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Originally Posted by Ub3rD4n
Wait, wait...humans have been proven to NOT have a fear of snakes? Not that I'm calling you a liar, but mind if I ask where you found that? Just seems kinda weird, seeing as everyone I know is a little scared of them despite never having any real contact with them. In fact, as far as I know, the people with contact with snakes are LESS likely to be afraid, cause most snakes are harmless to humans and so holding, seeing etc them helps people to realise that.
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B.F. Skinner actually did experiments with this, which were later validated by another experiment at Yerkes Primate Center. Skinner compared the reactions of human toddlers, which had not been exposed to snakes, with those of young chimps and Rhesus monkeys, which were born in captivity and also had had no contact with snakes. He placed a harmless snake in contact with both groups. The human toddlers readily picked up the snake, touched it, and were not afraid of it at all. In contrast, the young chimps and monkeys, although never having seen a snake before, were terrified of it. The Yerkes Primate Center experiment used a toy snake, which elicited terror in every single species of ape and monkey they showed it to, including those which were captive born and had never seen a snake, even those that had been raised by humans, without even having had contact with adults of their own kind. These experiments are widely known in child psych studies, and if you plan to become a teacher, you must take lots of child psych courses. The fear of snakes is a cultural thing in humans, and it is NOT actually present in all cultures. Most Native American cultures do not promote a fear of snakes, for example. More recent studies suggest that we humans have a gene that allows us to LEARN to fear certain aninals very readily, but we do not have an instinctive fear of those animals. Here is the details of that latest experiments, which proved that toddlers do have a predisposition to LEARN to fear certain things, but they have to learn it from SOMEBODY:
http://aands.virginia.edu/x837.xml . Even people who live where there are no snakes, are still subliminally bombarded with the message that snakes are "evil", and all of them are dangerous, or "mean". We have images of snakes used to represent evil or something bad in everything from advertizing to religious imagery to popular movies, and we are exposed to that from an early age. Most people just accept it, and don't even question it. Children are very perceptive to their parents' reactions to things; they can witness a parent reacting negatively to seeing a snake on tv, and file that away in their subconcious as a bad thing. If everything you see or hear about something is negative, naturally you will fear it. It's ironic that humans ourselves have probably never been preyed upon by snakes, unlike monkeys and small apes which HAVE evolved where large constricting snakes are among their predators, but there is considerable paleo-anthropoligical evidence that we we often eaten by large mammalian predators, like leopards, but far fewer people will react with fear to a large cat, than will to a even a small snake.
Some of us apparently lack that gene, since in spite of my parents' efforts to make me hate snakes, I never did feel anything that could overcome my fascination for them, and my neice, who is now four, is just as fascinated with them as I was, and is asking her parents to let her have one for Christmas already! I actually managed to change my dad's and grandparents' attitudes about snakes, to the point that my grandfather, who was normally more or less a human version of Wilt, once threatened a guy with a shotgun after the guy nearly ran HIM down in his own driveway while attempting to run over a Ratsnake that had just crossed the road in front of my grandparents' house, then had the audacity to tell my grandfather to get out of the way so he could kill the snake...in my grandfather's own driveway. You didn't mess with Ratsnakes or Kingsnakes on Papa's property, even though when I was a little kid he would kill any and every snake he saw, not realizing that most of them were harmless and would actually do a lot of good by eating the rodents that are the scourge of every farmer. Behavior that is learned, can be UNlearned, but true instinct is almost impossible to overcome. If humans had a real, instinctive, unlearned fear of snakes, you would be very hard-pressed to teach people to accept them, but I've done that with many people. Often, just seeing me hold one will be enough to make many people develope a new-found respect for the animals. Even people with genuine phobias, which are a form of mental illness, can be cured of their phobia of snakes.
pitbulllady