The Illusion of Threat: Reclaiming Reality in a Fear-Driven World

Beyond Safetyism: The Psychology of a World Gone Fearful

On Instagram I recently had a post on letting kids play outside go viral. The premise was outdoor unstructured play has dropped precipitously. This is partly due to structural changes (more traffic, fewer green spaces), but research also shows ‘safetyism’ is at play here.

The comments were interesting. While I received a lot of support, I also got dozens upon dozens that all were similar to this one: “There are kidnappers, rapists and child traffickers out there waiting for our kids to be ALONE.”

That sentiment isn’t just reserved for Instagram comments. It’s one the majority of people have. In 22 out of 26 Gallup surveys conducted since 1993, at least 60% of U.S. adults believed there was more crime nationally than the previous year, despite a general downward trend in violent crime rates during most of that period. In surveys of parents, fear of kids being abducted is among the top reported fears.

I can sit here and give you all sorts of data to shows that while abductions, violent crimes, and the like all occur, it’s much safer than when I was roaming the streets in the 1980s and 90s. And I’ll highlight a few below. But…statistics don’t change people’s mind. What I’m interested in is: why do so many people feel like the world is so dangerous.

• The U.S. violent crime rate decreased by 71% between 1993 and 2022.

• Property crime rates have also fallen sharply, with a 59% reduction between 1993 and 2022 based on FBI data

• Only about 115 kidnappings occur in the US each year that involve strangers who take children for ransom, or other nefarious reasons.

• The oft cited stats on large numbers of kids going missing every day, doesn’t account for that the vast majority of those are found within hours.

• Nearly 80% of child ‘abductions’ are from non-custodial parents, with the majority of the rest coming from another family member or friend. Stranger danger is very rare.
  

With the obligatory stats out of the way, let’s get to it…why do so many people think that there is danger everywhere? It’s one of the problems of our times. It’s one reason why the world has gone mad.

1. Our Brains Are Wired for Fear (And It's Being Hijacked):

The negativity bias is a well-established phenomenon that states that negative information, experiences, and emotions have a greater impact on an our psychological state than positive ones. And for good reason. Being attuned to potential threats in our environment is what made our ancient ancestors survive. It was much better to mistake a stick in the grass for a snake, then the other way around. Sensitivity to threat was an advantage when the threats were real, physical, and right in front of us.

In a local environment, a heightened threat sensitivity helps. But what happens when we move from local to global? It’s not good…

2. We're Consuming a Toxic Information Diet

The information we consume shapes our expectations for how the world works, shifting both our internal biology and our role and behaviors with it. We don’t have to look far for examples. “Our neighborhood is dangerous. It’s turning into the slums,” remarked a friend. This person lived in an upper middle class suburban house, where the median income was six-figures. Yet, when pressed further, they were convinced they were under constant threat. They were afraid of being carjacked at the local grocery store, of intruders breaking into their home, and more. And they followed through with behaviors that matched this fear. Mace, a stun gun, a home security system, and of course, the protection of a gun in the house. They also consumed a lot of cable news.

Our brains aren’t designed for this. We were meant for a local community and using real world experiences, or at best the experiences from close friends and family to guide our expectations. Our brain is tuned for that kind of information. We have the availability bias, which makes our brain more likely to overestimate whatever we can recall easily. That helps us when the information we can recall is dad warning us not to go too close to the river. It’s not so helpful when it’s a 24/7 news channel or social media app telling us that everyone is getting abducted and killed.

When we are inundated with a message that the world is threatening, we start to believe it. As I outlined in Chapter 7 of Win the Inside Game, research on media exposure explains why Americans, in particular, often see the rest of the world as dangerous. There’s a link between the amount of crime reported on the news and the degree of fear people have over crime. It’s not just the feeling, it’s also our behavior. The more news with “if it bleeds it leads” as the approach, the more we use avoidance behavior in our everyday lives. It’s not just traditional media that plays a role. A recent analysis found that social media consumption is linked to an increased fear of street violence.

This effect isn’t limited to crime. A 2022 study in Spain found that the more news participants consumed about COVID-19, the more COVID was perceived as a major risk. A study following the Boston Marathon bombing found that individuals who had watched six or more hours per day of coverage of the bombing felt more stress than those directly impacted. Our perception is reality. Regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum, you aren’t immune to a heightened fear or threat response driven by information consumption. In the 1970s, professor of communication George Gerbner coined a term for a similar phenomenon-mean world syndrome. Gerbner found that we tend to see the world as more dangerous and threatening than it is and that it was related to the overabundance of violence on TV.

