The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain

by Daniel Gardner

experts are wrong to think they can ease fears about a risk simply by “getting the facts out.” If an engineer tells people they shouldn’t worry because the chance of the reactor melting down and spewing vast radioactive clouds that would saturate their children and put them at risk of cancer . . . well, they won’t be swayed by the odds. Only the rational mind—Head—cares about odds and, as we have seen, most people are not accustomed to the effort required for Head to intervene and correct Gut. Our natural inclination is to go with our intuitive judgment.

the loss of an identifiable person can move us in ways that statistical abstractions cannot. That’s just human nature.

People love stories about people. We love telling them and we love hearing them. It’s a universal human trait, and that suggests to evolutionary psychologists that storytelling—both the telling and the listening—is actually hardwired into the species. For that to be true, there must be evolutionary advantages to storytelling. And there are. Storytelling is a good way to swap information, for one thing, which allows people to benefit from one another’s experiences. And storytelling is intensely social.

Storytelling can also be a valuable form of rehearsal. “If survival in life is a matter of dealing with an often inhospitable physical universe, and [of] dealing with members of our own species, both friendly and unfriendly, there would be a general benefit to be derived from imaginatively exercising the mind in order to prepare it for the next challenge,” writes philosopher Denis Dutton. “Storytelling, on this model, is a way of running multiple, relatively cost-free experiments with life in order to see, in the imagination, where courses of action may lead. Although narrative can deal with the challenges of the natural world, its usual home is, as Aristotle also understood, in the realm of human relations.”

In one of psychology’s most famous experiments, Asch had people sit together in groups and answer questions that supposedly tested visual perception. Only one person was the actual subject of the experiment, however. All the others were instructed, in the later stages, to give answers that were clearly wrong. In total, the group gave incorrect answers twelve times. Three-quarters of Asch’s test subjects abandoned their own judgment and went with the group at least once. Overall, people conformed to an obviously false group consensus one-third of the time.

It’s tempting to think things have changed. The explosion of scientific knowledge over the last five centuries has provided a new basis for making judgments that is demonstrably superior to personal and collective experience. And the proliferation of media in the last several decades has made that knowledge available to anyone. There’s no need to follow the herd. We can all be fully independent thinkers now.

Clearly, today’s fully independent thinker will have to have a thorough knowledge of biology, physics, medicine, chemistry, geology, and statistics. He or she will also require an enormous amount of free time. Someone who wants to independently decide how risky it is to suntan on a beach, for example, will find there are thousands of relevant studies. It would take months of reading and consideration in order to draw a conclusion about this one simple risk. Thus if an independent thinker really wishes to form entirely independent judgments about the risks we face in daily life, or even just those we hear about in the news, he or she will have to obtain multiple university degrees, quit his or her job, and do absolutely nothing but read about all the ways he or she may die until he or she actually is dead. Most people would find that somewhat impractical. For them, the only way to tap the vast pools of scientific knowledge is to rely on the advice of experts—people who are capable of synthesizing information from at least one field and making it comprehensible to a lay audience. This is preferable to getting your opinions from people who know as little as you do, naturally, but it too has limitations. For one thing, experts often disagree. Even when there’s widespread agreement, there will still be dissenters who make their case with impressive statistics and bewildering scientific jargon.

Along with truth, cynicism endangers trust. And that can be dangerous. Researchers have found that when the people or institutions handling a risk are trusted, public concern declines: It matters a great deal whether the person telling you not to worry is your family physician or a tobacco company spokesman. Researchers have also shown, as wise people have always known, that trust is difficult to build and easily lost. So trust is vital. But trust is disappearing fast. In most modern countries, political scientists have found a long-term decline in public trust of various authorities. The danger here is that we will collectively cross the line separating skepticism from cynicism. Where a reasonable respect for expertise is lost, people are left to search for scientific understanding on Google and in Internet chat rooms, and the sneer of the cynic may mutate into unreasoning, paralyzing fear. That end state can be seen in the anti-vaccination movements growing in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere. Fueled by distrust of all authority, anti-vaccination activists rail against the dangers of vaccinating children (some imaginary, some real-but-rare) while ignoring the immense benefits of vaccination—benefits that could be lost if these movements continue to grow.

We remain a species powerfully influenced by the unconscious mind and its tools—particularly the Example Rule, the Good-Bad Rule, and the Rule of Typical Things. We also remain social animals who care about what other people think. And if we aren’t sure whether we should worry about this risk or that, whether other people are worried makes a huge difference.

psychologists have discovered another cognitive bias that suggests that, in some circumstances, the blind can actually lead the blind indefinitely. It’s called confirmation bias and its operation is both simple and powerful. Once we have formed a view, we embrace information that supports that view while ignoring, rejecting, or harshly scrutinizing information that casts doubt on it. Any belief will do. It makes no difference whether the thought is about trivia or something important. It doesn’t matter if the belief is the product of long and careful consideration or something I believe simply because everybody else in the Internet chat room said so. Once a belief is established, our brains will seek to confirm it.

