Below, co-authors Ruth DeFoster and Natashia Swalve share five key insights from their new book, The Fear Knot: How Science, History, and Culture Shape Our Fears – and How to Get Unstuck.
Ruth is a journalism professor and media scholar who teaches at the University of Minnesota, where she is also the Director of the Undergraduate Studies for the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Natashia is a neuroscience professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, where she teaches psychology and psychopharmacology.
What’s the big idea?
The Fear Knot explores our misguided human fears, from premature burials to GMOs, while explaining the real dangers out there—and why you’re less likely to be afraid of them. With the right tools, we can all be better equipped to untie the fear knots misleading our behavior.
1. Fears are at least partially hardwired.
Not all fears stem from trauma, but most of them are built upon our most primal anxieties. Our bodies are naturally geared to experience fear, and rightfully so. The famous neuroscience patient, known by her initials, S.M., has a biological glitch that makes her unable to feel fear. While this may sound enjoyable, it’s incredibly dangerous. S.M. constantly finds herself in risky situations, like the time she was held up at knifepoint and responded by laughing at the criminal.
S.M. shows us that sometimes fear is a necessary evil. It helps us avoid deadly scenarios and keeps us alive in a constantly evolving world. But our fears also make us jump to worst-case scenarios, setting us up to believe in conspiracy theories and fall prey to misinformation. Parents worry about their children, so they chide them about playing in the dirt, likely increasing their chances of developing an allergy by avoiding dust and dander. We fear sickness and work hard to treat our ailments. But by doing so, we spark the spread of antibiotic resistance, many times more deadly than the original diseases. We fear the fate of our world, and so we build backyard honeybee hives, creating an army of new competitors for the creatures that are actually vulnerable: wild bumblebees.
Frauds and hucksters thrive on our instinctual fears, selling so-called “cures” like bleach as a treatment for everything from autism to HIV. But recognizing where those fears originate from can help. It can cause you to pull back from buying the untested treatment or trying out that new parenting technique that, while your neighbor vouches for it, is not backed by any science. While it may feel like your fears are driving your decision, you ultimately have the final say.
2. Fears are cyclical.
In much the same way that diseases spread, so do cycles of overblown fears, which sociologist Stanley Cohen referred to as “moral panics.” Throughout history, moral panics have cycled with surprising regularity, often tied to concerns about children’s safety. The Salem Witch Trials of the late 17th century alleged that witches were tormenting and even possessing local children, while the Satanic Panic of the 1980s picked up on similar themes—promoting the myth that a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles was operating out of American daycare centers. Even today, the QAnon conspiracy preys on the same fears of innocence lost and threats to American children.
“Throughout history, moral panics have cycled with surprising regularity, often tied to concerns about children’s safety.”
But whether these moral panics are associated with witchcraft or terrorism, one thing remains the same: we continue to repeat the same mistaken fears. The targets differ by year, but while the villains change with the decade, the tactics used to maneuver us toward those fears remain similar. Thankfully, ways to counter misinformation can be recycled as well.
3. We need shades of gray in a black-and-white world.
If you’ve heard of the drug kratom, you’ve likely heard one of two tales: It’s either a life-saving miracle plant, or it’s the lethal new opioid killing teenagers. As a drug researcher, I must mentally prepare myself if someone brings this drug up in conversation because I will likely be fighting misinformation from both sides.
Drugs are an easy target for rampant misinformation. The social program called D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) has maligned drugs across multiple generations of children, warning us that all drugs are bad. But on TikTok, we hear that the terpenes in cannabis can cure cancer, and melatonin will help put a stop to all your sleep problems.
The problem with this type of thinking is that the answer is somewhere in between. Kratom can help people quit using other, more dangerous opioids. But kratom also has addictive qualities and, because it’s unregulated, almost anything can be packaged into the product. Kratom samples frequently test positive for heavy metals and even Salmonella.
Humans tend to use an “all or nothing” mindset. Your nemesis is pure evil, and your best friend deserves the world. When we fear something, this distortion becomes even more extreme.
“Humans tend to use an ‘all or nothing’ mindset.”
As a result, our fears prompt us to swing wildly in the opposite direction of flawed trends. The laissez-faire parenting of the past is seen in the present as neglectful—and so, parents swing toward what is called “helicopter parenting,” hovering over our children’s every move. But the best parenting is more likely somewhere in between, promoting independence but ending the custom of literally throwing your children into the deep end of the pool.
It’s easy to picture a political opponent as trying to destroy the country you love and your choice for the role as a savior. But most of life exists within those more ambiguous shades of gray. The more we paint things solely in black or white, the more we lose the nuance of the everyday.
4. The biggest problems are complex, but crucial.
Every summer over the past decade or so, we have continued to see new heat records set. We watch floods ravage cities and hurricanes inundate areas previously considered safe. We avert our eyes, not because we don’t fear what our future is going to look like but because we feel helpless in the face of it.
The things we really should fear the most are often the hardest to wrap one’s head around—problems like climate change, systemic racial and gender inequality, childhood poverty, and domestic terrorism, to name a few.
As individuals, it’s easy to ignore these problems because—in the first place—we don’t think that we can contribute productively to the eventual solution. And it’s often painful to confront the behaviors of our own that contribute to these nightmarish scenarios, from the seemingly humdrum algorithmic echo chambers in which far too many of us now exist to the emotionally and economically expensive decisions we will likely have to make to try to fix them. But these big, systemic problems, many of which have continued to plague society for centuries, are what we now should focus on the most.
5. We believe what we see.
Across the world, rates of reliable types of birth control have plummeted, while more unreliable methods have begun to skyrocket. The horrors of hormonal birth control are shared between inboxes with no fact-checking in sight. Daysy, a fertility tracker app, became a leading example of the new face of contraception, supposedly protecting women from the evils of hormonal birth control while preventing pregnancy. But behind the curtain, the popular app that influencers promoted relentlessly turned out not to be as effective as originally touted, with the science backing it having been retracted from the original journal.
“Our fears don’t merely guide our daily actions; they also sharply define some of the biggest questions we face across society.”
Many social media stories turn out to be misleading or dangerous. Scientists talk about Andrew Wakefield’s study falsely linking vaccines to autism as a warning because this original source of misinformation has snowballed out of control. But every day, even more falsehoods flood social media, sometimes benign but other times deadly. Doctors plead for people not to rely on the new trend of “cough CPR” as a method to treat a heart attack—and yet, videos make the rounds, shared by millions without thinking of its risk.
Social media algorithms are designed to feed you what you want to see, and we want to see things with which each of us agrees. Over time in an algorithmic silo, our views become more extreme, and we become more at risk of sticking to our siloed positions. All the while, misinformation slides from one person to another, across countries and friend groups, exposing us to more of our own particular views. Recognizing that our algorithms drive these anxieties—shaping who and what we’re afraid of—is the first step toward taking a hard look at your own consumption and counteracting its persuasion.
Our fears don’t merely guide our daily actions; they also sharply define some of the biggest questions we face across society. It’s getting harder to know what we should be afraid of, particularly when our news and social media feeds are increasingly full of deep fakes and lurid sensationalism. Our biggest problems can seem all but impossible to solve, especially when we’re struggling with daily concerns like what type of food to buy or whether our space heater is dangerous. Even though our fears might be based on something primal, always remember that you are still in complete control of your behavior. Being informed, counteracting your own biases, and thinking critically about the world are crucial.
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