Something You Should Know - What Wikipedia’s Success Reveals About Trust & Are We All Too Fearful?

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

When you’re stuck on a multiple-choice question, should you change your answer or trust your gut? Most people swear your first instinct is best — but science says otherwise. Listen as I reveal what research really shows about when to stick — and when to switch. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15898871/ Wikipedia shouldn’t work. It’s built on the idea that anyone, anywhere, can edit their articles. You might think people would sabotage stories all the time. Yet it’s one of the most accurate and trusted sources on the internet. How is that possible? According to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, it all comes down to trust. In this conversation, he shares what Wikipedia’s success reveals about human nature and how trust fuels progress. Jimmy is also author of The Seven Rules of Trust: A Blueprint for Building Things That Last (https://amzn.to/499zKNR). Humans are born with just two fears but by adulthood, we’ve collected dozens more: from spiders to plane crashes to ghosts and scary monsters. So why do we fear so much, and so often the wrong things? Ruth DeFoster, assistant professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota and author of The Fear Knot: How Science, History and Culture Shape Our Fears – and How to Get Unstuck (https://amzn.to/3Jghms4), explains how fear takes hold of us, how the media amplifies it, and what we can do to loosen its grip. You can’t really make yourself taller — but you can look taller. From the length of your sleeves to the shape of your belt buckle, subtle details can add (or subtract) inches from your perceived height. Listen as I share clever styling tips that create the illusion of height and confidence. https://londonimageinstitute.com/illusion-dressing-to-look-taller-slimmer-for-business/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! AG1: Head to https://DrinkAG1.com/SYSK  to get a FREE Welcome Kit with an AG1 Flavor Sampler and a bottle of Vitamin D3 plus K2, when you first subscribe!  INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ right now! QUINCE: Give and get timeless holiday staples that last this season with Quince.  Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns! ON POINT: We love the On Point podcast! Listen wherever you get your podcasts! ⁠⁠⁠https://www.wbur.org/radio/programs/onpoint⁠⁠⁠ SHOPIFY: Shopify is the commerce platform for millions of businesses around the world! To start selling today, sign up for your $1 per month trial at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With Amex Platinum, you have access to over 1,400 airport lounges worldwide. So your experience before takeoff is a taste of what's to come. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Conditions apply. Today on something you should know, why the most common test-taking advice you hear is completely wrong. Then some great insight into trust from the founder of Wikipedia. which runs entirely on trust. The lessons that I've learned through Wikipedia, the lessons of my career about trust,

like how do you build trust when people inherently start off saying, oh, this is crazy. Like anybody can edit anything. That sounds completely insane. And why would I trust that? Also, clever ways to help you look taller and the fascinating science behind why many things we fear the most,

we really shouldn't. Air travel, serial killers, even terrorism. I mean, terrorism, especially international terrorism, is a problem so minuscule that it statistically approaches zero. You are literally more likely to be killed by your lawnmower. All this today on something you should know. This episode is brought to you by Peloton. A new era of fitness is here. Introducing the new Peloton Cross Training Tread Plus, powered by Peloton IQ.

Built for breakthroughs with personalized workout plans, real-time insights, and endless ways to move, lift with confidence, while Peloton IQ counts reps, corrects form, and tracks your progress. Let yourself run, lift, flow, and go. Explore the new Peloton cross-training treadplus at OnePeloton.ca. Something you should know. Fascinating Intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, something you should know with Mike Carruthers. You know, my mother was a teacher. First, she was a nurse, and then she taught nursing for several years.

And I remember she used to tell her students, and she used to tell me that when you take a test and you're not sure about your answer, go with your first answer. But is that really good advice? That's what we're going to start with today. Hi, and welcome to this episode of something you should know. We've all heard the advice that when you take a multiple choice test and you're not sure, go with your first answer. Teachers, test prep books, my mom have repeated that for generations. And it sounds reasonable, after all, your first instinct should be your best, right? Well, no, that turns out to be not true.

