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In a 2020 Republican campaign ad, a woman dials 911 only to discover that there’s nobody there to answer. The theme: Their candidate will protect us from chaos and looting. Messaging like this follows a successful playbook where, since the 1950s, political TV advertisements have sought to create both positive and negative emotions in viewers, often to scare us into voting for their candidate. As I describe in my book The Nature of Fear: Survival Lessons from the Wild, the addition of noisy sounds and fuzzy images (visual noise) are particularly good at evoking fear.
President Johnson’s 1964 Daisy advertisement is a perfect example: A little girl counts up (in an endearingly childlike way) as she plucks petals off a daisy. Suddenly, the camera zooms into her eye that morphs into a giant mushroom cloud. In a scratchy voice laid over the video clip, Johnson states what is at stake. The ad created fear and communicated that Johnson could make voters safe. Not surprisingly, it worked; Johnson was elected in a landslide.
But will 911 calls really go unanswered under a Biden presidency? And more importantly, if we wish to make rational decisions, how can we inoculate ourselves from advertisements and statements optimized to manipulate our emotions?
To understand our fears, we have to look left, far left in the historical timeline of life, to our distant ancestors—worms—who first evolved exquisite systems designed to survive the existential threats posed by their predators. The suite of neuro-endocrinological responses—the same ones that give us sweaty palms, a racing heart, and wide-open eyes when we narrowly avoid a car accident or a potentially catastrophic fall—ensured that animals avoided risks when detected and, when challenged, prepared themselves for fighting and fleeing by shunting energy and focus to predator evasion.
Evolution, as the Nobel Prize-winning biologist François Jakob noted, is about tinkering with what you have rather than making up new solutions to new problems. Thus, about 250 million years ago, when the first termites evolved sociality, this same suite of neuro-endocrinological responses formed the basis of responses to social threats—the threat of losing a meal, a territory, or the all-important status that comes with social rank. It’s this evolutionary legacy humans now have that predisposes us to overreact to a variety of modern threats.
Threats or at least perceptions of threats are abundant, and evolution has prepared us for many of them. We fear "outsiders"—those not from our groups—because of a long evolutionary history of the inter-group conflict that predates the evolution of modern humans. We fear violent interactions with potential predators as well as humans—after all, in any given year, more people are killed by other humans than predators. We fear the loss of our resources and the implications of this for our own security and our family’s security.
Yet, evolution has not had sufficient time to catch up and tune our responses to a variety of novel threats. Some of these are genuinely existential—we buy insurance to protect ourselves against bankruptcy from a medical disaster or from a lawsuit. But others—such as the threat of losing status from wearing the wrong clothes, having fungal infections that yellow our toenails, or buying the wrong phone or car—are novel but still tap into the same suite of neuro-endocrinological responses. Being social is potentially stressful!
Importantly, rather than habituating to this constant exposure to both historically important and novel threats, we have become fear-conditioned. Fear conditioning requires limited experiences with bad events to form indelible memories that prepare us for defensive action. Fear conditioning may be the basis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that afflicts victims of violent trauma. Indeed, we seem to be primed to learn rapidly to avoid violence that is beyond our control and then remember these lessons for a long time.
While adaptive, fear conditioning may become misplaced. And with headlines screaming out things to fear every day, our entire fear system is being over-burdened and hijacked. Fear sells. Politicians and pundits capitalize on these fears by screaming about the threats of other nations, aliens, and sadly, religious, sexual, and racial minorities.
Politicians know that capitalizing on fear can be leveraged into support for legislation. For instance, Bill Clinton passed his 1994 federal crime bill with Hillary Clinton’s help. Hillary referred to young, remorseless criminal gang members as "super predators." This was in the aftermath of the 1992 LA riots and at a time when the U.S. was in the midst of a crack cocaine epidemic. Urban gangs were seen as violent and scary, and she was clearly referring mostly to black and Latino youth. But, by using the term in speeches given to white audiences, she effectively capitalized on their implicit biases and fears to drive support of the bill.
Modern elections draw heavily from successful marketing. Marketers manipulate their messages to focus on how we can avoid potential losses by buying a certain item (particularly insurance!) without necessarily discussing the potential benefit. Political lobbyists and those trying to influence policy also carefully word their messages because they know that how risk is presented may change our perception of whether something with some risk is considered acceptable or not. To inoculate yourself against this, reframe statements about the loss to reflect the potential gains associated with a policy or a purchase. You may very well decide to try to avoid losses, but at least you will have had the opportunity to consider the magnitude of the associated benefits.
Understanding the biological basis of our fears argues against forming lazy, broad-brushed generalizations. Being hijacked by those with political agendas neither respects our fellow humans nor does it respect the exquisite evolutionary legacy illustrated by our fear system that has made us who we are. The vast majority of "illegal" aliens are not murderers or rapists, as some American politicians claim, but people simply seeking out a better life for themselves and their families. The vast majority of refugees fleeing wars are not intent on forming "sleeper cells" and attacking the homeland, but rather are again seeking out a safer and better life. The vast majority of peaceful protesters are exercising their right to be heard and to stand up for what they believe in; they are not a personal or a societal threat. And the vast majority of those with strong religious beliefs (whether Christian, Jew, or Muslim) are not religious terrorists.
We are the descendants of successful ancestors who got their risk assessments right. Risk is unavoidable and ever-present, but rather than reflexively having a fear-conditioned response to a fear-inducing political ad (as the marketers want you to have), pause and evaluate the data. In many instances, you’ll find that manufactured fears don’t reflect the reality of what’s really happening.
