Berkeley Voices: We learn what to fear. Can we unlearn it?

Anne Brice (intro): This is Berkeley Voices. I’m Anne Brice.

(Music: “Pasta Frola” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (narration): UC Berkeley political scientist Marika Landau-Wells first watched the 1990 movie Arachnophobia as a kid. Her mom warned her not to see the horror film. It was PG-13, and she was a lot younger than 13. But some of her friends were going to the theater to see it — apparently one of their parents thought it was fine — so she went. 

Marika Landau-Wells: I now have this deep-seated conviction that all spiders are at least 8 inches in diameter, hairy and can jump. This is not true, but all of my sort of instantaneous behavior around spiders is governed by that really, really wrong mental image that was burned into my brain at a very young age in a very terrifying movie.

And when I encounter a spider now, I actually really have to reflect, like, “Are my eyes seeing this thing? Is it eight inches wide? No, it isn’t. Is it probably going to leap at my face? No, it’s not.” 

Anne Brice (narration): Instead of panicking and killing it, like her knee-jerk reaction might be, she catches it calmly and she puts it outside. 

Marika Landau-Wells: Now, I have run into a couple of very large tarantulas since, and that evaluative process gets stuck at the, like, “Is it big and hairy?” point, and then I freak out. But most of the time this is not true. 

Anne Brice (narration): Landau-Wells says we all encounter problems like this, where we have quick reactions to things we’ve learned to fear. It could be something that is actually dangerous, but it could also be a tiny, non-threatening spider. 

Each time, we have to decide what type of problem it is, and then how to respond to it.  

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.

(Music fades out)

In her current book project, titled Seeking Security: Threat Perception and Policy-making in a Dangerous World, she explores how political leaders make decisions when they’re trying to protect their countries, themselves and their regimes. 

Marika Landau-Wells: When a president makes a decision, and they make a decision on behalf of millions, sometimes tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people, that decision can affect not only those on whose behalf they’re acting, their own citizens. But that decision can impact millions of other people who have no say in the matter, so maybe people in a neighboring country that gets invaded or whatever. 

Your own personal motivations play a big part in your ultimate behavior. Why is it that someone thinks that this is a good way to feel safe? Why is it that they think it’s a good way for their country to feel safe? Those decisions about how to feel safe, they can have the consequence of making other people much less safe.

And so, I’m drawn to those very high-stakes decisions, in part because they have these very profound consequences. You can literally say that some of them change the course of history.

Anne Brice (narration): For example, the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, triggered a major reorganization of the U.S. government, says Landau-Wells. Counterterrorism policies were stitched into everything — from domestic and international surveillance to how we monitor financial systems — that today we take for granted. 

In a Berkeley class about 9/11, Professor Michael Mark Cohen teaches his students about the Bush administration’s response to the attack and its devastating consequences in American society. They learn about the so-called “wars on terror” in Afghanistan and Iraq, the explosion of Islamophobia and anti-immigrant xenophobia that followed the attacks, and how a new sort of patriotism became weaponized into a polarized politics. 

Going back further, we can look at how a fear of communism in America kick-started the Cold War, a decadeslong military, economic and ideological rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union after World War II. 

Americans waged the war at home with loyalty tests, black lists and domestic surveillance. Abroad, the U.S. waged it with with military and economic aid, overseas bases, covert operations and a massive military build-up. Landau-Wells says all of these policies cast long shadows at home and abroad. 

Marika Landau-Wells: How we see the world around us profoundly affects how we act — what we think are good actions, what we think are effective actions. And as we all know from our personal experience, we don’t always make the right choices. We don’t always pick actions that succeed.

We make mistakes. Sometimes they are mistakes because we didn’t know enough. Sometimes they’re mistakes because we got it wrong. We got the world wrong. We didn’t understand how our action would redound in the world. 

I’m fascinated by both of those kinds of outcomes when it comes to things that really matter, like Should I invade my neighbor? Should I buy these missiles? Should I build a border wall? All of those are examples of security strategies, policies that somebody thinks will make them, in some ways, safer. They don’t always work. They don’t always have that effect.

(Music: “Bedroll” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (narration): So how can leaders, and individuals, make better decisions when we feel threatened? 

Landau-Wells says it starts with trying to figure out which threats are real, those that truly deserve our attention, and what’s just noise, rhetoric designed to hijack our fear response for someone else’s benefit. 

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Anne Brice (narration): Whether it’s through junky online ads or Facebook posts (music fades) or the way politicians speak, we’re all constantly exposed to a barrage of messaging that tries to leverage our instinctive response to danger, says Landau-Wells.