A large body of research covering seven decades of studies shows that test takers who reconsider and change, their answers, actually tend to end up with higher overall test scores. Psychologists have looked at thousands of exams from classroom tests, SAT-style tests, DMV-type quizzes, and over and over again the same pattern appears. When people actually change an answer, they're far more likely to switch from wrong to right than from right to wrong. So where does this trust your first instinct myth come from and why does it persist? Well, it's because of something called the first instinct fallacy.

It's a mental bias we all share. When we change a correct answer to a wrong one, it sticks in our memory. We feel regret and we remember it. But we tend to forget all the times we've changed answers that actually helped us. In other words, we remember the emotional sting of being wrong, more vividly. vividly than the quiet success of being right. So experts say the best strategy during a multiple-choice test is to mark any question you're unsure about,

move on and come back later with a fresh perspective. And that is something you should know. Chances are you've looked up something recently on Wikipedia. We all have. It is the largest collection of knowledge in human history. history, and it is built entirely by volunteers. And when you think about it, it is also one of the great experiments in trust. Users have to trust that Wikipedia is accurate, and Wikipedia has to trust that its editors, who are all volunteers, are acting in good faith. Somehow, against all odds,

it works. My guest is Jimmy Wales. He's the founder of Wikipedia, and he knows a thing or two about how trust is built and maintained. He's also the author of The Seven Rules of Trust, a blueprint for building things that last. Hey, Jimmy, welcome to something you should know.

Hi there. Thanks for having me. It's good to be here. So here you've built this thing, Wikipedia, really entirely on trust. So how do you view trust? What is it about trust that you find so interesting? Yeah, well, you just need to look around at the world today. We've seen this really bad decline in trust in institutions, trust in journalism, trust in politics, trust in each other to some extent.

And it's causing all kinds of problems. People don't know what to believe or who to believe. And, you know, I think we need to get back. to a culture where we can trust people. And is there evidence, though, to support that idea that we should be more trusting of people, that people are, in fact, trustworthy? Yeah, I mean, I think we all get this in our day-to-day lives. You know, a visual or an image that I use to talk about this is, you know, you imagine that

you're asked to design a restaurant and you think, okay, right, it's not just designing just how the tablecloths look and things like that. You're going to really go out of the box and say, how would we build a restaurant? And you think, okay, well, in my restaurant, I'm going to serve steak because I like steak. And everybody's going to have a steak knife. And therefore, because they might stab each other, we better put a cage around every table.

But obviously, that's ridiculous. We don't live our lives that way. We go into restaurants all the time and people are there with deadly weapons. eating next to us and you know they're basically trustworthy and you know we we have friends we have family we have strangers we meet in an elevator and basically almost everybody's decent decent human beings are all around us and we we know that and we really feel that and yet you know somehow when we get out into social media or where we're thinking sort of bigger picture there's this

toxicity that's crept in where you can really get the idea, and I'm sure we'll talk more about this, you can get the idea from social media that there's just, you know, the general public is just full of crazy, angry people. That's just not really how it is. When you first founded Wikipedia several years ago, I remember people saying, well, you can't trust it. Nobody trusts Wikipedia. And yet when people have researched the accuracy of the articles on Wikipedia, it passes with flying colors, even though those articles are edited and written by volunteers. And really, anybody can go in and edit an article on Wikipedia. So how have you dealt with that? Explain that. Yeah, I mean, I think a big part of it

is, this is the lessons that I've learned through Wikipedia, the lessons of my career about trust like how do you build trust when people inherently start off saying oh what this is crazy like this idea uh anybody can edit anything that that sounds completely insane and why would i trust that and so you think about okay but you know we know it's not insane what are the things we need to do to to build trust and so like you know one of the things that we need to do uh is around transparency i mean you know you'll often see if you read a lot of wikipedia entries you'll see the neutrality of this article has been disputed right at the top of the page. And I always joke, you know, I wish the New York Times would print that sometimes, you know,

to tell us, you know, like, we're going to run with this story, but we had a big fight in the newsroom. Like, not everybody's so sure about it, but we feel like it's important to tell you, you know, this reporting, but also that there may be some difficulty around it. I mean, like, that's great. I would trust them more if they could be a little more transparent about that sort of thing. Well, since Wikipedia is trust in action, is it possible to explain how that works? I mean, maybe it's too complicated.

