What are you so afraid of?

Quick! Your kid wants to play at a friends’ house. Friend one, let’s call her Sally, has a gun in her house, and friend two, Amy, has a pool.
Where should you let your child play?

 If you answered “Amy with the pool, duh!” go back to start. You are the victim of irrational fears.

As Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt recount in their popular book, “Freakonomics”, a child is one hundred times more likely to die in a pool than to be killed by a gun.

Yet, why do we still adamantly opt for the pal with the pool?

The problem is that we are often afraid of the wrong things. Statistically, I should be more afraid when I’m chowing down on fries in the Wright Food Court late at night than when I’m walking back home alone.

Even the most generous estimates state 1,832 people die each year from serial killer attacks, while 652,091 die from heart disease. Yet, which one did you find more terrifying, “No Country for Old Men” or “Supersize Me”?

Similarly, during his lecture at IU last week, Capt. Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace and animal rights activist, blamed irrational fears for the deaths of many marine mammals.

Although animals like orcas (so-called “killer whales”) are often feared and consequently killed, he reminded the audience a person is more likely to die from a soda vending machine falling on them than they are from a shark attack.

According to the International Shark Attack File, only one person died from an unprovoked shark attack in 2007. But where is the frightening blockbuster about soda vending machines gone bad?

Fear responses evolved as a way to help us avoid danger.

Now it seems our biology is betraying us. The things that make my palms sweat and my heart beat faster are no longer the things that present the biggest threats to my survival. In the twenty-first century of diabetes and heart disease, my biological responses seem outdated, as my instinct to eat, not a saber-toothed tiger, is more likely to be my undoing.

Fear is a powerful tool for motivating people to do things.

It affects us by not appealing to logic or reason, but to our most primal biological response. Fear has the power to compel us to do things that upon great reflection we would deem unreasonable.

It has led us to nearly eliminate an entire species of marine animals and to campaign against personal handguns, when all the while the real killers-combo meals, swimming pools and vending machines go unnoticed.

Because phobias like these are often irrational and misguided, we must proceed with caution in instances where fear is involved. Whether the fear of the moment is masked men or shark attacks, terrorists or tumbling markets, making decisions of fear can compel us to do things that are not in our best interests.

In these uncertain times, it seems FDR was right: The only thing we have to fear, is really fear itself.