A decade ago, a few days before Halloween, a team of sociologists at Chapman University published the first “Survey of American Fears,” a poll of more than 1,000 Americans about the things that give them the willies.
The “American Fears” survey quickly became an annual media event, a social science version of Groundhog Day. Most years, Chapman posts its latest top-10 fears list a few days before Halloween. And, most years, a few news organizations run brief stories about the survey’s findings, highlighting the latest on what is or isn’t spooking America.
Corruption, cancer, clowns; over the years a diverse buffet of scary ideas, broad or personal, real or imagined, have made at least one of Chapman’s “American Fears” lists.
But this year’s survey – released Wednesday, Oct. 23, close to the scariest holiday, Halloween, and less than two weeks before a presidential election that’s been widely described in politically apocalyptic terms – offers something bigger than any specific fear from any specific year.
Americans, researchers say, are more afraid today than at any time in recent history.
Trends from a decade of “American Fears” surveys, the expanding number of issues that evoke “yup, that scares the heck out of me” responses, the sometimes irrational reasons for feeling that way – all point to a culture in the grasp of deep, paralyzing dread.
“Fear is taking a larger and larger role in American life,” said Christopher Bader, a sociology professor at Chapman who has been involved in “American Fears” since the beginning.
“They’re afraid of more things than they used to be,” he said.
“And they’re more afraid of those things than they used to be.”
Higher anxiety
Bader’s contention is based on a decade’s worth of data.
In the early years of the survey, an issue could rank at or near the top of the “American Fears” list if more than 50% of respondents said they were very or somewhat afraid of it. A few items might beat that ratio in those years but most did not.
But, lately, the number of things feared by more than half of all Americans has risen steadily. And, this year, every item on the top 10 – plus at least the next five, according to Bader and another fear researcher, Ed Day, an associate professor of sociology at Chapman – cracked the 50% mark.
“Those percentages tell us that fear, overall, is increasing dramatically,” Bader said.
Fear helps to explain everything from the us-vs.-us nature of modern American politics to the rise of drug commercials that turn once obscure maladies (wet macular degeneration anyone?) into seemingly grave threats.
But both Bader and Day said the rise of fear is a big deal for a more basic reason: It can be self-perpetuating. The stuff we’re afraid of – even if, initially, we shouldn’t be – often comes true.
“Stranger danger is growing,” Bader said, referring to data that shows Americans – once viewed as optimistic and welcoming – are increasingly afraid of people they don’t know.
“It might not be valid or rational, but that particular fear can be powerful.”
As an example, Bader pointed to fears about living in or visiting urban public spaces. Such fears often are baseless or erroneous; studies consistently show firearm violence is less common in many big cities, on a per capita basis, than it is in many rural communities.
But as people who are afraid of cities avoid them, then those places tend to be left to a higher ratio of people who might be inclined to commit crime or violence – driving up the possibility of violence becoming more common in a place that once was safe.
That’s fear at work.
“Fear can make things real,” Bader said.
News, brains, math
This year’s survey asked people to respond to 85 different concepts. The one that prompted the most fear, ranking No. 1 on this year’s list, is “corrupt government officials.” Nearly two-thirds (65.2%) of Americans – conservatives and liberals alike, according to the researchers – say they’re “very” or “somewhat” afraid of politicians and other public employees who steal from us or otherwise abuse our trust.
It wasn’t a surprise. Corruption has ranked at or near the top of the list for most of the past decade.
It’s also not irrational.
Coincidentally, a day before Chapman released this year’s survey, news broke in Orange County that a county supervisor, Andrew Do, had admitted to misusing tax money earmarked for COVID relief. The Do story had nothing to do with Chapman’s survey; the survey was conducted months before Do’s agreement to plead guilty and resign from office. Also, Do is hardly the only corrupt government official; government corruption is part of American life.
But even a coincidental connection highlights what Chapman researchers believe is a driver of the rise of fear – the modern news cycle.
Websites, newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations; most consider government corruption a staple of their news operations. They do that for a lot of good reasons – it’s important for voters and taxpayers to know about it; independent news is a critical check on government corruption – but the result is a lot of news about government corruption.
That puts “government corruption” into the brains of most Americans, no matter how important – or not – corruption might actually be at any given time. This year’s response rate on the corruption question is actually well under the peak, in 2019, when 79.6% of “American Fears” respondents said they feared government corruption.
“How we get news is part of this,” Day said, in reference to why fear is growing.
“In 2017, the No. 2 fear on our list was repeal of the Affordable Care Act,” Day said. “It happened that that year, the (Affordable Care repeal) issue was in the news all the time. That made it something to fear.
“When it disappeared from the news cycle, it stopped being something a lot of people feared,” Day added.
“That’s part of how this works.”
It’s working this year, too. Six of the top 10 fears – cyberterrorism, No. 3; Russia using a nuclear weapon, No. 5; the U.S. becoming involved in another World War, (tie) No. 7; North Korea using a nuclear weapon, (tie) No. 7; terrorist attack, No. 9, and biological warfare, No. 10 – are in some way connected to war or international conflict. The researchers believe those results reflect a year of news coverage about wars in the Ukraine and the Middle East.
“Part of our survey, every year, is responding to current events,” Bader said.
It’s also an example of how modern media, math and our primitive brains can work in tandem to create big, sweeping feelings of fear and anxiety.
First, the biggest delivery system for modern news is social media, companies that make money by matching up online content (sometimes traditional news stories, sometimes videos of shirtless guys jumping rope, often cats) with the things that interest their customers. Those companies use increasingly clever math – algorithms – to streamline those connections.
The upshot is anyone with a smartphone winds up flooded with news about a particular subject. If that subject is crime or global warming or political division (or all of the above) that news consumer will be awash in stories about those topics.
All of those topics are scary. And all are common on the “American Fears” lists.
But that news flood is just part of the broader fear cycle.
That consumer on her phone is trying to make sense of all their news with a brain that’s wired to use fear as a very beneficial survival tool. Scary data on the phone is amplified – and more memorable – because it’s more important, survival-wise, than, say great chili recipes.
“The velocity of fear is increasing because our media feeds are showing us what they think we want to see,” Bader said. “Our brains can’t handle it.”
But if fear, on some level, helps us survive – spurring us to run away from a lion or a crazy guy with a chainsaw – it also helps us turn bogus information into a very real problem.
For instance, federal data shows that crime peaked in the United States in the early 1990s, and generally declined until the start of the pandemic. And last year, after a two-year jump, crime again began to fall.
But studies from Chapman and others show fear of crime hasn’t matched the decline.
“Two-thirds of Americans believe the opposite,” Bader said.
Bader said that’s the thing about fear.
“Sometimes it’s true,” he said. “Sometimes it’s not.”