Why Societies Search for Scapegoats in Times of Crisis

In the summer of 1348, as the Black Death swept across Europe, killing perhaps a third of the population within a few years, rumors began to spread through towns along the Rhine. The plague, some said, was not a disease at all. It was poison, deliberately placed in wells by Jewish communities. There was no evidence for this claim. It did not matter. Over the following three years, more than two hundred Jewish communities across German-speaking Europe were attacked, expelled, or destroyed.

The disease had a cause that medieval Europeans could not see, could not fight, and could not explain. What they found instead was a target they could see, blame, and punish.

This pattern did not end in the fourteenth century. It reappears with striking consistency whenever a society faces a crisis it cannot easily explain: a plague, a financial collapse, a lost war, a wave of unemployment. Somewhere in the response, a group emerges that is blamed for the disaster, often with little or no evidence connecting them to it. The central question is not whether this happens. It clearly does, across cultures and centuries. The question is why the human response to crisis so reliably takes this shape.

A Pattern That Crosses Cultures and Centuries

Scapegoating is not a single historical event. It is a recurring social behavior, documented across a wide range of societies, economic systems, and belief traditions. Medieval Europeans blamed Jewish communities for plague. Colonial New Englanders blamed accused witches for crop failure and infant death. Nazi Germany blamed Jewish citizens for the humiliation of the First World War and the economic collapse of the Weimar Republic. In each case, the accused group was not randomly chosen. It was usually already marginalized, already distrusted, and already outside the circle of people whose suffering the majority felt obligated to prevent.

This consistency is what makes scapegoating worth studying as a pattern rather than a series of isolated events. Historians, psychologists, and sociologists have each approached the question from a different angle, and together their explanations reveal something uncomfortable: scapegoating is not a breakdown of normal social functioning. It is closer to a normal social function operating under stress.

The Psychological Mechanism Behind the Search

One of the earliest scientific explanations came from a group of researchers at Yale in the late 1930s, who proposed what became known as the frustration-aggression hypothesis. Their basic argument was simple. When people are blocked from something they want or need, they experience frustration, and frustration tends to produce aggression. Under ordinary conditions, that aggression is directed at whatever is actually causing the frustration.

Crises complicate this. A pandemic, a currency collapse, or a famine is rarely caused by a single identifiable actor. The true causes are often abstract, distant, or simply invisible: a virus, a banking system, a drought pattern. Psychologists describe what tends to happen next as displaced aggression. When the real cause of frustration is inaccessible or too powerful to confront, the aggression it produces gets redirected toward a target that is accessible and comparatively powerless.

A pandemic cannot be arrested. A neighbor accused of witchcraft can be. This is the practical logic, however unjust, that makes a human scapegoat more psychologically satisfying than an accurate but unreachable explanation.

Why the Explanation Has to Be a Person

There is a second piece to this mechanism, and it involves how people process uncertainty. Research in social psychology has repeatedly found that ambiguous, uncontrollable threats are more distressing than threats that are clearly defined, even when the clearly defined threat is objectively worse. Uncertainty itself produces anxiety, and anxiety creates pressure to resolve it, even at the cost of accuracy.

A named villain resolves uncertainty in a way that a diffuse, structural cause cannot. “The well was poisoned” is a story with a beginning, an actor, and a possible ending. “A bacterium spread by fleas on rats traveled along trade routes” is a story with no villain and no clear point of resolution, particularly to a population with no concept of germ theory. One story permits action. The other does not.

This is not simply a medieval failure of knowledge. Modern societies with far greater scientific understanding still show the same pattern. Complex, structural causes of economic hardship or public health crises are consistently harder for a frightened public to hold onto than a single identifiable group that can be blamed and confronted.

The Group Boundary Effect

A separate line of research, built around what is known as social identity theory, adds another layer to the explanation. People tend to define themselves partly through group membership, and they tend to feel more favorably toward their own group, or in-group, when that group faces an external threat. Crisis conditions sharpen the line between “us” and “them,” and outsiders, or out-groups, become more suspect precisely because the boundary between groups has become more psychologically important.

