While most fears are learned, humans are believed to be born with innate fears of loud noises, falling (heights), and potentially a predisposition to fear ancestral threats like snakes and spiders, alongside an early fear of strangers and abandonment, serving as basic survival instincts that help infants react to danger and seek comfort.
Examples of innate fear include fears that are triggered by predators, pain, heights, rapidly approaching objects, and ancestral threats such as snakes and spiders.
Scientists have found that two fears are inborn in humans—the fear of falling, and that of loud noises. Infants as young as 6 months old will hesitate and not crawl onto a surface that seems to look like a cliff edge.
Science reveals that humans are born with only two natural fears: the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises. All other fears, such as fear of snakes or the dark, are learned over time and influenced by our environment and culture. But fear isn't always negative.
Babies are actually born with 2 fundamental fears: the fear of being dropped and the fear of being alone. The rest of them are just learned through experience. Humans associate events with objects, people or other events. This is the mechanism through which we learn.
✔️ Innate Fears: Babies instinctively react to heights and loud sounds. ✔️ Learned Fears: Kids pick up fears from parents, media, and experiences. ✔️ Curiosity Before Fear: Infants explore first, then learn what's "dangerous." ✔️ Survival Instincts Grow Over Time: Fear responses develop as they age.
The 5 Core Fears
Humans are born with only two innate fears: falling and loud noises. These instinctual responses are essential for protecting us from danger, triggering our body's fight-or-flight reaction through the brain's amygdala.
1. Social Phobia: Fear of Social Interactions. Also known as Social Anxiety Disorder, social phobias are by far the most common fear or phobia our Talkspace therapists see in their clients.
Evidence of a perceptual bias for snakes and spiders isn't necessarily inconsistent with fear, but given the lack of any corroborating behavioral evidence of fear, we conclude that infants are not afraid of them. Thus, these findings do not support the notion that snake and spider fears are innate.
You cannot know if you'll be heartbroken, leg broken, or brain dead from a garish toothbrush injury. Fear of the unknown is universal, but it seems to take form most commonly in three basic human fundamental fears: Fear of Death, Fear of Abandonment or Fear of Failure.
What are the psychological factors that contribute to the development of hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia? Traumatic experiences, like being mocked for mispronouncing words, can trigger this phobia. Genetic predisposition to anxiety and learned behaviors from environment or family may also contribute.
What Are the Rarest Phobias?
You become the type of person who people find more challenging to love because you're not being you. So, those are the 3 universal fears: The fear of not being enough, the fear of not belonging, and the fear of not being loved.
Fear of failure. Fear of being wrong. Fear of rejection. Fear of being emotionally uncomfortable.
Naturally, the humans who craved acceptance and feared rejection survived through the ages and became the modern-day humans. To this day, one of the greatest fears in our human experience, is the fear of rejection.
Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia is a specific phobia, meaning that someone with this condition would experience intense, irrational anxiety or fear when faced specifically with the number 666.
The following are some of the weirdest or rarest phobias people actually live with.
Everyone is born with the two innate fears of falling and loud sounds. The rest are learned. Our surroundings – parents, siblings, friends, TV – teach us at a young age to be scared of things, like the dark or monsters.
SM has an unusual genetic disorder called Urbach-Wiethe disease. In late childhood, this disease destroyed both sides of her amygdala, which is composed of two structures the shape and size of almonds, one on each side of the brain. Because of this brain damage, the woman knows no fear, the researchers found.
Primordial fears, also known as primal fears, are those that are deeply rooted in the human psyche, borne out of our ancestral need for survival. These fears include fear of darkness, heights, predators, death, and isolation.
Humanity's greatest fear is not the unknown, it's the certainty of death. And we've been coping with it artistically since time immemorial.
Here are the three most common fears that I've seen hold people from achieving success, and how overcome them:
Napolean Hill has spelt out the 6 basic fears in his Classic book – Think and Grow Rich: