The Psychology of Irrational Fear

Last week Sen. Rand Paul, a doctor, laid out the threat of Ebola in America thusly, to CNN:

"If someone has Ebola at a cocktail party, they're contagious and you can catch it from them.”

That statement is, of course, not true, unless the person is symptomatic, in which case he or she would not be up for hummus and Chardonnay. But it’s not as untrue as what Georgia Republican Rep. Phil Gingrey, also a medical doctor, wrote to the CDC:

"Reports of illegal migrants carrying deadly diseases such as swine flu, dengue fever, Ebola virus and tuberculosis are particularly concerning.”

If Gringey were to consult a map, he might be relieved to find that West Africa is several thousand miles away from the U.S.-Mexico border. And that, Ebola being what it is, someone in the throes of the hemorrhagic fever would be unlikely to muster the strength to not only fly to Mexico, but then sprint through the South Texas desert. More recently, Kaci Hickox, a nurse who recently returned to her Maine home after treating patients in Sierra Leone, was subject to an involuntary quarantine in a tent at a New Jersey hospital, despite not showing symptoms of Ebola.

It’s a big time of the year for fear. Not only is it Halloween, a holiday more recently known for sexy hamburgers but originally famous for its spookiness, but also because the U.S. has had four (now one) cases of Ebola diagnosed on its soil. Maybe it’s the combination of the two that helps explain the abundance of ridiculous statements like the above in recent weeks.

Call it Ebolanoia. A recent CBS poll found that 80 percent of Americans now think U.S. citizens who travel to West Africa should be quarantined upon their return, even though most health experts think that would only make Africa’s Ebola outbreak worse.

Of course, Ebola is partly a stand-in for our ongoing collective anxieties, ever simmering and child-leash-purchase inducing. In calmer times, we might instead be wringing our hands over gluten, swine flu, or that illegal immigrants are coming here to “steal our jobs.”

A recent survey from Chapman University found that Americans are most afraid of walking alone at night, identity theft, safety on the Internet, becoming the victim of a mass shooting, and having to speak in public.

The study also found that Democrats were most likely to be worried about personal safety, pollution, and made-made disasters. Republicans, meanwhile, had the highest levels of fear about the government, immigrants, and “today’s youth.” It also found that having a low level of education or watching talk- or true-crime TV was associated with harboring the most types of fear. Despite the fact that crime rates have decreased over the past 20 years, most Americans, the survey found, think all types of crime have become more prevalent.

Fear of things that might actually hurt us, like the flu or smoking, is understandable and healthy. It’s the phobia of things—snakes, sharks, the youth—that pose virtually no threat at all that’s more puzzling. (The last shark attack death in the continental U.S. was in 2012. Meanwhile, 30,000 people die in car accidents every year). Even in 2013, people thought more frequently about the possibility of a terror attack in the U.S. than they did about the prospect of their own hospitalization.

An inability to process these kinds of odds ratios is one reason why some people experience irrational, sometimes crippling, unease. In an interview with New York magazine about why Ebola is sparking mass hypochondria in the U.S., Catherine Belling, an associate professor at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, chalked it up to a reasonable fear (you might get Ebola if you accidentally touch the bodily fluids of someone who has it) getting distorted by bad logic (you might get Ebola if you accidentally touch anyone, ever.)

“What hypochondria is, then, is the inability to put that very rational fear into context, where you can continue to function normally rather than being paralyzed by it," she said. "When someone who is in, for example, New York, won’t leave their apartment because they’re afraid of getting Ebola. They’re incapable of recognizing that there’s truly an incredibly minuscule likelihood of getting Ebola.”

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