies of the panic types. Despite the lack of sustained scholarly attention, the relation between these types of panic is worth pursuing. For example, the presence of moral panics may make possible mass hysterias, as was the case in the Salem witch-hunts, an instance of mass hysteria made possible by a moral panic and subsequent deviance epidemic among the Puritan sect occurring within the strictures of a religious organization; Puritans believed that women were prone to fall prey to the Devil—they saw the soul as feminine and women’s bodies as weaker and more vulnerable to the Devil’s designs (Reis, 1995, 13) [16]. The same is true for epidemics of deviance, in which a leader of an organization such as a political party leads a precipitated gathering of adherents to do her bidding. Additionally, mass hysterias often bring about panic flight, for example, in recent recurrent economic fears during which throngs of people congregate in front of banks and other financial institutions trying to withdraw their capital suddenly perceived at risk. There is also a relationship between governmental and civil society organizations’ current warnings about the ongoing destruction of the environment (which sometimes has justified a deviance epidemic) and fears about climate change’s nefarious impact, a type of moral panic. In this instance, both the moral panic and deviance epidemics reflect and amplify the widespread insecurities when modern culture no longer provides the means to interpret and manage the risks people face, in what Giddens (2002) [10] identified as a “runaway world”.