Fear

“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Last week in Santiago, Chile, the mass hysteria caused by a rumor spread over WhatsApp and Twitter overwhelmed a large share of the city’s gas stations.

Fear of a fuel shortage shook a big part of the upper middle class. They had already forgotten that the earthquake of February 2010 showed that gas stations could keep supplying for several days without being refilled.

They had forgotten to check whether the news was true. That same afternoon I heard an official on the radio deny the rumor and spell out the real scope of the story: a drivers’ strike at one of the companies supplying a gasoline distributor.

Can we trust an RT?

“And the things that we fear are a weapon to be held against us…” – The Weapon, Rush

Social networks let rumors spread faster than before. That’s why, for all their advantages, we have to be cautious about what we receive through these new media.

However, the same social networks can protect us from false rumors. Between 2010 and 2012 the Chilean researchers Carlos Castillo (@ChatoX), Barbara Poblete (@bpoblete) and Marcelo Mendoza (@mmendozarocha) published some interesting papers on the subject (like this one: Twitter Under Crisis: Can we trust what we RT?)

Is it possible to predict whether a rumor on Twitter is true or false?

Apparently the answer is yes. There are differences in the way rumors propagate on Twitter that depend on the credibility of the information.

Fortunately there are groups of Twitter users who confirm and validate any information circulating in outside sources. If something turns out not to be true, tweets appear refuting the information. The researchers found that when a tweet is true, opposition to its spread is low; when the tweet is false, on the other hand, it gets a large number of tweets refuting it. On top of that, confirmed tweets have a higher percentage of retweets.

Atavistic fears

“They say there are strangers who threaten us
In our immigrants and infidels” -- Witch Hunt, Rush

Today I read in Oscar Contardo’s column for La Tercera:

“In Chile there are localized fears, like the one voiced by a woman from Lo Barnechea who made the news two weeks ago: she claimed to have seen two men dressed as priests trying to steal a Mercedes Benz. Her recorded statements circulated on WhatsApp and were reproduced by a newspaper. She was basically connecting her experience -two priests trying to open a car- with an actual robbery she had heard about secondhand at some other time. It was a faint suspicion, or rather a fantasy, turned into a fact that was never confirmed. The interesting part is the discourse unfolding behind her words: the woman was terrified, because now thieves could be “good-looking, like our own sons” and, worse than that, could pass themselves off as priests. What her statements imply is that in certain circles the fear of being robbed is embodied in a particular appearance, and that the possibility of something breaking that mold is far more chilling than the crime itself. Something similar happened this week with the rumor of a strike by fuel truckers, which went from WhatsApp to Twitter and revived the specter most feared by many Chileans, the harsh reality of shortages and their most perverse symbol: the lines.”

I don’t know whether anyone has done a study on the spread of rumors on WhatsApp like the one I mentioned above.

It’s harder in this case, because WhatsApp is not a social network but a communication tool that lets you set up broadcast lists, which are used to create groups around interests or friendships. In Chile it’s widely used among the parents of a school class to keep up with news from their kids’ schools.

Unlike social networks, where you can filter and confirm the validity of messages because you can reach more reliable sources, in a WhatsApp group the quality of the information will be only as good as the level of knowledge or ignorance of its members.

It only takes two or three people in a WhatsApp group swallowing a rumor for it to jump from one broadcast list to another. Add to that our cognitive biases and the natural cognitive laziness we suffer from and you have an excellent breeding ground for sowing fear.

FUD

In 1975 Gene Amdahl coined the term FUD: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, to refer to IBM’s strategy of sowing doubt among its customers and competing unfairly with his company, Amdahl Corporation.

“FUD is the fear, uncertainty and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering Amdahl products.”

The term became popular in the late nineties when Microsoft was accused of using this same strategy both to discredit its competitors and to oppose the growing use of free software.

In 2004 Bush was accused of using the same strategy against John Kerry.

FUD has been used again and again, consciously or not, by politicians, businessmen and religions throughout human history. The only thing that happened is that Amdahl gave it a name.

FUD is a form of appeal to fear, a fallacy that consists of upholding the validity of an argument on the basis of a threat.

The logical form of this fallacy is the following:

If X does not accept that Y is true then Z will happen (Z being a coercion or attack against X). Therefore, Y is true.

An example, taken from Wikipedia, is this:

«If Iran upholds its right to use atomic energy for civilian purposes it will have to face the decisions taken by the international community. Therefore Iran must not use atomic energy for civilian purposes».

Here the debate is not about a country’s right to use energy, but about the consequences for Iran of using it. It’s a veiled threat.

Today we see many debates based on fear. Fear of economic chaos, or fear of the power of majorities. Fear can be and is used as a weapon against us.

The Fear Tetralogy

“And the things that we fear are a weapon to be held against us…” –The Weapon, Rush

In a 1994 interview, Neil Peart, the drummer and lyricist of the progressive rock band Rush, explained the inspiration for the Fear Trilogy, a series of three songs the group wrote and included across several albums.

“The idea for the trilogy was suggested by an older man telling that he didn’t think life was ruled by love, or reason, or money, or the pursuit of happiness – but by fear. This smart-but cynical guy’s position was that most people’s actions are motivated by fear of being hungry, fear of being hurt, fear of being alone, fear of being robbed, etc,. and that people don’t make choices based on hope that something good will happen, but in fear that something bad will happen.
I reacted to this the way all of us tend to react to generalities: “Well, I’m not like that!” But then I started thinking about it more, watching the way people around me behaved, and I soon realised that there was something to this viewpoint.”

Today we know there is some truth to this idea. Fear is a very strong emotion, and emotions drive our actions far more than we suspect.

In 2002 Neil Peart added a fourth song, Freeze, to the original trilogy. I leave them with you to close this post. Fear sometimes freezes us; fear is used against us. We should reflect on our fears. Being cautious is good, but being fearful is not.

Title photograph: Into Darkness, by Transfomer18 on Flickr, taken from here