Core studies summary Bennett & Marteau (1984)
Aims and context (Put aims of study & background history):Aims:
To examine the principle of ‘preparedness’ i.e. what characteristics of animals humans are biologically programmed or prepared to fear. The hypothesis is that humans like animals are prepared to fear certain stimuli such as rapid movement & stimuli which are very different from the way humans look.
Bennett-Levy & Marteau aimed to investigate if human beings are biologically prepared to fear certain stimulus configurations in animals, such as rapid/abrupt movement and discrepancies (differences) from the human form, and if these ratings are meaningfully related to the distribution of ratings of fear and avoidance of these animals.
Context:
Evolutionary Psychology suggests phobias are once adaptive behaviours which helped our ancestors to survive; if we are extremely fearful of an animal and we try to get away from the animal, we are unlikely to get hurt by it. The fears that were important to the survival of our ancestors may lie dormant in our brains.
Gray (1971) & Seligman (1971) have proposed that humans are in some way biologically prepared to fear certain animals e.g. snakes. This idea is because of these pieces of evidence:
1. Not all species are likely to bring about phobic behaviour
2. Fears are not related to a traumatic experience with the animal species
3. Children become phobic at about age 4 which suggests phobias aren’t learned but are inborn (innate/biologically pre-programmed).
Seligman stated that fears which are ‘prepared’ involve certain stimuli (e.g. sliminess) which are of biological significance to the survival of humans.
Animals are also scared of certain animals, for example, Hebb (1946) noticed that a realistically painted snake brought about a stronger fear reaction in chimps than any other object put into the cage. However, we don’t know if this was due to ‘preparedness’.
Mineka et al (1980) found wild reared monkeys showed fear of real, toy & model snakes, but laboratory reared monkeys show only mild fear. But when the snake moved a lot, the laboratory monkeys were fearful. Mineka showed that chimps & maybe humans do not have a prepared image (template) of a ‘snake’ in our heads, to be fearful of when we are born, instead it could be snake like movements not actually snakes, which humans & chimps are prepared to fear.
Schneirla (1965) believed that certain movements brought about a fear response in animals, e.g. these were abrupt, irregular in timing & of a high magnitude. So large animals which moved unpredictably & at high speeds should be feared.
Hinde (1974) said that newness & strangeness bring about fearful behaviour. Hinde said a large difference (discrepancy) between an animal or any stimulus & the organism’s (e.g. humans) idea of the world is the cause of this response.
Procedures (What did the Psychologists do to the participants?)
· Sample was a group of people, 113 in total, attending a local health centre. Their own reports (self-report method) of how they thought about these animals were recorded.
· 1 group of p’s were asked to complete questionnaire 1, this was about fear and avoidance of 29 harmless common animals like rats and cockroaches. The mean age of the p’s was 35.5 years; males & females were tested.
· On questionnaire 1 there were 2 scales, 1 was a fear scale, 1=not afraid up to 3=very afraid, the other was a five point rating scale for nearness. 1=Enjoy picking it up, up to 5=move further than six feet away. P’s were instructed that as some animals & insects are difficult to pick up in the wild, imagine that they have been injured in some way, e.g. that the birds have a broken wing.
· The second questionnaire used with different p’s males & females were tested, mean age 35.1 years, was designed to measure p’s ratings of the same 29 animals along 4 perceptual dimensions i.e.: ugly/slimy/speedy/how suddenly they seem to move. A 3 point rating scale 1=not and 3=very was used.
· People’s actual behaviour and physiological responses to animals were not examined.
· The mean (average) ratings of animal characteristics like ugly, and fear and nearness ratings were calculated.
· Some of the 29 animals asked about included rats, jelly fish, grass hopper and squirrel.
Perspective : Biological
Method: Correlation using Questionnaire & Informal Interview
3 advantages of the methodology: Sample (e.g. representative)
Internal & external validity/internal & external reliability/ethics & any other issues:
1. Not gender bias - roughly the same number of males and females took part i.e. 54 males & 59 females. This was important as female and male responses could be analysed & compared for sex differences.
2. Independent subjects design, where different groups of p’s completed different questionnaires, so this reduces the likelihood of them understanding what the study was about and reacting to demand characteristics.
