Fear of Change

That is a fear with a demonstrated function, in a species where the function can be stated. It also frames the general problem exactly: in ecological research neophobia is treated as a trait that is both helpful and harmful, protecting wild animals from novel dangers while preventing them from reaching novel resources.

Why food neophobia protects and costs

Applied to food in humans, the same trade-off has a name. An omnivore choosing whether to eat something new is choosing between risking harm and missing a valuable food source, and some degree of food neophobia is evolutionarily advantageous because it helps avoid poison.

Food neophobia is a common symptom of avoidant and restrictive food intake disorder and is not itself a disorder. Toddlers and small children have it most, and it tracks how much novelty and risk a person wants generally. People high in it do not merely resist new foods; when they do try them, they rate them lower than people who enjoy novelty.

Two instruments exist: the Food Neophobia Scale, ten items on a seven-point scale, and a children's version in which parents report.

How much of it is inherited

Roughly two thirds of how much people differ on this is put down to genetics, and twin work puts the figure higher again.

The rest is learnable in both directions. Young children watch parental food preferences closely, and a parent who avoids certain foods may produce the tendency. How strongly a child tastes bitterness matters too, and that tracks either a history of middle ear infections or being a supertaster.

What actually reduces food refusal

Push a child to eat something they dislike, or threaten them over refusing it, and the problem gets worse.

What works is stated with unusual precision:

• give something that is not food for a taste of the thing, and a sticker will do
• parents modelling the behaviour by cheerfully eating the food themselves in front of the child
• repetition, because looking at a new food is not enough: it can take as many as fifteen attempts before a child accepts an item

Weaning looks like a window that closes. The variety of solid foods a child is first exposed to can lower later food refusal, and some researchers believe the variety in a nursing mother's diet, and therefore the range of flavours in her milk, leads to greater acceptance of new foods later in life.

Food neophobia tends to decrease naturally with age.

Why dietary conservatism is a separate question

In animals, food neophobia is a fear of novelty lasting minutes at most. Dietary conservatism is different: a prolonged refusal to add a new food to the diet, lasting days or years.

Dietary conservatism has never been demonstrated in humans, though the genetically influenced fussy eating seen in children resembles the animal behaviour. That is a clean open question, and it matters, because a fear lasting minutes and a refusal lasting years call for different responses.

How Wilson read neophobia through Kuhn

Robert Anton Wilson argued in Prometheus Rising that neophobia is instinctual in people once they begin raising children, and took a mostly negative view of it, holding it responsible for human culture and ideas advancing more slowly than technology.

He takes the mechanism from Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. However well an idea is demonstrated, it gets adopted only once everybody who found it new has died and been replaced by people who grew up with it as ordinary.

Neophobia is also a common finding in ageing animals, though apathy may explain or contribute to the lack of exploratory drive observed there, which researchers attributed neurophysiologically to dysfunction in neural pathways connected to the prefrontal cortex.

Which other names neophobia goes by

Neos is Greek for new or young; kainos means new or fresh, giving cainophobia and kainophobia. Metathesiophobia and prosophobia are the other alternatives, and the 2008 printed encyclopedia treats fear of changes and neophobia as the same thing.