Fear of Snakes

Why herpetophobia already contains ophidiophobia

Wikipedia carries ophidiophobia and ophiophobia as a single pair of headwords, then offers herpetophobia, fear of reptiles, as a more general name for the same fear. Snakes are reptiles, so the wider word already contains the narrower one, and no rule is given for preferring either.

No threshold is given either. Nothing says at what point wariness of snakes becomes ophidiophobia, and no diagnostic manual or code is named anywhere in the article. The only boundary marked is the phrase "clinically relevant", which sits in quotation marks and is attributed to nobody. Outside medicine the word travels on one example, Indiana Jones, and the article names no piece of writing that makes the comparison.

Where the extra syllable in ophidiophobia comes from

The etymology offered is Ancient Greek ophis, snake, and phobia, fear. That accounts for ophiophobia letter by letter and leaves the extra syllable in the middle of the longer form unexplained, since it comes from somewhere the article does not identify.

No date of first use appears and no coiner is named. Which spelling arrived first goes unmentioned.

How fast snake fear conditions in the laboratory

Arne Ohman reported in 1993, in the Handbook of Emotions, on pairing an aversive stimulus with snakes and spiders and with a control set: firearms, electrical outlets, mushrooms, flowers and drawings of polyhedra. Snakes and spiders conditioned after a single pairing. The response was permanent. Everything in the control set took repeated pairings and faded once the conditioning stopped. Two of the things that would not stick are the ones capable of killing a person inside a modern house.

Paul Ekman set that result beside an anecdote from Charles Darwin's 1872 book on emotional expression. Darwin put his face to the glass of a puff adder's enclosure at the Zoological Gardens, resolved not to flinch, and leapt back a yard or two the instant the snake struck. His will and his reason, by his own account, were no match for a danger he had only imagined.

How laboratory macaques learned to fear a toy snake

Susan Mineka, Richard Keir and Veda Price found that rhesus macaques raised in a laboratory would reach across a toy snake for a banana untroubled. Each was then shown a film of another macaque recoiling from the same toy, after which they would not reach, and the fear that appeared was permanent. A film of a macaque frightened by a flower produced nothing whatever. The article gives no year for the experiment and names no journal.

Why too little snake fear has a name

Randolph Nesse argued that fear can be conditioned to evolutionarily novel dangers, an electrical socket among them, but slowly, because nothing wires that kind of cue to fear in advance. His illustration is driver education, which emphasises speeding and drink driving and protects nobody reliably: close to a quarter of American deaths in the 15 to 24 age band in 2014 happened in traffic collisions.

Nesse, the psychiatrist Isaac Marks and the evolutionary biologist George C. Williams proposed a name for the opposite condition. Hypophobia is a systematically deficient response to the fears that are adaptive, snake fear and spider fear among them, and a person who has one is careless by temperament and stands a higher chance of dying in an accident nobody intended.

Whether snake fear is taught or inherited

Richard Dawkins argued that selection would favour imagination and simulation over learning by trial and error. Christopher Boehm put the weight on vicarious cultural learning instead, his example being Kalahari Bushmen teaching children where venomous snakes are likely to be found. Steven Pinker counts wariness around snakes among the cultural universals, in the company of folk biology and folk taxonomy.

Why the snake fear figures cannot be checked

About a third of adults fear snakes, and roughly 3 to 4 per cent have what the article calls clinically relevant ophidiophobia. Wikipedia states both figures and attaches no survey, no instrument and no date to either, which leaves the most repeated sentence about this fear resting on nothing a reader can check. The claim that it ranks among the phobias most often reported rests on the same nothing.

Three further findings are dated and otherwise anonymous:

1. The first is placed at the Karolinska Institute in 2001 and read as evidence that mammals react to snakes and spiders innately.
2. The second, from 2009, covers forty years of work and reports that people condition strongly to snakes and process pictures of them fast and without conscious access, through a brain network in which the amygdala takes part.
3. The third, from 2013, offers neurobiological evidence that macaques have been selected for spotting snakes quickly.

No authors, no journals, no titles.