Dislike of Snakes: Learned or Innate?
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Are you terrified of snakes, but kind of don't want to be? Well, there's a real good trick that I can tell you, but you'll need a time machine. If your parents acted towards you in a certain way as it came to snakes, you might have not been so scared of them. This is all according to a new research study. We're here with someone who worked on it. She's a psychology instructor and snake lover, I believe, at the University of Regina. Her name is Danae Buchko. Danae, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks so much for having me. So snakes and children, the very thought I think to most people would cause them a great horror. Why are so many people scared of snakes to begin with? Well, that's the question, isn't it?
That's the question that I had. That's the question that kind of spawned my interest in this kind of research.
Why are people scared of snakes?
So as you mentioned, I'm not afraid of snakes. I've never been afraid of snakes. I've always really loved snakes and all reptiles. So that is what I was wondering as I embarked on this journey of My degree and getting an education, getting my master's degree in psychology. I wanted to know why such a large proportion of people in our culture, like, which is mostly a North American Western thing, had such a disdain towards these creatures. And that's what we kind of see in our study, or that's what we kind of look at. I think the naive thought about this, and I'm sure it may not be the full picture or even true at all, is that early cave-dwelling humans had to deal with snakes and maybe also spiders in caves.
And so a little innate, you know, evolved fear would be a good thing. But that doesn't account for the fact that so many people are not scared of these things. How do we end up with this fear? How do we end up not having this fear? Yeah, okay, so what you're saying is absolutely correct, sorry. There is a not small pool of people who would argue that something like this, this widespread aversion towards snakes or fear towards snakes and spiders could be due to something like an innate mechanism to protect ourselves that evolved over time. evolutionarily this theory possible, but there's not a lot of great evidence for it. So when we look at the research on babies and really young children, including the study that I ran, none of these children and none of the very young babies that we have run studies on are afraid of snakes.
We don't see indications that they're afraid of them. So this is something that looks like probably develops as children interact with our culture, with other people. And what we see or what I have found is that it has a large amount to do with the way that we talk about these animals and the way that we represent them in the greater culture as well. So how are we talking about these animal snakes that cause kids to become so scared of them before we talk about how we can intervene and make them not scared of them? OK, so one major thing for sure is. The way that we talk about snakes often tends to be a lot more objectifying than the way we talk about other animals. So when we talk about snakes, often what we see in parents when they're talking to their kids or just individuals when they're looking at pictures or viewing them, they'll refer to them not using any pronouns.
So as it rather than you see a squirrel or a bunny rabbit. Running down the street, people are more likely to say that, oh, he's so cute or she's so cute rather than it. So this objectifying language can contribute to us thinking about these animals as being different than other animals. So just conceptually, if this is the way we always refer to them and we don't do that for other animals, they're different and different sometimes means scary. The other thing is using negative language towards these animals. slimy, slithering fangs, things like this. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So one of the things that we saw in the study that we did is that parents did at least 50%, around 50% of parents tended to say at least one negative thing about snakes when they were looking at that picture book.
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