What Americans Fear

Technology is awesome – in the 16th century sense of arousing or inspiring awe, something that fills someone with reverential fear, wonder, or respect (OED). As I’ve argued in an earlier post, digital tech is powerful, pervasive and mysterious. So why aren’t people more afraid of it? Before trying to answer that question, here is some survey data about what Americans say they’re afraid of.

The Chapman University Survey of American Fears polls people for their degree of fear about 95 phenomena; a blog post about the results in 2018 is here (N =~ 1,000; errors +- 4% p.p.; answer choice {Very Afraid, Afraid, Slightly Afraid, Not Afraid, Not applicable}.)

If one uses the percentage of people that gave Afraid or Very Afraid rankings, the Top Ten are:

1. Corrupt government officials
2. Pollution of oceans, rivers and lakes
3. Pollution of drinking water
4. Not having enough money for the future
5. People I love becoming seriously ill
6. People I love dying
7. Air Pollution
8. Extinction of plant and animal species
9. Global Warming and Climate Change
10. High Medical Bills

Not a lot of tech in the Top Ten. Here’s the subset of topics I counted as broadly tech related:

The three digital tech ones (Cyber-Terrorism, and Corporate, and Business, Tracking of Personal Data) made it into the top quintile. Cyber-terrorism just missed the Top Ten, and given the huge error bars, is no different from the seven items above it in the list; I suspect cyber-terrorism rated highly more because it’s organized violence than because it’s digital.

Marinelle B pointed out to me (personal communication) that many terrifying things, like random mass shooting and terrorism, leave fewer than 50% of the respondents “afraid,” perhaps because we just assume they’re not going to happen to us, otherwise we’d be paralyzed with fear and worry most of the time.

I’m also struck that people seem relatively unconcerned about the privacy risks of (say) using YouTube and Facebook. Perhaps they feel they don’t have a choice but to use them, and so would rather not think about it. (Alternatively, one could argue that people make a rational choice, and consider the loss of privacy worth the benefits they gain in return.)

Several things bothered me about the survey, such as that seeing the percentage that are afraid or very afraid doesn’t really give one a sense of the depth of emotion. For example, something where 40% of the population were very afraid but everybody else didn’t mind wouldn’t have made the Top Twenty. 

Similarly, consider “Computers replacing people in the workforce” that scored 32%; the social implications 30% being Very Afraid and 2% Afraid, versus only 2% being Very Afraid and 30% merely Afraid would be quite different. In other words, it would be very interesting to see the distributions on the emotion scale?

I don’t think the Chapman Top Ten is “really” a top ten, since it’s just the responses that most people scored Afraid or Very Afraid. I strongly suspect one would’ve got a different answer if you’d asked each respondent to pick their personal Top Ten, and then aggregated that. (Admittedly, asking people to pick ten things out of a list of 95 is hard; but you can simplify the task, e.g. by having respondents pick only from things they rated as Very Afraid or Afraid.) When I did the survey, only three of the Chapman Top Ten were in my personal top ten.

Another methodological quibble was that the grouping of questions, and the distance between groups, could well have affected the results. In the 2019 report, for example, one had:

Question 14

1. Becoming seriously ill
2. People I love becoming seriously ill
3. Dying
4. People I love dying

<unrelated demographic questions>

Question 22

1. Computers replacing people in the workforce
2. Technology that I don’t understand
3. Cyber-terrorism
4. Corporate tracking of personal data
5. Government tracking of personal data