• Question: Why are people scared of different things?

    Asked by pinkjuju 800 to Ed, Kerrianne, Nina, Oli, yoyehudi on 13 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Yo Yehudi

      Yo Yehudi answered on 13 Nov 2017:

      I think some fear is healthy and important – imagine if you were in a forest and you *weren’t* afraid of the big bear looking at you and thinking you might be lunch! That is – fear helps all organisms survive, because there are plenty of things that we *should* be scared of. It sucks that sometimes we’re scared of things we don’t need to be scared of, though – but I’m still glad fear exists! I suppose that some of the time I might fear something because I’ve had a bad experiences – I fell off my bike a few months ago and I’m still a bit chicken at the thought of hurting myself again, for example. I suspect many of us feel that way after we’ve had a bad experience. Other times we fear something simply because others have told us it’s scary, or we even fear things for no logical reason, which is a bit odd!

    • Photo: Oli Wilson

      Oli Wilson answered on 15 Nov 2017:

      I found an old paper (from 1977) that suggested there are three ‘pathways to fear’ (which is itself a kind of scary title). We can become scared of things because of our experiences (like being attacked by a dog when we’re a child) – our brain associates the experience with a bad outcome, so starts to expect the bad thing every following time we have that experience (so you might get scared every time you see a dog, even if you’re never attacked again). We can also get scared by seeing other people’s fear – for example, soldiers who see a comrade get scared by something might themselves start to feel scared of it, even without experiencing it themselves. And some fears we have because we’re taught them – when I was teaching some students would take warnings about flames or acids to heart so much they were really scared of those things, even though flames and acids had never done anything bad to them or someone near them.
      Like I say, that’s an old paper so people might think differently now, but it sounds sensible enough to me! And it fits with what Yo said too, which makes me think it’s mostly right 🙂

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