We cannot easily test this out in humans, but we can look for evidence in animals. Darwin noticed that birds are more ready to fear cats than people, presumably because they are at more risk from cats. More than one hundred years after Darwin, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, Martin Seligman, became interested in how that should be. After all, both cats and people kill birds and it might be as well for the average bird to have a healthy respect for both.
Seligman said that birds are programmed to fear cats but not people. Somewhere in the depths of the bird’s tiny brain lies the knowledge or the instinct that makes them ready to fear cats. By contrast, they are essentially neutral towards humans. Birds may become afraid of humans, but are not likely to fear people unless they have been harmed or hounded in some way. Cats are natural enemies of birds and have killed off swathes of them down the ages.
Seligman said that birds are ‘prepared’ to fear cats but ‘unprepared’ to fear people. He said further that some animals are ‘contra-prepared’ to develop certain fears and never become afraid even if they have repeated bad experiences. For example, pigeons instinctively peck for food and in the laboratory they learn quickly to peck a lighted key if it delivers grain. But if the experiment is set up so that pecking the key prevents them getting grain, they do not learn, and continue pecking at the key even though they never get anything to eat. Pigeons normally have to peck to feed and they are contra-prepared to make an association between pecking and starvation. The hungrier they are, the harder they peck, and it never occurs to them that taking a rest might be the answer.
Similarly, they learn quickly to fly away to avoid a shock but only with great difficulty to peck a key to stop the shock. Again, it makes sense. Hopping or flying away from an unpleasant stimulus is a good idea. Pecking, as a rule, would not help.
Humans may also have degrees of preparedness to develop fears. Watson and Rayner’s experiment with Little Albert (described in the last chapter), showed that he learnt instantly to fear the furry rat, and many other similar objects, after the experimenters startled him with a loud noise while he was playing. He did not take against the scientists conducting the work, who quite clearly deserved it, which suggests he was more ready to fear animals than people. Another researcher gave children common household objects like curtains and blocks to play with, delivered a sudden loud noise, and found they developed no fear at all. In yet another similar experiment, children remained robustly unafraid of a wooden duck.
This may be an important hint as to how phobias develop. The brain’s hardwiring determines how ready we are to become afraid of something. It provides a kind of mould for our fears. Some animals and situations fit it well. Fears of them are instinctive and develop with the least provocation. Seligman initially said that objects or situations which threatened the survival of the species, such as insects, animals, heights or the dark, best fit the mould. Phobias develop without conscious thought, sometimes after a one-off event, and they are not easily extinguished. In addition, the more flexible process of experience, learning and observing others, means that we can become afraid of anything. Modern objects tend not to fit the mould and it takes very adverse circumstances to make us fear them. Phobias of objects can and do develop, but not easily. Seligman rather harshly suggested that people with these fears may have ‘talked’ themselves into it. Fear of cars or guns is unprepared, he says, our brains have no template for it, and it takes effort or severe experience to lodge the fear in our minds. We will return to this point later in the chapter.
For many years there was a fierce debate over whether people and animals were born with fears or developed them later, but in the 1960s researchers demonstrated that laboratory-reared monkeys are not at all afraid of snakes. Monkeys who have spent even a short period in the wild are extremely afraid. It is highly unlikely that all of the once-wild monkeys had had a traumatic experience with a snake, so this was puzzling and it seemed that at least some of the monkeys must have acquired their fear vicariously, through seeing another monkey acting scared – a kind of fear by proxy.
Susan Mineka and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin put a monkey’s favourite treat, such as a marshmallow or raisin, on a ledge behind a transparent box. There was a real or toy snake in the box and the monkey had to reach over the snake to get the sweet. The more afraid the monkey was, the more reluctant it was to stretch over the box, and Mineka found that the fearless laboratory-reared animals grabbed the treat where the once-wild monkeys refused it.
Some laboratory-reared monkeys had lived with their previously wild parents all their lives. This was obviously not sufficient for them to acquire the fear of snakes – they seemed to need some experience for the fear to develop. When the laboratory-reared monkeys were allowed to watch older, wild-reared monkeys cowering from the snake, the vast majority developed the same reaction themselves, within minutes. They mimicked the screen monkey’s behaviour, clutching or shaking the cage, grimacing or threatening.
Mineka then attempted to make monkeys fear flowers or rabbits, objects that could never pose a threat. One video showed a monkey afraid of a snake and another was edited so that the same monkey was apparently afraid of a flower. Fearless young monkeys watched the tapes and afterwards, those who had seen the snake tape avoided snakes, but those who had seen the flower tape remained unconcerned by flowers. It was clearly easier to induce a fear of snakes than flowers. A similar experiment demonstrated that the monkeys were more ready to fear toy crocodiles than toy rabbits.
This is powerful evidence that creatures really are programmed to fear certain things. These monkeys were born in laboratories and had never previously encountered snakes, flowers, crocodiles or rabbits. Mineka and Cook concluded that it was highly likely that the difference in the monkeys’ reactions was somehow in-built, or ‘phylogenetic’. In other words, snakes and toy crocodiles are a better fit for the mould in the monkey’s brain.
Monkeys may not be born afraid of snakes but any sort of demonstration is enough to provoke their fear. It makes sense from the evolutionists’ point of view. Animals may not get a second chance in the wild and mistakes can be fatal. It could be that monkeys that quickly learn to be afraid of snakes or crocodiles have a survival advantage over their bolder companions. They are more likely to avoid these animals and therefore to survive and produce offspring. They will pass on the tendency to fear and, over generations, natural selection would increase the proportion of all monkeys inclined to fear snakes or crocodiles.
Work like this could not be done on people because we would all have experience of any object the researchers chose. But it might still be possible to draw human parallels from the work. Monkeys are not people, but our learning processes are surprisingly similar.
Take a country like Britain, where we have only one poisonous snake, the adder, and virtually none of us has ever seen it. Yet many of us are afraid of snakes. Why? Mineka’s work suggests, if humans are anything like primates, it will not take much exposure to snakes for a strong fear to develop. Monkeys developed permanent fears from watching videos and people probably do, too. We could be watching from a distance as someone else reacts to a snake or, much more likely, see someone shuddering at them in a film or on TV. From a very young age, we learn of Little Miss Muffett being frightened away by the spider, or the farmer’s wife shrieking in terror at three blind mice.
Role models are powerful, especially – according to Mineka – if they are older and more dominant. Her models did not have to be related to the young monkeys but it helped if they knew each other. This suggests that parents or other influential adults – even television and film role models – could pass on their fear to children. Mineka believes that if adults have phobias, they should not confront snakes, spiders or whatever it is they fear in front of children. We might expect it to be a bad thing for parents to blatantly avoid objects or situations, but this study suggests that it is worse for children to see their parents visibly disturbed.
There is a plus side to this work. Mineka found that monkeys can be immunised against developing a fear and learn not to be afraid. A model monkey who was unafraid of a snake made a lasting impression on the naive monkeys. They apparently got the message that snakes are not to be feared and it prevented the later