How your worst fears stack up against reality

Updated

For those of us who can't stand the thought of creepy crawlies or who jump at the sight of a shadow in the ocean, summer in Australia can be a challenging time.

Deadly snakes, sharks and spiders — you name it, we've got it.

But just how deadly are these creatures and how disproportionate is our fear of them? To find out we compiled a list of deaths commonly associated with summer.

So how much do cold, hard facts change that rush of adrenaline at the sight of, say, a spider? There have been no confirmed deaths from spider bites in Australia since 1979, while falling out of bed (a sub-category of falling deaths shown in the chart) killed 523 people between 2007 and 2016. Does knowing this mean you'll now be more afraid of beds than spiders?

Probably not. Most people with irrational fears are well aware that the object of their terror isn't likely to kill them. In fact, awareness that the fear is "out of proportion" to the actual threat or danger posed is one of the criteria for diagnosing phobias, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).

So if we know they're irrational, why do we cling to these fears?

Where fear comes from

We learn fear, an emotion critical to survival, both directly and indirectly. "Vicarious" fear learning happens when we see people around us reacting fearfully (like being afraid of wasps because you see other people running away from wasps). "Instructive" fear acquisition includes when we're exposed to negative information about something (such as being afraid of the basement because your older brother told you there was a monster living there).

We also learn fear directly, through association with intense negative experiences. In the infamous and unethical "Little Albert" experiments, researchers taught an infant to fear a white rat by startling him with a loud noise every time he saw the rat. Eventually, Little Albert would cry and try to crawl away whenever he saw the rat, whether or not it was accompanied by a loud noise.

It goes further: we can be afraid of things that resemble things we fear. The researchers discovered Little Albert was afraid of a fur coat and cotton wool, for example, even though he'd had no negative experiences of these things.

On the other hand, other studies that tested babies' reactions to images of creepy crawlies suggest fear of "ancestral threats" such as snakes and spiders might be innate, since these images triggered stress reactions long before the babies could have learned them.

We asked you to share your irrational fears in the comments.

Poor risk calculation

But understanding where irrational fear comes from doesn't explain the converse: why we're often disproportionately unafraid of things that are far more dangerous by comparison.

Fear is a risk calculation — a lightning-fast one that floods the body with adrenaline. But we're notoriously bad at mitigating risks that don't have immediate consequences. Take sunbaking, for example. We know it greatly increases the risk of skin cancer but we experience sunshine every day without serious injury.

So while the rational brain might understand the long-term consequences, it's hard to actually feel afraid of sunbaking. And ultimately, risk assessment and emotion are intimately connected.

Emotion enhances memory, which is useful for helping us avoid things that have caused pain or hurt in the past, like bee stings or that cheating boyfriend.

But emotion can also undermine our ability to calculate the odds, leading us to overestimate the risk of events that are horrible but uncommon, and underestimate the risk of the familiar or ordinary.

Driving, for example, is far more risky than flying but after September 11, more than a million Americans chose to drive instead of fly, causing up to 2,300 more road deaths than would be statistically expected, according to studies.

The control factor

For many, that decision probably tapped into another element of fear: lack of control. You can control how safely you drive; you can't control a plane or a terrorist attack.

Some researchers believe that the urge to control the ultimate fear of death may also underpin phobias, which focus on smaller, more manageable "threats", such as spiders.

Control also plays into heightened fear of the unknown, the unfamiliar and the unexpected.

For example, researchers found both people and mice became "hyper-vigilant" when exposed to a harmless tone sounded at unpredictable intervals. The unexpected undermines our ability to assess threats, and predict or control outcomes.

It's not stupidity that leads to irrational fear. Silly as they may seem, irrational fears do have a rational basis.

Notes about this story

Except for shark attack deaths, figures on deaths compiled from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Shark attack deaths come from the Global Shark Attack File.

Deaths from jumping or diving into water refer to fatal injuries other than drowning.

Fire deaths include deaths from "uncontrolled fire in building or structure" and "uncontrolled fire not in building or structure".

Credits

Reporting: Inga Ting and Mark Doman

Development: Nathanael Scott and Ri Liu

Design: Alex Palmer

Topics: death, community-and-society, shark, animal-attacks, human-interest, australia

First posted