Take Donald Trump, for example. He convinces people of what they should fear — immigrants, trans people, diversity programs, universities, wokeness, the list goes on. He then sells the public a version of a country that’s strong and secure, one where he can deliver them from all these so-called terrors. And he tells them that he’s the only one who can bring it about.

Marika Landau-Wells: Then who else are you going to turn to? And that version doesn’t have to be insincere. It can be, of course. I could really believe in that problem, and I’m spreading the word, or I could really believe that this is a way for you to do what I tell you to do.

But if I tell you there’s a problem and you trust me, then you’re going to believe that problem probably, or you’re much more likely to believe it, I think. And if I tell you I’m the only person who can fix it, then you’re going to have every incentive to support me. 

And that means that it’s not just about being able to tell when someone’s pushing this button in you, but also being able to tell the difference between a harm that really requires you to do something and something that doesn’t that you can ignore. And it’s almost like a kind of literacy.

Your body just can’t take everything seriously. You can’t operate completely stressed out and highly alert for a very long time without needing serious help because it’s not something that we’re designed to do. We want to feel safe. We want to get somewhere where we feel safe so that we can stop being on high alert all the time. 

(Music: “Dust Digger” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (narration): In a research paper recently published in a journal about international affairs called International Organization, Landau-Wells found that in order to better regulate our fear responses, and grasp how people change their minds about what is dangerous and how, we need to better understand how danger is processed in the brain.

Marika Landau-Wells: It’s almost like our minds work like a ratchet. You can switch something on and push it up, but we don’t really know how to wind it back, we don’t really know how to dial it down, at least not with any sort of real scientific understanding. And I think that a lot of that starts with understanding how our brains process and represent danger.

We pour tons and tons of research dollars, foundations pour money in, governments pour money in, to figure out how to persuade people of various things. And this is another area where we think that persuasion could matter, that changing people’s minds could matter, could be a good and productive thing.

Knowing how to persuade people to stop paying attention to something that is not true or apocryphal, and how to start paying attention to the things that are true, I think that there’s a lot more that’s needed to systematically study that, those processes, (music fades out) that I haven’t seen yet, but I think could have quite a significant impact if those two problems could be cracked.

Anne Brice (narration): To complicate this even more, it’s in our nature to ignore things we don’t want to hear, she says.

Marika Landau-Wells: Being afraid, being concerned, being anxious is unpleasant. More danger in the world is not good news. And people like good news. They don’t necessarily want to hear that everything is out to get them. That’s not a great message. And so incrementally convincing someone of something that is ultimately quite bad news is hard. And it’s hard whether it’s really sort of danger-related or not. 

So on the one hand, we’re prepared to learn about danger, we’re prepared to learn about danger from other people who we trust. On the other hand, we don’t like bad news.

The motivation that we find that gets over that hurdle can be things like prosocial behavior or caring for people other than ourselves: Maybe I won’t go through something that hard for me, but I would do it for someone in my family.

But there’s no silver bullet that just says, “Here’s how you can tell the true from the false, the good from the bad.” You know, the people who are trying to manipulate you for their own personal gain from things you really need to do to take care of yourself. It’s so hard.

Anne Brice (narration): Leaders around the world have the same problem, says Landau-Wells. They’re always trying to discern which dangers are real and what kinds of threats they pose, and then how to most effectively respond to keep their countries safe or to stay in power or to otherwise achieve their goals. 

But these calculations are highly complex, and often have unintended consequences. 

(Music: “Our digital compass” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (narration): There’s a common theory in international relations that by putting yourself in another person’s shoes, by trying to understand what they perceive as threatening, that you can make better-informed decisions about what actions to take. 

But in a recent paper, Landau-Wells found that this task is actually much harder than previously assumed for people who don’t share a given fear. 

Marika Landau-Wells: Humans think about other humans a lot. We try to infer the intentions, the beliefs of other people a lot. It helps us interact with them. It’s an ability that comes online from when you’re born through your childhood and adolescence.

It’s something that kids get better at. If you raise a little kid, when they’re about 2, they’re not even sure you’re a real person. Like, you don’t have necessarily as much autonomy and agency, in their mind, as you actually do. But they come to realize that other people have thoughts and feelings and beliefs that they don’t share. It’s often called theory of mind. It is something that you can, to some extent, get better at, so people get better as they develop through their lifespan. 

You can also apply some effort. If you don’t try to understand where someone else is coming from, the chances that you succeed, especially if it’s quite a complex question, are relatively small. But often, you’re going to hit a ceiling, which is that we aren’t mind readers. Humans, factually, are not mind readers. If we were, I think our relationships would look really, really different. 

