The Ethical Study Of Group Panic

Recently, group panic events take place frequently in China. These events pose serious threat to social harmony and stability, at the same time, the public exclaim anxiously that the moral degeneration of the world is getting worse day by day. Saying from ethics, group panic refers to many moral problems, such as self cultivation and the group virtue, psychological guidance and behavioral norms, and so on. So the ethical study of group panic is very necessary and the study has important practical significance.Group panic refers to some psychology and behaviors of unconscious "psychological group". Their panic psychology include anxiousness, fear, frightfulness, etc. Their panic behaviors include escape, conformity, attack, and so on. Group panic has the general features of psychological group, such as non-rationality, impulsion and suspicion, besides, it has features of the sudden crisis, for instance, spontaneity, unconventionality and diffusivity. The process of group panic events always pass through several stages, namely, stage of initial stimulation by incidents, stage of emotional contagion in psychology, and stage of the process that emotion converts into behavior. At the background of "risk society", group panic can be induced into "existent" panic and "constructive" panic, base the crisis’existent or not."the survival panic" belongs to the former, and "the moral panic" belongs to the latter.The impact of group panic has two sides:if the situation is controllable, group panic can increase people’s self-protection awareness and skills of solving crisis, promote the improvement of social institutions and policies. And this is why it can be " constructed ". If it is out of control, it will harm to the safety of individuals’lives and property, threaten the society’s harmony and stability, even threaten a nation’s long-term peace and order and the world’s peace and development. On the view of ethics, in order to cope with group panic, we should first use external laws and construction of social morality to guide and constrain people’s thinkings and behaviors, and then pay attention to the education and cultivation of individuals’ private morality. Only when individuals, the media, the society all erect correct view of justice and interests during their positive interaction, when they put the principle that "the most happiness of the most people" as the starting point and objective, when we have combined the principles of self-discipline and other-discipline, and when the social conscience has been rebuilded, then we can eliminate the panic and realize the aim to build a socialist harmonious society.