I don’t think it is so much magical thinking or superstition as it is that emotions tend to get aligned with beliefs, but it takes time. And to realign your emotions you need to “deprogram” the now-unconscious memories causing the fear. Just how often do you get the opportunity to face the fear of ghosts that you caught from ghost stories and horror movies when you were younger?
I watched too much Twilight Zone and Outer Limits and so on myself—despite being more at home in the dark than anyone else I have ever met, I still have a visceral feeling that something is about to jump out at me whenever I’m out at night.
Of course, this reinforces (or is reinforced by, depending on how you approach it) the evolutionary fear of the dark, mostly inspired by night hunting predators.
And this still leaves the problem of the popularity of horror movies.
I have to second the idea that it takes time to realign your emotions. I have overcome a number of irrational fears in my life and they don’t usually go away as soon as I realize that they are irrational. For example, after I stopped believing in god, I still felt uncomfortable blaspheming. After I decided that it was OK to eat meat, it took me months before I actually was willing to eat any meat. And there are countless other situations where I decided, “This is a safe/acceptable activity”, and yet I would still have a visceral uneasiness about doing them while acclimating to the idea.
I don’t think it is so much magical thinking or superstition as it is that emotions tend to get aligned with beliefs, but it takes time. And to realign your emotions you need to “deprogram” the now-unconscious memories causing the fear. Just how often do you get the opportunity to face the fear of ghosts that you caught from ghost stories and horror movies when you were younger?
I watched too much Twilight Zone and Outer Limits and so on myself—despite being more at home in the dark than anyone else I have ever met, I still have a visceral feeling that something is about to jump out at me whenever I’m out at night.
Of course, this reinforces (or is reinforced by, depending on how you approach it) the evolutionary fear of the dark, mostly inspired by night hunting predators.
And this still leaves the problem of the popularity of horror movies.
I have to second the idea that it takes time to realign your emotions. I have overcome a number of irrational fears in my life and they don’t usually go away as soon as I realize that they are irrational. For example, after I stopped believing in god, I still felt uncomfortable blaspheming. After I decided that it was OK to eat meat, it took me months before I actually was willing to eat any meat. And there are countless other situations where I decided, “This is a safe/acceptable activity”, and yet I would still have a visceral uneasiness about doing them while acclimating to the idea.