Fear: The survival instinct

Imagine this scenario for a moment. You are alone in a dark forest. A thick canopy of leaves is a blanket filling the space around you with still darkness; the moonlight is barely able to illuminate your surroundings. Despite knowing that there is nothing around you, most people would feel afraid. But why is that? Why do we feel fear?

From an evolutionary perspective, fear has been a critical tool for survival. Early humans who developed an appropriate fear of life-threatening dangers like venomous snakes, aggressive predators, or precarious heights had a better chance of surviving and passing on their genes. Over millennia, these fears became deeply ingrained in our instincts, often triggering immediate, automatic responses. Even fears of intangible concepts such as fear of the dark are responses engineered through millenia of natural selection, where humans who didn’t fear the dark were more likely to be preyed on by predators, while those who did evolve fear of the dark were more likely to survive and pass on their fears to their children (Clasen, 2017).

Fear is also not limited to what we can see or recognize. The human brain has an extraordinary capacity to imagine threats, often amplifying the unknown into something far scarier than reality. The creak of a floorboard in an empty house or the vague uncertainty of a new experience can provoke greater fear than a clear and present threat. This tendency comes from our discomfort with ambiguity. Without clear information, our minds tend to fill in the gaps, often exaggerating risks. (Layton, 2023)

References:

Clasen, M. (2017, October 24). How Evolution designed your fear - Nautilus. Nautilus. https://nautil.us/how-evolution-designed-your-fear-236858/

Layton, J. (2023, August 18). How fear works. HowStuffWorks. https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/emotions/fear3.htm#:~:text=In%20humans%20and%20in%20all,to%20pass%20on%20their%20genes.