Science Behind The Spooky: Why We Fear What We Fear

There’s no better day to take a scholarly look at how human fears are shaped, and Nautilus does this rather well. In its latest edition devoted to fear and monsters, it examines how evolution (unsurprisingly) has a great hand in sculpting our fears.

Over time, humans have tackled danger in many forms — predatory and environmental perils, violence from kin, ostracization and contamination, among others. The “selection pressures” from these have created in us a special sensitivity towards certain fears. The fascinating thing here is that “not all human fears are instinctual and hardwired — we need to learn what to be afraid of.”

In fact, while development psychologists have demonstrated that children develop certain predictable fears, evolutionary scientists have shown these fears emerge when children would have felt most vulnerable to such dangers in ancestral environments. The environments have changed but the fears persist. For instance, toddlers develop stranger anxiety while pre-schoolers, who are exploring their environment more extensively, are typically afraid of monsters in the dark, lions and tigers lurking in cupboards and often ask endless questions about death.

As we grow up, we think we have outgrown most of our childish fears – strangers, monsters, predatory animals and the dark – and yet, these continue to appear in horror stories for adults. The author calls this “an ancient and anxious voice” from the “deepest recesses” of our brain that tells us to steer clear of graveyards in the night. This is, in a sense, our evolutionary instincts telling us to better be safe than sorry.

What shapes our fears becomes distinctly clear when we place our phobias under the evolutionary spotlight. Very rarely do people die of being bitten by spiders or snakes in our modern world. And yet, we are more terrified of creepy crawlies than of vehicles, which cause more deaths today than any spider ever did. Because our ancestors were.