3. External reliability - as other studies have found some people associate fear with certain stimuli above others, e.g. Ohman & Soares (1998) in conditioning experiments where people have been taught to link perceptual properties e.g. spiders with an electric shock.
4. Internal Reliability too, as structured questionnaires like the one in this study where there is little room for misinterpretation due to them scoring their answers to the questions e.g. pick a number on a scale from 1-5 generally gives reliable responses if given to the same population again in the future or another similar population of people.
5. Questionnaire - generates quantitative data, easy to analyse so easy to compare p’s answers from the 2 questionnaires. Also a large amount of information is gathered quickly & easily.
3 disadvantages of this methodology: Sample bias/validity – internal & external/reliability internal & external/ethics/gender bias/cultural bias & any other issues:
1. Opportunity sample of people attending a health centre, these people may not be representative of the wider population e.g. they could be more scared of harmless animals than other people, but not phobic.
2. Internal validity could be lowered because p’s ignored the experimenters’ instructions that the animals were harmless as rats were perceived by people to be harmful so this was a confounding variable.
3. Ethics - people may feel uncomfortable & distressed if they have to give their responses to something they fear. So little protection of participants even if they are not phobic.
4. Structured closed questionnaire does not allow the researchers to gain qualitative data and find reasons WHY people fear certain animals over others, this misses out a realm of human experience. Instead they are relying on quantitative data to explain fear of animals.
5. Correlation – can’t tell cause & effect, we know that fear and perceptual characteristics are related but we don’t know exact reasons for this even if it does measure the strength of these characteristics.
Findings and conclusions of the study:
· All p’s were more fearful of rats than any other animal of the 29.
· On the nearness scale, females said they were less likely to approach or pick up 10 of the animals listed than males e.g. jellyfish, cockroach, ant, moth, spider. Similar results were found on the fear ratings.
· No sex differences in the perceptual ratings of males and females of how ugly, slimy, speedily and suddenly an animal moved.
· The 4 ratings ugliness/sliminess/speed/suddenness of movement were all related (correlated) to fear and nearness ratings.
· The fact that perceptual characteristics of animals rated by one group of p’s should be related to the fear and nearness ratings of another group was supported.
Conclusions:
Results show perceptual characteristics of animals are of importance in whether humans rate these animals positively or negatively. As p’s are not phobic in this study the results can be generalised to the wider population.
The fact that humans have innate (inborn) tendencies to fear certain animals is explained by the fact that animals are different in form to humans (i.e. discrepant) in the way they look, this relates to hairiness, colour etc. Humans are not prepared to fear specific animals like spiders, but instead ratings of how harmful we think an animal is & the presence of fear evoking perceptual properties (e.g. aversive stimulus configurations like speed and suddenness of movement) and the discrepancy from the human form are important in our fear of them.
The study suggests that fear responses should be desensitised to specific perceptual characteristics e.g. sliminess.
“The results of this study suggest that the perceptual characteristics of animals are of some importance in determining their positive or negative appraisal by humans.”
“The results from the study indicated that humans are probably not prepared specifically to fear animals ‘of biological significance to the species’. Rather, the degree to which humans are prepared to approach or fear an animal depends not only on its objective harmfulness, but also on the presence of certain fear-evoking perceptual properties, and its discrepancy from the human form.”
Alternative and complementary research findings:
Alternative:
Instead of us being biologically prepared to fear certain stimuli e.g. suddenness of movement, another theory called social learning theory states that we can develop phobias by observing other people’s responses. If our mother for example avoids spiders, we learn these animals should be avoided. Bandura & Rosenthal (1966) asked p’s in a study to watch a confederate of the experimenter who appeared to get a painful electric shock every time a buzzer sounded. After seeing this, the p’s showed a fear response every time they heard the buzzer even though they had never had a shock; they learned to fear it by watching someone else.
McNally & Steketee (1985) did a study and found that in 91% of the cases of snake & spider phobias, the cause for concern was not a fear of being harmed but instead a fear of having a panic attack. This again goes against the idea of biological preparedness. The exception was dog phobias when people were afraid of being bitten.