This helps explain why scapegoated groups are so rarely selected at random. They tend to already sit outside the dominant group’s boundary: a religious minority, a group of recent immigrants, a rival ethnic community, a class of people considered strange or suspicious even before the crisis began. The crisis does not usually create the boundary. It hardens a boundary that was already there.

An Influential but Contested Interpretation

The French historian and literary theorist René Girard offered a broader theory of this pattern, one that has been influential in anthropology and cultural studies, though it remains an interpretation rather than an empirically settled finding. Girard argued that communities under internal tension often resolve that tension by uniting against a single victim, whose punishment or expulsion temporarily restores a sense of order and shared purpose. He called this the scapegoat mechanism, and he traced its structure through myths, rituals, and historical persecutions across many cultures.

Girard’s theory is compelling as a description of pattern, but historians caution against treating it as a complete explanation. It describes a recurring shape in human behavior without fully accounting for the specific economic, political, and religious conditions that determine which group becomes the target in a given time and place. The mechanism may be old and recurring. The victims are chosen by particular, historically specific reasons.

What the Historical Record Shows

The pattern becomes clearer when specific cases are compared side by side. During the Black Death, Jewish communities were accused despite the fact that plague spread just as severely through communities where no such accusation existed, a fact that should have disproven the poisoning theory almost immediately. It did not, because the accusation was never really about evidence.

The witch trials of early modern Europe, which peaked between roughly 1560 and 1630, followed a similar logic during a period of unusually severe cold, crop failure, and economic hardship now known as the Little Ice Age. Historians continue to debate exactly how strong the connection between climate stress and accusation rates actually was, and the explanation is almost certainly not limited to weather alone. Local power struggles, religious conflict, and property disputes also shaped who was accused. But the timing across large regions of Europe is difficult to explain without some role for economic desperation.

In the twentieth century, the pattern shifted from famine and disease to national humiliation and economic collapse. The hyperinflation and unemployment of the Weimar Republic created conditions in which a political movement could offer a coherent, if entirely false, explanation for Germany’s suffering, one built around blaming a minority population. The economic collapse was real. The explanation for it was manufactured.

What Popular Memory Gets Wrong

There is a common assumption that scapegoating is simply mob irrationality, a temporary collapse of reason during a moment of collective panic. The historical record complicates this picture considerably.

Scapegoating is rarely spontaneous in the way that phrase suggests. It typically has organizers: religious authorities during the witch trials, political parties during the twentieth century, local leaders seeking to redirect anger away from their own failures during economic crises. Blame is not simply discovered by a frightened population. It is often actively supplied, because assigning blame to a specific group can serve the interests of whoever supplies the explanation, whether by consolidating political power, protecting an existing elite from criticism, or acquiring the property and position of the accused.

This distinction matters. A phenomenon that arises purely from psychological panic calls for education and reassurance. A phenomenon that is also actively organized and incentivized calls for scrutiny of who benefits from the accusation, not just sympathy for those who believe it.

Why the Pattern Persists Today

Modern societies have far greater access to scientific explanation than medieval Europe did, and yet the underlying psychological mechanisms have not disappeared. Public health crises, financial shocks, and periods of rapid social change continue to generate the same search for an identifiable, blameworthy group, sometimes amplified by media environments that reward simple, emotionally charged explanations over complicated, accurate ones.

Sociologist Stanley Cohen’s concept of the moral panic, developed in the 1970s, describes how modern societies periodically fix intense, often disproportionate concern on a particular group, framed as a threat to social order. The specific targets change with the era. The underlying structure, an accessible group blamed for a diffuse and frightening problem, remains recognizable across very different historical moments.

Scapegoating did not disappear with modern science. It changed its explanations while keeping its function.

The Central Insight

The search for a scapegoat during a crisis is not simply a failure of reason. It solves a real psychological problem: it converts an unbearable, uncontrollable threat into a target that feels controllable, and it does so quickly, at a moment when uncertainty itself has become intolerable. That is precisely what makes the pattern so durable and so dangerous. It offers relief without requiring truth.

Recognizing this mechanism does not by itself prevent it. But it does change what a society is equipped to ask when the next crisis arrives and an explanation starts to spread with unusual speed and unusual certainty. The question worth asking is rarely whether an accusation feels satisfying. It is whether anyone actually checked if it was true, and who benefits if no one does.