Hopefully it's more simple, but can you explain how it works? It's both complicated and really simple. I mean, I do think it goes back to, you know, when we look at new edits coming in, even from people who aren't logged in. So you can still edit 99% of Wikipedia without even logging in or having an account. And it goes live immediately. I can? Look at those edits. Wait, I can?

Yeah, you can. Right now, you can go to almost any article in Wikipedia, not the most famous ones, obviously, and not ones that have had trouble. But broadly pick something unknown. And then when we look at those edits that are coming in, what we find is, although they're not as good of a quality as that of really experienced Wikipedians who've been doing it for years

and who understand all of the parameters and so forth, But they're still on net positive. Like most people, they just come and they just maybe fix a spelling error. They add some fact or they just put a link at the bottom to something they think is important. And on average, people are doing it. So there's that experience we have to say, well, actually, it does work. So that part is simple. But then the more complicated bit, right?

So we have, you know, the regular users of the website have a lot of tools to be able to monitor things. So anything you've edited in the past, You get a notification if you want to when you log in to say, oh, here's the things you're watching and here's something changed, you can keep an eye on it. We have admins who are elected by the community, and they can temporarily block people or they can lock pages if there's a big fight or some kind of problem.

And so those are the kinds of things that we do to try to say, okay, right, we are going to deal with that less than 1% of people who come in and they're being annoying or they're, you know, not doing what they're supposed to. But even there, you know, usually what we do is we see, you know, there's some great stories of Wikipedia's like really great, wonderful people who they started editing Wikipedia when they were very young by vandalizing a page because they couldn't believe they could do it. And then somebody says to them, hey, you know, like, yeah, don't do that. That's not really what we're doing here. We're trying to make an encyclopedia. And then people are like, oh, okay, right. Well,

oh, great. I didn't realize, like, this is actually nice people and I should be a nice person too. And so it's building that culture is a big part of how it all works. But it's very human. It's really people get to know each other. There's a lot of friendships. There's a lot of people who are, you know, you might edit, maybe your favorite subject is trains because there are, you know, train people who are obsessed with trains. And they may go and edit, you know, the history of various locomotive engines from the 1930s and through Wikipedia they get to meet somebody else who believe it or not is interested in the same thing and so they make friendships they're like oh wow look I didn't know anybody was as obsessed with this as I am so yeah great we can work together

so wait a minute so somebody goes on Wikipedia and tries to vandalize or tries to screw up an entry you contact them and go hey knocking off we're trying all trying to get along here is Did I hear you correctly? You do that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully. I mean, you know, it depends on the situation and it's very human. It's admins doing this. And they normally will post a warning on the talk page before they block you forever. It sort of depends on what you do. Like if you've done something minor, you're more likely to get that. If you went around in quick succession, like putting really vile stuff on 10 pages in a row, they're probably just going to block you first and just say, you know, knock it off. Like, that's ridiculous. this but usually that first block is just for a short period of time and you do get a message saying hey you've been locked blocked for 24 hours you know knock it off you can get permanently banned of course but by and large most people they get blocked once and they're like all right well that wasn't that exciting so they stop and i think it's love that i think it's really important

to understand like one of the problems we have with almost every social media platform these days is that far from getting blocked if you go on and you start being rude and abusive, you get a lot of attention. You either get attention because, well, people can't help but respond back by yelling back at you and then, you know, that's a waste of everybody's time, but it's very human. But also maybe the algorithm notices you and says, ah, this person's getting a lot of engagement. There's a lot of, you know, people are staying on the site longer in order to talk to this person. So we're going to show more of their content to more people. And of course, that means toxic content, you know, it just goes viral sometimes, and that's not helpful.

I'm speaking with Jimmy Wales. We're talking about trust. He is the founder of Wikipedia and author of the book The Seven Rules of Trust, a blueprint for building things that last. It's the matchat or the three ensemble Cado Cephora of the FACTS that I've been to denishé who me energize so much. It's the ensemble. The form of standard and mini-regrouped. Hello, Ben.

