Why do so many people hate spiders? A group of researchers set out to try to answer that question... with Doctor Who.

Really.

A common explanation for why humans dislike spiders blames our evolutionary history. Perhaps ancient humans that were jumpy around harmful animals had a survival advantage. Taking time to think deeply and process your feelings isn't terribly adaptive if an animal is trying to eat you. Easily-startled humans survived disproportionately, and passed that tendency on to their descendants.

But what evidence is there for that just-so story? Since spider phobia is one of the most common phobias, it's the go-to anxiety for studying fear and fearful behavior in humans. There is a remarkably large research field pretty much based on getting people to look at spiders and poke them with sticks. For Science.

An adorable little Jumping Spider. How can you not love it? Image: © Astrojunta

From those experiments, we know that there is a large component of learning in phobias; most people who are afraid of spiders have family members that are also afraid, or had a specific experience as a child that primed them to become phobic. We also know that our brains are hardwired to notice things, and that some things (spiders and snakes) do get noticed more often than others. And we know that in many cultures, spiders are not feared, culturally important, and also delicious snacks.

So how do you separate out what might be innate and part of our brain's programming to recognize threats, and what is socially learned? How about comparing something that is entirely socially constructed, like Doctor Who Fandom, to spiders? And that's just what the researchers did.

They identified three groups of people: Spider-phobic Doctor Who fans, Non-spider-phobic Doctor Who fans, and people who didn't care much about either Doctor Who or Spiders. The level of test subject nerdery was determined with a Doctor Who quiz asking which planet the Doctor was from, how many hearts he had, and why the TARDIS looked like a police box, among other questions. Subjects also completed a spider phobia assessment.

Once their Whovian cred was established, test volunteers were asked to find a picture of a horse in a grid of nine images in repeated tests. The grid also held pictures of spiders, screenshots of the Tenth Doctor, and images of fish, cows, and screenshots from a cop show and a soap opera.

Whovians that were spider phobic were significantly slower to find the horse; in other words, the presence of a spider on the screen distracted them. Who fans that were not spider phobic were also significantly slower to find the horse, but in their case it was David Tennant that was the distractor, not spiders. The control group (knew of Doctor Who and spiders, but not fans of either) wasn't distracted by either spiders or a Gallifreyan with awesome hair. There also was a very nice predictive relationship between scores on the spider-phobia and Who-philia tests and the amount of distraction the test subjects experienced.

The Tenth Doctor is, indeed, quite distracting. Image: © BBC

What does this tell us? If fear of spiders is evolutionarily privileged–if it's something hard wired into our brains–all the groups should have reacted the same way, and would be distracted by the spiders. That didn't happen. It's also clearly not credible to say we evolved to notice Doctor Who as an explanation for the results.

The researchers suggest that attention biases are markers of things that we are interested in, not remnants of our evolutionary history. The more relevant a stimulus is to us, the more likely we are to notice something. The person afraid of spiders will always be the first one to spot a spider in the room; a person interested Doctor Who will notice a blue police box in their neighborhood right away.

This is a very satisfactory explanation for why some like spiders and some don't, and that varies widely from culture to culture. However, in the words of the researchers, "Where this leaves the Empress of Racnoss, we are unsure."