In a laboratory in the Netherlands, there is a tarantula in a terrarium. And sometimes, in the name of science, researchers use it to scare people.
I learned this from a new paper, “Faking on direct, indirect, and behavioural measures of spider fear: Can you get away with it?” published in the journal Cognition and Emotion. In the study, the researchers tried to figure out whether people can successfully fake being afraid of spiders, and also whether people can fake not being afraid of spiders. The short answer is, for the most part, no.
First the researchers asked participants to respond honestly to a number of spider-related fear tests. In one test, photos of spiders appeared on a screen and participants could “push” the image away by using a joystick to make the image smaller. In another, they were asked to move as quickly as possible into a room where a (real) tarantula was crawling around inside a terrarium.
Participants were then asked to take the tests again, but to behave as if they were very afraid of spiders or not afraid of them at all. What the researchers found was that people exaggerated their fear (or lack of it) when they were faking, and so it was possible for researchers to tell, in most cases, when they were pretending and when they weren’t.
I’m not sure I fully understand why this is meaningful, except that it tests whether people can trick the spider-fear tests. But I was interested to discover that there is something called a Spider Anxiety Screening. Should other researchers wish to follow-up, allow me to suggest my tool shed as a possible laboratory.
(The study was conducted by researchers at Radboud University in the Netherlands. You can download the paper here — it’s the third one down.)