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qualified stay. Life's the trip. Make the most of it at Best Western. Visit bestwestern.com for complete terms and conditions. So, Jimmy, I mean, this is a whole business, and just listening to you talk, it explains why you wrote a book about trust, because your whole business is built on trusting people. And I can imagine whenever, I don't recall when you started Wikipedia, but if you sat around the table with people and said, okay, I got this idea, we're going to start this thing.

thing that became Wikipedia, I would imagine everyone would say, well, that is never going to work because people will have agendas and this will not be neutral at all and this will be and would just destroy this idea. I don't know how it survived that if it did happen. People do wonder about that and they say that. I mean, it turns out there's, there are a lot of people in the world who actually are very happy to see ideas presented in a clear and neutral way. Even if they agree with one side or the other, they say, well, look, to really be fair, we need to explain very well, like, what's the

fight about? What's the argument? My favorite type of example is to imagine a kind and thoughtful Catholic priest and a kind and thoughtful Planned Parenthood activist. And they could work together on the article abortion, as long as they're kind and thoughtful, which is what I specified, Because they'll both say, okay, we're right, the Catholic priest will say, look, I understand Wikipedia can't say, you know, abortion is a sin, it can't sort of just blindly put forward the Catholic Church point of view,

but it can say the Catholic Church point of view is this, and the Pope has said that and the argument is this, and critics have responded thus and such and so on. And that's really what you want out of an encyclopedia. You really want to get the whole story, you want neutrality, and that's another big piece of how we think about building trust. And you make your money from donations, correct?

Yes, yeah. So Wikipedia is a charity. The Wikimedia Foundation is the charity I set up that owns and operates Wikipedia. And we're funded very, very much by the small donors. So, you know, the people who are giving their 20 bucks once a year, they see the notice and they go, oh, yeah, right, Wikipedia. I love Wikipedia. I'm going to chip in my 20 bucks. And I think that's really important that we're not funded by governments. We're not funded by a handful of billionaires because it gives us intellectual independence. You know, we're able to say, you know, the community can

say, oh, we can write the truth, we can do what we need to do without worrying about if we're going to offend a donor. So, Jimmy, I'm sure everyone listening has heard of Wikipedia, has read articles on Wikipedia, has referenced Wikipedia. But I'm curious, like, exactly how many people actually use Wikipedia? So in a month's time, we see about two billion devices, access Wikipedia. Now, we don't do a lot of tracking, so, you know, we can't link up. If you're on your phone or you're on your laptop, we don't know you're the same person, so we can't really tell. But, you know, two billion devices. So lots of people over the course of a month would see Wikipedia from two devices.

Some people would see it only from one. Some people only have one device. So I'd say probably a billion and a half people every month, probably see Wikipedia. That's a lot of people. It is a lot of people. And it's in so many languages as well. You know, we're all around the world and so many countries, so many languages. And that adds a lot of richness.

to the whole, you know, the whole community. And so how does the language thing work? Do all Wikipedia articles, say, start in English and then they get translated, or each language has its own database of articles or what? Yeah, well, each language is written separately. So, you know, if you look at Japanese Wikipedia, it's, and who edits it, it's 99% of the people or something like that are in Japan and they're Japanese. Japanese people editing Japanese Wikipedia.

And maybe, yeah, sometimes people translate. Actually, I think there's as much translation into English as out of English because, you know, oftentimes people have two languages. And if you have two languages, probably your second language is English because it's the most popular second language in the world. And so maybe you're writing about your, you know, local village in Poland and you think, oh, yeah, well, I've just written this in Polish, I can see they don't have it in english i'll go and add something there um and you know people sometimes are a little shy about that because they know my english isn't so good but these days machine translation is getting better also the communities do know each other a bit and they say oh yeah come yeah we're the we're the english language polish wiki project and we want to help polish people sort of share knowledge

about poland because probably it's people who are you know living abroad and are polish themselves and so on and so that kind of collaboration happens but there really are independent communities And are you concerned at all that AI will displace some of the people who use Wikipedia, rather than look at the Wikipedia article about Paris, I can ask chat GPT exactly what I want to know about Paris. So maybe I'll, does that concern you? Well, it doesn't concern us that much. And at least so far, we haven't seen any really material impact on our traffic from the rise of AI.