Unfortunately, seeking to confirm our beliefs comes naturally, while it feels strange and counterintuitive to look for evidence that contradicts our beliefs. Worse still, if we happen to stumble across evidence that runs contrary to our views, we have a strong tendency to belittle or ignore it.

In 1979—when capital punishment was a top issue in the United States—American researchers brought together equal numbers of supporters and opponents of the death penalty. The strength of their views was tested. Then they were asked to read a carefully balanced essay that presented evidence that capital punishment deters crime and evidence that it does not. The researchers then retested people’s opinions and discovered that they had only gotten stronger. They had absorbed the evidence that confirmed their views, ignored the rest, and left the experiment even more convinced that they were right and those who disagreed were wrong. Peter Wason coined the term “confirmation bias,” and countless studies have borne out his discovery—or rather, his demonstration of a tendency thoughtful observers have long noted. Almost four hundred years ago, Sir Francis Bacon wrote that “the human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being a received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects; in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate. . . .” Wise words proven true every day by countless pundits and bloggers.

All this was predictable. Far more startling, however, was what showed up on the MRI. When people processed information that ran against their strongly held views—information that made their favored candidate look bad—they actually used different parts of the brain than they did when they processed neutral or positive information. It seems confirmation bias really is hardwired in each of us, and that has enormous consequences for how opinions survive and spread.

Decades of research has proved that groups usually come to conclusions that are more extreme than the average view of the individuals who make up the group. When

It doesn’t matter what the subject under discussion is. It doesn’t matter what the particular views are. When like-minded people get together and talk, their existing views tend to become more extreme.

Like a microphone held too close to a loudspeaker, modern media and the primal human brain create a feedback loop.

Risk is a major subject within sociology, and culture is the lens through which sociologists peer. But the psychologists who study risk and their colleagues in the sociology departments scarcely talk to each other. In the countless volumes on risk written by sociologists, the powerful insights provided by psychologists over the last several decades typically receive little more than a passing mention, if they are noticed at all. For sociologists, culture counts.

our feelings are more often influenced by experience and culture.

Politicians promote fear to win elections. Police departments and militaries do it to expand budgets and obtain new powers. And although we tend to think of public-service agencies and nongovernmental organizations as working entirely for the public good, they have vested interests just like every other organization—and many realize that fear is an excellent way to promote their issue, boost memberships and donations, and enhance political clout.

It would be impossible to come up with a complete list of the organizations and individuals who stand to profit one way or another by elevating public anxiety. There are simply too many.

Critics call it “disease mongering.” Australians Roy Moynihan and David Henry, a journalist and a pharmacologist, respectively, wrote in the April 2006 edition of the journal Public Library of Science Medicine that “many of the so-called disease awareness campaigns that inform contemporary understanding of illness—whether as citizens, journalists, academics or policymakers—are underwritten by the marketing departments of large drug companies rather than by organizations with a primary interest in public health. And it is no secret that those same marketing depart– ments contract advertising agencies with expertise in ‘condition branding,’ whose skills include ‘fostering the creation’ of new medical disorders and dysfunctions.”

The evidence assembled by Moynihan and Henry in their book Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients is extensive.

Erectile dysfunction, female sexual dysfunction, hair loss, osteoporosis, restless leg syndrome, shyness: These are just a few of the conditions whose seriousness and prevalence have been systematically inflated by drug companies seeking bigger markets.

the breakthroughs Kahneman and Tversky revealed in their famous 1974 paper—the Example Rule, the Rule of Typical Things, and the Anchoring Rule—are common knowledge, and the expanding scientific research on the role emotion plays in decision-making is followed with all the passion of a banker monitoring Wall Street.

We are safer and healthier than ever and yet we are more worried about injury, disease, and death than ever. Why? In part, it’s because there are few opportunities to make money from convincing people they are, in fact, safer and healthier than ever—but there are huge profits to be made by promoting fear. “Unreasoning fear,” as Roosevelt called it, may be bad for those who experience it and society at large, but it’s wonderful for shareholders. The opportunities for growth are limitless. All that’s required is that fears keep rising, and those who reap the profits know which buttons to push in our Stone Age minds to ensure that happens.

H. L. Mencken once wrote that “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Mencken penned this line in 1920, at the height of the first Red Scare.