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by skolsuper
2098 days ago
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Absolutely. I am scared of spiders because my mother is scared of spiders, not because she told me to be scared of spiders. Quite the opposite: knowing arachnaphobia is an irrational fear (at least in the UK), she tried very hard not to pass it on to her children, but the body language of fear must be near impossible to hide from a child. |
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What's really interesting here is the problem of just a "naive threat estimation", which usually is always just estimating the purely mechanical danger the body of a foe could pose. We have a healthy respect for large animals like horses and cattle that could crush us. We've got an open fear of predators with obvious sharp teeth and such (wolves, big cats, crocodilians). But bugs? Bugs are really weird because they're not mechanically dangerous, and as, say, a child, sizing them up, there's no sensible reason to be scared.
I find it really interesting how - even without necessarily understanding that they've got poison, we as a species do a really good job of being scared of "things that aren't visually obvious threats" like this - especially in kids, who really struggle to "get it" when it comes to what's actually dangerous about, say, a spider or a jellyfish.
I think you really hit on something there - I think a little bit of it is actually a built-in instinctual fear, but there's also a huge part that's an imitative fear kids pick up from anything that the body language of a parent conveys as dangerous.