Fast forward to today, and we occupy a world where that correlation no longer holds. The information we’re inundated with often has little connection with the reality we face on an everyday basis. Add in social media and it takes Gerbner’s mean world syndrome to another level. We not only have news that shifts our global view of the world we occupy, but social media creates a false sense of connection and intimacy. The ‘friend’ on Facebook, Instagram, or Tiktok feels closer than the presenter on the news. After all, we are watching the latter from their home, and can ‘interact’ with them through comments.

The more real, authentic, and local the information feels, the greater the impact. It’s why there’s often a discrepancy for national perceptions versus local. In polls dating back decades, people tend to rate far off cities as much more dangerous than their local neighborhood, even if the overall crime rate in both areas is exactly the same. This trend has lasted because of how we utilize comparisons. We tend to rely on outside information when thinking about distant lands. We tend to reflect on our own experiences when thinking about local comparisons.

3. We're Starving for Meaning and Belonging

Think back to middle school. For most, it was a stressful time. You moved from the structure of elementary school to having to switch classes, find people to sit with in the cafeteria, figure out what activities and classes interested you, and for the first time deal with a social hierarchy staring you in the face. In other words, middle school often sucked for a bit because we didn’t know who we are, what we were doing, or where we belong. The modern world has made us all feel like we are in middle school again.

As I outlined in my new book, research tells us for a meaningful life we need significance, coherence, direction, and belonging. And when we lack those, we tend to try to fill those voids with the cheapest easiest version we can find. We try fit in instead of belong. We settle for being a troll on social media, to ‘own’ someone to feel a momentary hit of significance. We look for a cause to feel like we have direction and purpose. We strive out of a way to validate ourselves.

In a series of studies out of Princeton University in 2017, psychologists found that social exclusion leads to conspiratorial thinking. Other research points to it providing purpose, meaning, and significance. We all want to belong, to have the world add up. Ironically, we fall for delusions precisely because we are trying to have things make sense under threat and uncertainty. When our environment screams danger, finding a place to belong, to validate our world, provides the antidote, even if that means accepting the crazy.

In other words, when we don’t fill our basic psychological needs, the world seems more threatening. Partially because we are more insecure. We get stuck looking toward the external to validate our self. And in doing so, we become fragile instead of resilient. When our sense of self is on shaky grounds, of course we’re going to overreact to any subtle threat.

The Result: Survival Mode.

The argument I make in Win the Inside Game, is that these combination of factors—an overwhelming flood of information, moving from local to global world, never ending comparison, and lack of fulfilling our basic psychological needs— is pushing us towards living in survival mode. The world has conditioned us to to turn our threat alarm to 11. And as a result, we not only walk around with a low level anxiety about everything, we also act accordingly with avoidance and fear related behaviors. Going back to the original Instagram post, it’s why safetyism is on the rise. And why social media is becoming a turf battle, where people are trying to grasp onto straws of significance by trolling or ‘owning’ someone, instead of finding friends and doing hard things in the real world.

That’s why it’s bigger than just people being afraid there kid’s are going to be abducted. It’s about living in survival mode. And when we occupy such a place, we not only default to avoidance, we are more likely to be tribal, and to simplify the world into us versus them, good versus evil. The world becomes zero-sum.

What to do about is complex. It’s something I cover in the book, and something I’ve covered in the past. But it means reformatting our information diet. It means filling our basic psychological needs in the real world. It means providing avenues for people to feel significant in a world that makes us feel lost. It means having friends. Not the only variety, but those who actually get and support you. To summarize, the solution is to:

· Curate your information diet. Stop mainlining fear. Seek out deep and slow information. Minimize fast.

· Fill your psychological needs in the real world. Seek genuine connection, meaningful purpose. Do real things in the real world with real people.

· Build resilience, not fragility. Do hard things. Have experiences that broaden and shift your perspective. Diversify your sources of meaning. Create a robust but flexible sense of self.

We’ve let our environments turn our threat alarms to 11. Our environment—from the information we consume to whether we feel secure in it—shapes our expectations. And when everything around us is screaming fear and danger, is it any wonder we default towards survival mode and protection? Our brain is doing its job, predicting based on the information it has. We need to start giving it better information.

-Steve Magness