Listen: How ads and politicians weaponize fear

We’re bombarded with messaging trying to hijack our quick fear responses, says Marika Landau-Wells.

But brain research could tell us more about how to change our perception of what’s dangerous and what’s not.

Against her mom’s warnings, Landau-Wells, a UC Berkeley political scientist, watched Arachnaphobia as a kid. Ever since, she has been terrified of spiders.

But over the years, she has learned to reason with her quick fear response—No, that spider is not 8 feet in diameter—and calmly trap them and put them outside.

We all encounter problems like this, she says, where we have quick reactions to things we’ve learned to fear. It might be something that is actually dangerous that we really should quickly react to, but it could also be a tiny, non-threatening spider.

Each time, we have to decide what kind of problem it is and then how to respond. She says this task is especially hard today because we’re inundated with messages trying to hijack our fear response, from junky online ads to the way politicians speak.

Landau-Wells studies how we make these kinds of decisions, and what influences how we act, especially in situations where there’s a lot on the line. Her research reveals just how hard it is to tell the difference between a threat that requires your attention and one that you can ignore, and could influence how world leaders make decisions about how to keep their countries safe.

Here, she digs into how research could tell us more about how to change our perception of what’s dangerous and what’s not:

Read this episode’s transcript.

Source: UC Berkeley

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