The Science of Fear-Mongering: How to Protect Your Mind from Demagogues | Susan David | Big Think

How do we thrive in a world where every which way we turn our fear is being activated by politicians, by the media and by the desperate events that are happening around us? What is really fascinating when we look at the brain research around fear is that our brains proxy anything that feels unfamiliar, incoherent or inaccessible as being unsafe.

There is fascinating research that shows that when people have lower levels of self-esteem and they are in a job in which they are recognized and promoted, that promotion can feel incoherent to the person with low self-esteem. They have low self-esteem and they might be used to and expecting to be treated badly. So what is fascinating is the results showing that when people are promoted when they have a lower levels of self-esteem they are more likely to leave their jobs.

Fear is an incredibly, incredibly powerful force in our lives and our brains are fairly immature in assessing anything that feels slightly incoherent or unfamiliar as unsafe. What this might mean is that if you are used to hearing a story time and time again from a parent or from a partner about how you are not good enough, you are more likely to be drawn to that relationship because it feels familiar. The messaging that you are getting time and time again is connected with what you expect to get.

When we have politicians who are effectively demagogues who are inspiring fear in us, that fear leads to very particular and relatively predictable responses. When we are fearful there is this idea in psychological research of mortality salience that when our mortality is threatened, when someone says, "oh this group of people is out to get you," and we feel that we are actively being threatened we are more likely to stereotype, we are more likely as individuals to become bigoted, we are more likely to respond to messages that we hear time and time again even if they are against our values as somehow making sense to us.

How do we protect ourselves against this? Daniel Kahneman describes system 1 thinking and system 2 thinking. System 1 thinking is the intuitive response, the emotional visceral "us and them" that can sometimes arise out of fear. System 2 is the deliberate thoughtful examination of what is this person saying? Is it in line with how I really want to be? Is it connected with how I really want to raise my children? Is this a world that I want to support?

When we are able to step back from our fear, not to pretend that it doesn't exist but to see our fear for what it is: fear, not a direction but data and an emotion. When we are able to step back from the fear and able to assess the fear and assess the messaging from the place of our values in a more deliberate thoughtful way, we are able to come to a place where we are ultimately protected from the demagoguery message, from the message of the fear and are able to move ourselves forward in a way that is aligned with how we truly want to be and with a world that we truly want to live in.

When Donald Trump first started with all of his messaging we used to hear things that the politicians would say and we would be like, "oh my goodness, how can the person possibly say that thing?" But what happens over time is the more familiar something sounds, so the more we've heard it time and time again, even if the story is inaccurate, even if the story doesn't serve us, the more we are likely to become immured to it and immune to it.

So what I actually think from a media perspective is when I speak to people in the media about this, they will often say, "well we simply go where the story takes us, so we'll give as much coverage to wherever the story is at even if the story is one that incites hatred or violence." But I actually think that there is a very, very powerful ethical choice that the media makes in that. Because when they expose and expose and expose and expose a story that is about hatred and a story that is about violence, as human beings the more familiar we become with that story the more immured we become to it.

And I think we can see exactly this in the current election...