humans are evolutionarily biased towards paying extra attention to things like spiders and snakes
Only tangentially related, but since the article seems to be treating the fear of snakes and that of spiders equivalently, I looked into something I’d been curious about: how widespread this supposed fear of spiders actually is. It’s a common meme on the Internet that everyone is afraid of spiders, but here in India they’re generally regarded as curious creatures and minor pests, not even as “scary” as cockroaches, and not at all comparable to snakes.
The spider gained an evil reputation from the 1842 Biedermeier novella by Jeremias Gotthelf, The Black Spider. In this allegorical tale which was adapted to various media, the spider symbolizes evil works and represents the moral consequences of making a pact with the devil.
and started forming a story in my head that it’s a Western cultural thing started by this one book and proliferated into multiple media from there.
But then I came across this paper “A cross-cultural study of animal fears”, which seems to be suggesting (Table 2) that India is the outlier here—Indians were “significantly less fearful than” every other country when it comes to spiders. And there’s not a general East-West trend either, Holland is less fearful than Hong Kong, and Japanese are the most fearful of spiders among all tested countries. In general,
Indian subjects reported lower levels of fear to disgust-relevant animals [cockroach, spider, beetle,
maggot, worm, leech, bat, wasp, lizard, rat, slug, bee, jellyfish, moth, and snail] than subjects from all other countries, while Japanese subjects reported significantly higher fear ratings to disgust animals than Indian, UK, USA, Korean and Hong Kong subjects.
I wonder if this reduced fear also translates as a corresponding lack of extra attention, or if the attention is still there, just not associated with the fear response.
Only tangentially related, but since the article seems to be treating the fear of snakes and that of spiders equivalently, I looked into something I’d been curious about: how widespread this supposed fear of spiders actually is. It’s a common meme on the Internet that everyone is afraid of spiders, but here in India they’re generally regarded as curious creatures and minor pests, not even as “scary” as cockroaches, and not at all comparable to snakes.
I looked at the Wikipedia page on cultural depictions of spiders, which said this:
and started forming a story in my head that it’s a Western cultural thing started by this one book and proliferated into multiple media from there.
But then I came across this paper “A cross-cultural study of animal fears”, which seems to be suggesting (Table 2) that India is the outlier here—Indians were “significantly less fearful than” every other country when it comes to spiders. And there’s not a general East-West trend either, Holland is less fearful than Hong Kong, and Japanese are the most fearful of spiders among all tested countries. In general,
I wonder if this reduced fear also translates as a corresponding lack of extra attention, or if the attention is still there, just not associated with the fear response.