Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

388 | HOW THE MIND WORKStin Seligman suggests that fears can be easily conditioned only when theanimal is evolutionarily prepared to make the association.Few, if any, human phobias are about neutral objects that were oncepaired with some trauma. People dread snakes without ever having seenone. After a frightening or painful event, people are more prudent aroundthe cause, but they do not fear it; there are no phobias for electrical outlets,hammers, cars, or air-raid shelters. Television cliches notwithstanding,most survivors of a traumatic event do not get the screaming meemiesevery time they face a reminder of it. Vietnam veterans resent the stereotypein which they hit the dirt whenever someone drops a glass.A better way to understand the learning of fears is to think through theevolutionary demands. The world is a dangerous place, but our ancestorscould not have spent their lives cowering in caves; there was food togather and mates to win. They had to calibrate their fears of typical dangersagainst the actual dangers in the local environment (after all, not allspiders are poisonous) and against their own ability to neutralize the danger:their know-how, defensive technology, and safety in numbers.Marks and the psychiatrist Randolph Nesse argue that phobias areinnate fears that have never been unlearned. Fears develop spontaneouslyin children. In their first year, babies fear strangers and separation,as well they should, for infanticide and predation are serious threatsto the tiniest hunter-gatherers. (The film A Cry in the Dark shows howeasily a predator can snatch an unattended baby. It is an excellentanswer to every parent's question of why the infant left alone in a darkbedroom is screaming bloody murder.) Between the ages of three andfive, children become fearful of all the standard phobic objects—spiders,the dark, deep water, and so on—and then master them one by one.Most adult phobias are childhood fears that never went away. That iswhy it is city-dwellers who most fear snakes.As with the learning of safe foods, the best guides to the local dangersare the people who have survived them. Children fear what they seetheir parents fear, and often unlearn their fears when they see other childrencoping. Adults are just as impressionable. In wartime, courage andpanic are both contagious, and in some therapies, the phobic watches asan aide plays with a boa constrictor or lets a spider crawl up her arm.Even monkeys watch one another to calibrate their fear. Laboratoryraisedrhesus macaques are not afraid of snakes when they first seethem, but if they watch a film of another monkey being frightened by asnake, they fear it, too. The monkey in the movie does not instill the fear