Even if you have really good intentions, how good are you at figuring out why someone thinks that something’s dangerous?

(Music fades out)

And the punchline in the paper is: If you don’t think that thing is dangerous, you’re not going to be a great guesser.

Anne Brice (narration): Say one person believes that climate change is an existential threat — that it has devastating consequences that are playing out before our eyes, with things like catastrophic fires and flooding, and species extinction. But another person thinks that climate change isn’t real or that it’s just not that big of a deal, and that other factors are to blame for these disasters. 

No matter how much the climate change believer tries to convince the non-believer, the non-believer will have a hard time understanding why the other sees climate change as dangerous if they don’t share that fear. 

But even though it’s difficult to understand others’ fears, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, says Landau-Wells. Maybe it even means we need to try a little harder — as individuals and communities, but also as countries trying to work and live together on our one and only planet.

Marika Landau-Wells: You know, either for the sake of cooperation or for better ongoing relationships, to not have your relationships deteriorate, you might want to try to get it right. But because we’re not mind readers, and it’s a problem that has many possible answers, you have to put in some effort to make that leap. 

And to be honest, I didn’t think that that gap would be there when I designed that paper. I didn’t think that would be the most important thing, that this sort of difference in danger perception would turn out to outweigh something like partisanship for being a good explanation of why people get this wrong. I thought being on the flip side of the partisan issue would have done the trick. But it turns out that gap in understanding what someone thinks that something’s dangerous is a pretty big gulf.

Anne Brice (narration): But maybe, she says, we don’t always have to guess. Sometimes it might be a whole lot simpler than that.

(Music: “Aourourou” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (narration): As part of the Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program, Landau-Wells has worked with nearly a dozen students over the last three years she’s been at Berkeley. Among the documents they read are ones about fear of communism during the Cold War and the U.S. response to terrorism after 9/11. 

Marika Landau-Wells: One of the things that surprises them about this primary source work is just how obvious it all is.

I’ve had that from a few students who are reading history that predates them. And I think a lot of the versions of it are a bit conspiratorial, like, you know, secretly the U.S. was conspiring to dupe the public into thinking Saddam Hussein was dangerous or, further back, that the whole communism Red Scare thing was sort of cooked up and, you know, now it’s a punchline. 

And they read these sources, and they realize, like, “Wow, these guys just, they said it. They said what they were thinking, and then they went and did that thing that they said they were going to do.”

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You don’t need an elaborate conspiracy. When it comes to threats and national security, people think that’s a pretty good reason to do anything. And they don’t hide it nearly as much as you’d think. You don’t need a conspiracy theory.

And it’s not a joke: These things are really said and they’re really said with a great deal of sincerity. 

And so one of the things that I think some of the students reading this take away for the present day is when it comes to these security issues, if someone tells you that that’s what they’re going to treat as a threat and they tell you how they’re going to do it, take them seriously, they mean it. You should believe them no matter what it is, no matter whether you agree that that thing is dangerous or not. This is not a domain where people jump through hoops to deceive. They’re pretty straight up, and you should believe them.

(Music: “A Little Powder” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (narration): Throughout our lives, we learn what to be afraid of. Once we know what to fear, we have instant reactions when we encounter these dangers. It’s how we survive. 

But this quick response doesn’t always have a positive outcome. We’re inundated with messaging trying to hijack our sense of fear for another’s benefit. Maybe an ad tells you that without a certain product, you won’t live to your full potential. Or maybe a politician tells you to fear other communities, and that in order for you to stay safe, you have to harm them. It’s an incredible challenge to know what we need to respond to now, and what we should try to better understand before we act. 

(Music fades down and out)

Once our brains understand something as dangerous, it’s hard to change. Our brains are easy to ratchet up, but much harder to bring down. Landau-Wells says we need more research about how our brains respond to and process fear so that we can learn to regulate our own responses, but also so we can begin to figure out how to persuade others to see a particular fear differently. 

Although it’s difficult to understand where other people are coming from, why they’re scared of something that you yourself don’t find scary, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, she says.

(Music comes back up)

And when we feel stuck and we just can’t fathom why a person or leader feels how they do, and in turn, how they might react, Landau-Wells says we should listen to what they tell us and believe what they say, even when we don’t want to hear it.

Anne Brice (outro): I’m Anne Brice, and this is Berkeley Voices, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs at UC Berkeley. If you like what we do, tell a friend about the show and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts.

This was the fourth episode of our eight-part series on transformation. In eight episodes, we’re exploring how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. New episodes of the series come out on the last Monday of each month.

We also have another show, Berkeley Talks, that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

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