There was a study showing that, you know how when you search in Google these days, you often get an AI summary at the top. Right. And so the study said that for traditional search results, Wikipedia is in the top 10, 3% of the time. But in AI summaries, Wikipedia is cited 6% of the time. So we get cited a lot more, but people click through a lot less because, as you say, maybe they just got the answer they were looking for.

You know, you used to type sitting at home, having dinner with their family or friend, and you say, how old is Tom Cruise anyway? I don't know. Let's check. And you Google, how old is Tom Cruise? And back in the olden days, 10 years ago, the olden days, Google didn't know. Google had no idea how old Tom Cruise was. They had just linked to Wikipedia.

Now Google knows. Google just tells you. But it also gives you the source. So you might not click through or you might get tempted to click through. So we haven't seen much impact on our traffic. And then again, there's this question of trust. You know, when we think about what do you trust? I mean, I find those Google AI summaries in particular are often quite confused.

I think part of that is because, you know, when you're searching, you just type two or three keywords. So it doesn't really know what you're trying to ask. And so sometimes it just answers hilariously. Well, I love that I love your story because. you know, here's Wikipedia, which is really the foundation of it is people writing articles and editing articles. It's very not high tech in that regard like AI is, but yet people love it. I mean, people truly, as evidenced by the numbers you just gave, people still love it and use it. And I know school teachers hate it in some ways because they're afraid kids will rip it off and that'll be their essay.

I love to go out and talk to young people at schools and so on. And one of the things I always say to young people is you might think you could just copy from Wikipedia, but guess what? Your teachers also read Wikipedia. Right, right. That isn't going to work. Well, this is such an interesting framework to use to talk about trust because here you've got this business that really is built on trust. The foundation of Wikipedia is trust. We've got a trust that it's accurate.

and you've got to trust as the founder of Wikipedia, you have to trust that the people editing the articles are being accurate, and it all seems to work. I've been talking with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, and author of the book The Seven Rules of Trust, a blueprint for building things that last. And there's a link to his book in the show notes. Jimmy, thank you for being here.

Yeah, thank you. At Desjardin, we speak business. We speak startup funding and comprehensive games. plans. We've mastered made-to-measure growth and expansion advice, and we can talk your ear-off about transferring your business when the time comes. Because at Desjardin business, we speak the same language you do, business. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us, and contact Desjardin today. We'd love to talk, business. Tim's new Cravable Raps are made for the times your boss said the what now, or your teacher

mentions that thingamabob, need to pick me up. Snack back to reality with Tim's new Cravable Raps, available in Chipotle or Ranch, plus tax at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. What are you afraid of? These days, it feels like fear is everywhere.

In the news, on social media, in the way we talk about the world. We're told to be afraid of crime, disease, politics, technology, even each other. But is the world really more dangerous than it used to be, or have we simply learned to feel more afraid? And what would happen if we could ease some of that fear and see things more clearly? My guest, Ruth DeFoster, is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota,

and she's author of the book, The Fear Not, how science, history, and culture shape our fears and how to get unstuck. Hi, Ruth, welcome to something you should know. Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. So what exactly is fear? Everyone's experienced fear. But does science have some sort of definition or explanation as to what happens when we're fearful? Not really. I think fear is a social construct to a large degree. And so for that reason, it's kind of hard to nail down a precise definition. But it is interesting to look to the difference of the fears that we are born with versus the fears that we develop. over the course of our lives. And the fears that we're born with are which? Yeah, it may surprise you.

It surprised me to learn that humans are only born with two innate fears, fear of loud sounds and fear of falling. So that kind of makes sense on an evolutionary level because, you know, falling can harm or kill you, and loud noises can predict danger. But those innate fears are really embedded in our biology as a means to protect us. And interestingly, if you look to either people

or certain types of animals who are unable to feel fear, we can see how that is really harmful to those people and to those animals. So, for example, people who suffer from Urbach Vita disease, which renders humans incapable of feeling fear, and one of the most famous patients with this disease is called SM. She's a married mother of three.

