Edward Day and Ann Gordon. From moral panics about immigration and gun control to anxiety about terrorism and natural disasters, Americans live in a culture of fear. While fear is typically discussed in emotional or poetic terms—as the opposite of courage, or as an obstacle to be overcome—it nevertheless has very real consequences in everyday life. Further, fear harms communities and society by corroding social trust and civic engagement.
Yet politicians often effectively leverage fears to garner votes and companies routinely market unnecessary products that promise protection from imagined or exaggerated harms. Drawing on five years of data from the Chapman Survey of American Fears—which canvasses a random, national sample of adults about a broad range of fears—Fear Itself offers new insights into what people are afraid of and how fear affects their lives.
The authors also draw on participant observation with Doomsday preppers and conspiracy theorists to provide fascinating narratives about subcultures of fear. Fear Itself is a novel, wide-ranging study of the social consequences of fear, ultimately suggesting that there is good reason to be afraid of fear itself.
In this important book, the scholars behind that survey examine their data and provide invaluable insights into what Americans fear and the effects of those fears. In January of , a random sample of 1, adults across the United States was asked about ninety-five different fears ranging from topics about the environment, government, natural disasters, COVID, and many more. As the Coronavirus spread across world, the search for a vaccine began alongside it.
In the United States, the vaccine became available for some as early as January of , with more groups becoming eligible for the vaccine as time went on. The COVID pandemic has impacted the health of millions across the globe and uprooted ordinary life for everyone. At this point in the United States, a majority people know someone who has or has had the coronavirus. In the survey, it ranked only as the 24th fear and then moved up to the 20th spot in the survey.
However, for the first time fear of widespread civil unrest landed in the top 5 fears of Americans. In July of , a random sample of 1, adults from across the United States were asked their level of fear about eighty-eight different phenomena including crime, the government, the environment, disasters, personal anxieties, technology, and many others. Unfortunately, many Americans choose not to evacuate, even when authorities call for mandatory evacuations.
Michele Gelfand does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Michele Gelfand is a professor and distinguished university scholar teacher at the University of Maryland.
Jesse R. Harrington is a doctoral student in psychology at the University of Maryland. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American.
Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Discover World-Changing Science. Capitalizing on fear Throughout his campaign, Donald Trump has effectively and ruthlessly used threatening language to monopolize fearful voters and pit them against other cultural groups. The future of Trump culture To Trump supporters, America feels like a nation on the brink of disaster.
This article was published in collaboration with Scientific American Mind. Harrington receives funding from the National Science Foundation. Recent Articles by Jesse R. Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. In a study, for example, Pyszczynski and his colleagues devised a clever means of measuring aggression: seeing how much hot sauce participants were willing to feed others who expressed a clear distaste for spicy food.
In some cases, they gave one another the maximum amount of hot sauce possible in the experiment. Several other studies have led to a similar and tragic conclusion: After death reminders, people are more antagonistic toward those with different beliefs and values. In addition, political beliefs shift to support militaristic policies, charismatic nationalists and increased domestic surveillance. Another study showed that George W. But, of course, these are just laboratory studies.
In some scenes, he is so angry, the viewer feels sorry for him — and concerned for his health. He even joined the NRA, although he never owned or used a gun. Everything was antithetical to how he was before. Inherent in the ways the news is both reported and received are a number of biases that guarantee people are not informed, but rather misinformed. The first problem with the news is that it must be new. Generally, events that are both aberrations from the norm and spectacular enough to attract attention are reported, such as terrorist attacks, mass shootings and plane crashes.
But far more prolific, and thus even less news-worthy, are the suicides in the U. Add to these the 1, deaths each day due to smoking, the related to obesity, and all the other preventable deaths from strokes, heart attacks and liver disease, and the message is clear: The biggest thing you have to fear is not a terrorist or a shooter or a deadly home invasion.
You are the biggest threat to your own safety. It would make logical sense, then, that if Americans were really choosing politicians based on their own safety, they would vote for a candidate who stresses seat-belt campaigns, programs for psychological health to decrease suicide, and ways to reduce smoking, obesity, prescription-pill abuse, alcoholism, flu contagion and hospital-acquired infections.
So, the fear of domestic ISIS-spawned terrorist attacks, for example, becomes far greater than the fear of everyday experiences that are much more likely to result in a fatality.
These are the wages of a hour news cycle, regurgitating constant powerful visuals and reminders of our own vulnerability to dangerous forces beyond our control. Between our phones and browsers, most of us are plugged into a nonstop feed of headlines and opinions that are responsive to our specific interests and fears.
This makes it feel more emotionally charged. We start receiving notifications on our phone as soon as these disasters happen. There are two particular ways, among many, in which living with these anxieties month after month can change your brain. They wither. And the amygdala actually gets bigger. In the process, attributes such as conscious decision-making, risk-taking, exploratory activity and logical thinking are adversely affected.
The second way: Anxiety can turn to fear. You spot a Middle Eastern man with a duffel bag and, suddenly, he unzips the bag and pulls out an umbrella. Not only is that fear, but you may have just changed your brain circuitry. In the case of rats, an electrical shock paired with a tone conditions them to have a threat response to the tone on its own afterward. Just last year, researchers discovered a neural superhighway between the specific areas of the brain that represent faces and symbols, and the areas of the brain involved in stress and threat detection.
So what you get is a completely manufactured anxiety turning into a full-blown fight-freeze-or-flight fear response. For one study, University of Colorado social psychologist Joshua Correll brought in police officers to play a video game in which they were asked to shoot armed assailants.
Half the targets were white; the other half were black. Some were carrying guns, others phones or wallets. If you stop and look around, you will see these patterns everywhere. So your brain starts to think that black people commit crimes.
And you will think you see a correlation between race and negativity when there is none. Clearly, these and other fear illusions affect our behavior, from voting decisions to supporting policies that are against our own interests to prejudices, divisive rhetoric, murder and crimes against whole groups of people.
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