Why Are Spiders So Scary?
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Every single year at the beginning of autumn, the media love nothing better than to frighten the public with images of unnaturally huge and scary spiders and to tell us that it won’t be long before we’re all lying in comas because of a bite from one of the creatures. The scaremongering seems to work, as around one million people in the UK are diagnosed with arachnophobia and plenty more are generally scared of spiders.
It’s important to note that there are no spiders native to the UK that could kill a human but there are one or two that could cause a painful or irritating bite; however, cases are rare. This being said, we must ask ourselves, why on earth are people so scared by the tiny little things?
Well there are a number of reasons, summed up in a table by Professor Graham Davey who is an expert in Anxiety, Clinical Psychology and Psychology. He asked a group of people who were afraid of spiders to give their top reason for being afraid of them and here were his results:
As you can see, the legs of a spider are what cause people the most anxiety, closely followed by sudden movement and speediness. It seems that a human’s fear of spiders is probably caused by similar reasons to an elephant’s fear of mice – they’re small, wriggly and quick.
Despite this, the point still stands that realistically, a spider in the UK can’t do any serious damage to you and at the worst, they are just a bit creepy.