If we explain phobias in terms of biological preparedness, then all cultures should be equally scared of certain stimuli e.g. animals that make sudden movements. However, fear of spiders has been shown to be restricted to Europeans and their descendants. (Davey 1994). In many African cultures for example, the spider is seen as a wise creature & where the spider lives is cleaned & protected by local people. Renner (1990). In many areas of the world spider is eaten as a delicacy including spiders that are lethal to humans when alive! In Egypt spiders are symbols of good fortune.
Complementary:
Cook & Mineka (1989) got laboratory bred monkeys to look at a video of a wild reared monkey behaving with fear to a variety of stimuli. They found that monkeys that had never seen a snake before would rapidly acquire an intense fear when shown a toy snake, after they had watched a wild reared monkey behaving fearfully. However, the monkeys did not become fearful when shown less fearful animals like rabbits, but they did when shown a more snake like animal like a toy crocodile. As these monkeys had not seen a snake, rabbit or crocodile before it seems that the difference in reaction to toy snakes v’s toy rabbits is a result of evolutionary preparedness rather than learning.
Another study showed that rats seemed to be more biologically prepared to avoid some stimuli over others, as they are dangerous. Garcia & Koelling (1966) showed rats could be taught (conditioned) to avoid life threatening stimuli such as shocks or toxic liquids very quickly, but not to avoid stimuli like flashing light which had no bad consequences for them.
Ohman et al (1976) had 2 conditions. In one condition students were shown pictures of things humans are scared of e.g. snakes and in the other condition, students were shown neural stimuli like the picture of a house. Then the students in both conditions received a shock when viewing the stimuli. Ohman found that those students, who had seen what most people are fearful of e.g. snakes, were more frightened and conditioned to fear more quickly than those who had seen the house & other neutral stimuli. The conclusion was that humans are more likely to learn a fear response to dangerous things than to neutral objects. Again this could be due to biological preparedness.
Prepared fear conditioning can be got with minimum contact with the feared stimulus. Mineka et al (1984), found rhesus monkeys got a bad phobia for snakes after very brief exposure to watching their parents being fearful in the presence of a toy snake. Again this is evidence for biological preparedness.
Evaluation points of the study:
Strengths:
· Structured questionnaires are reliable.
· As the results for males and females were very similar on ratings of ugliness etc of animals i.e. their perceptual characteristics, then it seems the findings are valid (truthful & correct).
· High ecological validity, findings should generalise to other situations as p’s were not involved in an artificial study so behaviour, opinions etc should be natural.
· The researchers used a non-phobic sample so results should generalise to other populations.
· Useful as it shows evidence for the nature side of the nature v’s nurture debate, that people are fearful of certain stimuli e.g. colour of animals than others.
· No gender bias as males and females were used in the study.
Weaknesses:
· Internal reliability of questions could still be questionable, as people can respond subjectively e.g. if I answered 2 = quite afraid when asked about fear of a spider, my idea of quite afraid could be different from someone else’s idea of quite afraid, so can the answers be compared?
· The sample was an opportunity sample; these p’s could be different from the normal population, so results may not be valid.
· There are always individual differences - people who will not react like other people, so we can’t state that everyone will behave in the same way e.g. be fearful of rats.
· Experimenter bias - p’s were asked about why people were fearful of certain animals, the experimenter could have given clues about what to say through body language tone of voice etc.
· P’s could have reacted to demand characteristics; after all they were in a health clinic and could have guessed the study was about animal fears. This means they may have given answers in line with what is expected, not their real answers.
· It tells us about the determinism / free will debate; it would seem from this study our behaviour is strongly determined by biology, in that we are prepared to fear certain animal characteristics.
· Reductionist - reduces explanation of behaviour down to characteristics of an animal, obviously we would not be as fearful if we were with a snake charmer in the desert! But it doesn’t take this & other factors into account.
· Cultural bias, as seen above - some cultures aren’t fearful of spiders/snakes etc. Also ethnocentric, as p’s were from one culture & we can’t use their answers as a basis for how all cultures behave.
· Small sample - 113 people is not a huge sample, so less confident in generalising results to all people.
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