Fear Factor – New Survey Reveals What Scares Americans The Most

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
If the idea of walking alone at night scares you, you’re not alone – in fact, a new comprehensive nationwide poll on what strikes fear into the hearts of Americans has found that it is the thing that scares people the most.
The survey, conducted by researchers at California’s Chapman University, polled 1,500 participants from all over the country and from all walks of life and found that walking alone at night was followed by becoming the victim of identity theft, safety on the Internet, being the victim of a mass or random shooting and public speaking as the top fears.
“What initially lead us into this line of research was our desire to capture this information on a year-over-year basis so we can draw comparisons with what items are increasing in fear as well as decreasing,” lead investigator Dr. Christopher Bader said in a recent blog posting. “We learned through this initial survey that we had to phrase the questions according to fears vs. concerns to capture the information correctly, so that is how we present it.”
[ Watch the Video: Chapman Survey Of American Fears ]
The study also found that the five things people in the US worry the most about or are the most concerned about are having their identities stolen on the Internet, corporate surveillance of their online activity, running out of money in the future, having the government spy on their Internet activity, or falling ill, the Chapman Survey on American Fears also revealed.
The poll results were placed into one of four broad categories: personal fears, crime, natural disasters and fear factors. The authors described the crime section of the survey as particularly surprising, as they found that Americans not only fear criminal activities such as child abduction, gang violence and sexual assaults, but they believed that these types of crimes and several others had actually increased over the last two decades.
“When we looked at statistical data from police and FBI records, it showed crime has actually decreased in America in the past 20 years. Criminologists often get angry responses when we try to tell people the crime rate has gone down,” said Dr. Edward Day, who led this portion of the research and analysis. As a result, and despite the evidence to the contrary, residents of the US do not believe the country is becoming a safer place to live.
The authors of the Chapman Survey asked participants how they believed the prevalence of several types of criminal activity (child abduction, gang violence, human trafficking, mass riots, pedophilia, school shootings, serial killing and sexual assault) today compared with 20 years ago, and in all cases, responders said they believed that crime levels had at least remained level, and many believed that things had worsened.
The poll also covered topics related to climate change and extreme weather events, and asked people about their fear of natural disasters and their level of preparedness for such an event. The researchers found that people were most afraid of tornadoes and hurricanes, followed by earthquakes, floods, epidemics/pandemics and power outages.
Despite their fears, however, the Chapman Survey also found that that Americans were woefully prepared for natural disasters, and only one-fourth of all US residents had assembled a disaster preparedness kit that includes food, water, clothing and medical supplies. Dr. Ann Gordon, who led that section of the study, said that the researchers were conducting follow-up research to examine why so many people were so unprepared for natural disasters.
The university researchers looked at several factors in determining what caused people to be more afraid on the whole, including age, gender, race, employment status, education, income, region of the country, political preference, religious affiliation, television viewing habits and gun ownership. Their analysis revealed that, as a general rule, lower levels of education and high frequencies of TV viewing were the most consistent predictors of fear.
Related Reading:
> Fear Of Holes May Have Evolutionary Origins
> Fear Of Approaching Objects Is A Common Human Evolutionary Trait
> Is Your Fear Of Being Single Making You Settle For Less?
—–