She's been unable to feel fear for three decades. And researchers and scientists have tried almost everything to make her feel fear. They've put tarantulas on her. They've taken her to haunted houses. They've shown her horror movies. They've even briefly suffocated her with carbon dioxide, all in the name of science.

But she cannot feel fear because of this disease. And while this might sound like an evolutionary boon, it actually, her lack of a fear response has put her in danger many times throughout her life. So for example, once she was held up at gunpoint, and because she can't feel fear, she just laughed at her attack her. And so, yeah, so fear exists on a continuum. If you have too little fear caused by diseases like Urbach Vita disease or there are some prey

animals like mice, if they have toxoplasmosis, they completely lose their ability to fear predators. And obviously that can be deadly. But we also argue that all consuming fear can be debilitating as well. And so we try to strike the right balance, recognizing and identifying legitimate fears while demystifying the fears that have been overblown or sensationalized. You would think that those creatures who have no fear, evolution would have taken care of them because how could they survive very long if they have fear of nothing?

And it does. Yeah. So what we're kind of talking about there is rodents. So certain rodents, if they're exposed to toxoposmosis, they lose the ability to fear predators. And this is also the reason why women are asked not to change litter boxes during pregnancy. It's to avoid being exposed to that same disease. If you're one of those people who doesn't have fear, what do you have? In other words, when you are confronted with a fearful situation in most people's eyes, is there a different reaction or is there no reaction? Interestingly, in the scientific literature around the patient SM, who I mentioned before, if you look to the data and the write-ups of all the studies that have been done around her and

her experiences, they draw a distinction between what they call fear and panic. So she does occasionally panic. She does occasionally experience like that kind of pressing concern. But the scientists who have been studying this disease have made a distinction between momentary panic and that sort of deep-seated psychological fear that most human beings are capable of experiencing. And all the other fears are all basically learned fears. We learn to be afraid of things. Correct. Every other fear that we have is something that we learn. It is not innate. It is socially constructed by our lived experiences. And my sense is that we live in a more fearful world today than in the past.

We're certainly more fearful than my childhood. Yeah, I would agree with that. I think we're already kind of seeing the ways in which the overblown sensational fears have really poisoned our political and cultural discourse from the really cruel and toxic way that we talk about immigration to the way that we glamorize and sensationalize serial killers and murderers in the true crime pop culture community. And I mean, I hate to say it, realistically, I don't see this changing anytime soon because the system, the algorithmic system, especially on social media, is really stacked against

any kind of large scale change. And that's because most of our news and information now is drawn from the algorithmic wild west of social media and companies that own social media platforms like ByteDance, which owns TikTok and Meta, which owns Instagram, they know that outrage is one of the best mechanisms for continued engagement on these platforms, and thus these sites develop, devolve very quickly into rage bait and incentivize negativity. And I think you can really see this in the current tenor of political discourse in this country. Civil discourse is truly becoming a thing of the past, and that is largely because of cultural fears.

So one of the things that seems pretty apparent and pretty universal is the more you're exposed to something fearful, even though you're not in harm's way, the more fearful you become of it, as you just said, if you listen to a lot of true crime podcasts or watch a lot of scary movies or read about serial killers, you think those are a bigger deal in life than they probably are. Yeah, that's exactly right. And there's actually a term in the literature for this. There's a gentleman named George Gerbner, and he coined the term Mean World Syndrome. And this is basically, it's a cognitive bias where people who have, especially who have really heavy media diets of violent or frightening media, they go on to then perceive the world as being considerably more dangerous than it is.

And we can certainly see this in my area of expertise, which is media coverage of terrorism. I mean, terrorism, especially international terrorism, is a problem so minuscule that it statistically approaches zero. You are literally more likely to be killed by your lawnmower than an international terrorist. But the degree of concern and cultural fear and pop culture that we've built up around this sort of trendy cultural fear of international terror is truly overblown relative to the actual risk that it poses. And I would argue that's largely a function of our media diets and the pop culture that we consume, which is especially in the post-September 11 years, has been really focused on this looming external. threat of international terror. Well, the example that's often cited, especially after 9-11, is air travel versus car travel.

