Overcoming Fear Culture and Fear Itself

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Gardner points to the 12 months after 9/11, during which, researchers now know, an understandably large number of people heeded their guts and avoided flying. Fear itself put millions of additional people in cars. Flying, however, is vastly safer than driving, and in that one year, traffic fatalities on U.S. roads spiked. An additional 1,595 people lost their lives. At the end of the year, air travel numbers returned to normal, and traffic fatalities resumed their disconcerting but regular rates.

These sorts of miscalculations happen every day: When our guts tell us not to let children play outside unsupervised, the sedentary lifestyle that inevitably results exposes kids to a host of health problems far more dangerous than the slim probability of abduction. In 1999, when sociologist Barry Glassner wrote The Culture of Fear, researchers had discovered that women, by and large, misunderstood the statistical risks of breast cancer, and that overblown fears had kept them from scheduling preventive screenings.

Our brains are poorly equipped to weigh risks that don’t result in immediate negative consequences, Psych­ology Today observed last February. One more cigarette, one more fast-food meal: What’s the harm?

Marketers, politicians, and entertainers grasp with precision how brains misfire, and they apply this knowledge to great gain. Fearmongering has worked wonders for everyone from real estate agents hawking gated communities to advocacy groups attempting to recruit members.

“In 1993 there were only a few dozen antibacterial consumer products,” Mother Jones reported in December. “Today, there are more than 9,000, with 2,753 new ones introduced in 2007.” Never mind that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration concluded four years ago that antibacterial soap is no better at preventing infection than regular suds: Sales of antibacterial chemicals are projected to reach $930 million in 2009. If you aren’t afraid of germs, you haven’t been watching enough TV.

As networks battle for ratings and newspapers grasp at disappearing readers, the urge to lead with sensational stories grows. The gap between the reported and the commonplace skews our subconscious stockpile of reference points, while hunger for the next big story inevitably broadens our catalog of things that go bump in the night.

Television shows seem almost single-mindedly intent on triggering our anxieties—and tend to lay the blame squarely on those fools who were not fearful enough. In a recent episode of CBS’ Criminal Minds, a pair of grief-stricken parents blubbered in front of the agents sent to recover their abducted son. The father, it seems, had argued that the 5-year-old ought to be allowed to walk to a friend’s house . . . alone. “I thought we were babying him,” he moans, as the aggrieved mother issues a stony, reproachful stare.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print