Air travel took a real dip, and people were driving in their cars, and you're much more likely to die in a car crash than you are on an airplane, but you're much more likely to survive a car crash than you are to survive an airplane crash. Yes, and I think there's also something to be said psychologically for the locus of control in a car. You feel more in control, even if that control or that feeling of control is misplaced. In an airplane, right, you're in a metal tube with dozens of other people and you're just sitting there. So I think that there's probably psychologically something going on with like the ability to sort of have personal agency in that situation. But yeah, you're right. It is

considerably more dangerous to travel by car than it is to travel by plane. One fear that comes up every year is this idea that you have to screen your kids' Halloween candy because someone may have put a razor blade in it or poison in it. And yet when you look at the facts, when you search for this, it pretty much never, ever happens. There have been a couple of incidents. They've been more pranks than there were deliberate attempts to kill people. and there was that one case of the father who actually did kill his son by poisoning his Halloween candy back in the 70s. But in terms of the neighbor waking up one morning and deciding to poison all the neighborhood kids with their Halloween candy, it just never happens.

No, I mean, compared to other cultural, trendy fears that focus on children, like, for example, like fears of child abuse or like QAnon or the satanic panic, those fears at least have a kernel of truth. I mean, childhood sex abuse absolutely is a real problem, but it is not committed by strangers. It is almost always committed by people who are in the child's life. So that almost makes like a little bit of intuitive sense, but this one is truly perplexing. You said a moment ago that some of these fears kind of recycle generation to generation. What's an example of that? Yeah. So going back to like, it's easy to look at dramatic historical examples of mass hysteria like

the Salem witch trials as something that we've evolved from. but we really, really haven't. I mean, in some ways, we certainly have evolved since the 17th century, but the echoes of that mass hysteria still trickle down into the present. It trickles into the satanic panic. There are still Americans in jail today on trumped up charges of satanic rituals and American preschools. And many of the court cases that accompanied the panic of the 1980s, they bear a striking similarity to the sensational trials of the Salem era. And that's just one example. In the 19th century, there were several cyclical fears of being buried alive.

That was really interesting. So there were all of this pop culture and novels and plays about this fear of being buried alive and then that faded away. And then today we have, you know, more cyclical fears of things like serial killers. But another fear that's been cyclical that I think is really, really harmful is fear of vaccination. That's not new. That goes back hundreds of years. there have been concerns about the safety of vaccination or as it was initially called variolation when it first came out.

But from a public health perspective, rising childhood fears of vaccination have been absolutely catastrophic in the 21st century. My youngest two children are in middle school and they have already lived through three local measles outbreaks, including one that is spreading right now. And that's not a sentence that I should be uttering in the 21st century because we have the medical technology. We have the scientific consensus to enact an effective childhood vaccination program. But instead, many Americans are afraid of vaccination. They don't plan to fully vaccinate their children. And now we have a 20-point gap between the amount of vaccination that we need for heart immunity against measles

and the number of Americans who are actually planning on fully vaccinating their children, which is only about three quarters. The idea of being afraid often seems to be focused around children. that I'm not afraid for me, I'm afraid for my kids. Is that, does that kind of run through history that, that, that's not me, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, we have to save the kids. Yeah, that's been a really common through line throughout history. And that's also often a common scapegoat when, when folks are trying to trample free speech, right? It's about protecting the children. It's not about trampling free speech.

There's, of course, a natural fear that every society has for their young. And we found that almost all of the cultural fears that have sort of evolved in the early years, they are often based around trying to protect and serve the most vulnerable among us. But we do have to be really careful of not then using that as a rhetorical or political cudgel to silence independent thought. One word that gets people's attention that people are afraid of is toxic or toxins. And you hear this a lot with supplements and things, they'll get rid of the toxins in your body and nobody wants toxins. And yet nobody's really sure what it means

because when you ask people, well, what toxins does it get rid of? They don't really know. Yeah, that's my co-author Tasha did a lot of work around over the counter drugs and supplements for that reason. And you're right, that word toxin is a frequently touted marketing term. But it really is almost meaningless sort of in the clinical literature, the way that it's being used by vitamin and supplement industries, especially because you already have, you know, systems in your body, your kidney, your liver that will filter out toxins from your body. And any product that is claiming that you need it to flush toxins is it's not true. But what we have in United States is a uniquely unregulated vitamin and supplement industry. They can claim almost anything

they want without legal repercussions. And so when it comes to vitamins and supplements, you need to be really careful and you need to consult with a medical doctor before you add anything to your regimen. Another thing people have learned to become afraid of, scared of, are toxins in like cleaning supplies, household products, that kind of thing. And, you know, so we're told you've got to get rid of all that and bring in all natural, organic, whatever, because those other products under your sink are dangerous. And again, that goes back to fears for children, right?

I mean, this goes back to the idea that we are somehow unwittingly exposing our kids to something that might be harmful to them. And I think that that inclination is well placed. You know, there's nothing wrong with wanting to care for your children to create a safe and welcoming environment for them. But when it can become all consuming to the degree that, for example, authoritative, you know, Eorexia is an eating disorder that consumes some people who are so obsessed with only eating healthy that it actually becomes a problem for them. It becomes very limiting and it actually becomes like a clinical disease.

And so there's always just this middle ground to be had between trying to do, you know, what's right and what's thoughtful and what's environmentally conscious, but not letting it become so all-consuming that it actually becomes like a clinical psychological problem. If you're old enough to remember, you can feel today, you can just feel it in the air. There is a societal fear that didn't used to be. That is this fear of like stranger danger, that your kids are just walking potential victims of kidnappers, that you've got to keep your eye on them. You can't let them go out by themselves. And yet, the evidence is, as I understand it, that we live in a time now that is safer than ever and that those things are even less likely to happen today than before. But boy, the pressure to keep your eye on your kids because you just never know what could happen is pretty

strong. Yeah, that is absolutely true. By almost any metric, we live in an unprecedented era of safety and security, asterisk, if you're in the United States. That's not true for everyone. But for those of us who are in the United States and who are in, you know, the Western world, We're doing really well. Teen pregnancy is plummeting in the United States. Violent crime is down. Serial killers are significantly less active than they were in the 1970s and the 1980s. I mean, across almost every metric we're doing better. And yet, this idea that kids can't go outside and play by themselves because it's so dangerous is very prevalent. And it can't be good for kids, I would imagine. It's not good for children actually to not have unsupervised play. There's an interesting study that was a longitudinal study. It looked at children in the 1970s versus children in the 2000s, and it was looking at

the amount of space that those children had to roam unsupervised. In the 1970s, that was basically like half of their town. They could just come back on your bike when it's dinner time. By the 2000s, it was their backyard. That's it. And so it's more, we're keeping kids on a shorter and shorter leash, but ironically, the world is a safer place for them than it's ever been before. And so I think it's really important to give kids a little bit of space to go and explore.

I let my kids explore my neighborhood and, you know, come back. I know where they, you know, I know generally where they are and they come back at dinner and they're fine. It's good for them. And so where did that come from? Where did a fear based on absolutely incorrect facts take such hold? Well, I think this might come back to just trends in parenting. So a lot of the sort of latchkey kids of the Gen X generation, they attributed, a lot of their sort of concerns and problems in adulthood to the fact that they felt

that they had been neglected as children. And I think that they've often sort of overcorrected toward what's called snowplow parenting. So from the latchkey generation, which was much more hands off, they sort of overcorrected to try to clear every obstacle out of their kid's way. And that has its own, you know, that has its own pitfalls. So again, it just comes down to like striking that happy middle balance. Well, I think it's great to have these conversations because it kind of prompts you to think about your own fears, and what are you afraid of, and should you really be that afraid of this? And I appreciate the conversation.

Ruth DeFa Foster has been my guest. She's an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota, and she's author of the book The Fear Not, How Science, History, and Culture shape our fears, and how to get unstuck. and there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Ruth, thanks so much. I appreciate you being here. Thanks. Bye. A lot of men wish they could be taller, but unfortunately there's not much you can do about that.

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