Fearmongering, orscaremongering, is the act of exploiting feelings of fear by using exaggerated rumors of impending danger, usually for personal gain.[1][2]
According toevolutionary anthropology andevolutionary biology, humans have a strong impulse to pay attention to danger because awareness of dangers has been important for survival throughout theirevolutionary history. The effect is amplified bycultural evolution when thenews media cater to people's appetite for news about dangers.[3]
The attention of citizens is a fiercely contested resource thatnews media,political campaigners,social reformers,advertisers,civil society organizations,missionaries, and culturalevent makers compete over, according toattention economy.[4]
Social agents of all kinds are often using fearmongering as a tactic in the competition for attention, as illustrated by the examples below.[3][5]
Fearmongering can have strongpsychological effects, which may be intended orunintended. One hypothesized effect ismean world syndrome in which people perceive the world as more dangerous than it really is.[6][7] Fearmongering can make people fear the wrong things, and use too many resources to avoid rare and unlikely dangers while more probable dangers are ignored. For example, some parents have kept their children at home to preventabduction while they paid less attention to more common dangers such aslifestyle diseases ortraffic accidents.[8] Fearmongering can produce arally around the flag effect by increasing support for the incumbent political leaders. For example, official warnings about the risk ofterrorist attacks have led to increased support for the proposed policies ofUS Presidents.[9][10]
Collective fear is likely to produce anauthoritarian mentality, desire for astrong leader, strictdiscipline,punitiveness,intolerance,xenophobia, and lessdemocracy, according toregality theory. Historically, the effect has been exploited bypolitical entrepreneurs in many countries for purposes such as increasing support for anauthoritarian government, avoidingdemocratization, or preparing the population for war.[11]
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Daisy is a famous television commercial that aired in 1964 and was run byLyndon B. Johnson'spresidential campaign. It begins with a little girl standing in a meadow, birds chirping in the background; she picks and clumsily counts the petals off of a daisy. When she reaches 'nine', an ominous male voice begins a launch countdown. The girl's gaze turns toward the sky and the camera zooms into her eye until her pupil blackens the screen. As the countdown reaches zero, a nuclear explosion flashes on and morphs into a mushroom cloud. While the firestorm rages, Johnson's declares, "These are the stakes! To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die." Another voice then says, "Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay home."[12]
Fierce economiccompetition is driving commercialmass media to rely extensively on scary stories and bad news in a competition that has been characterized as an emotionalarms race.[13] Stories about crime, and especially violent crimes and crimes against children, figure prominently among newspaper headlines. An analysis of US newspapers has found that between 10 and 30% of headlines involve crime and fear, with a tendency to a shift of focus from isolated crime events to more thematic articles about fear.[14]In the United Kingdom, the news media have routinely used a focus on gory sex crimes as a parameter of competition. The continued focus on emotionally touching sex crimes has had a strong influence on politics and legislation in the country.[15]
Advertisers have also entered the arena with their discovery that "fear sells". Ad campaigns based on fear, sometimes referred to asshockvertising, have become increasingly popular in recent years. Fear is a strong emotion and it can bemanipulated to persuade people into making emotional rather than reasoned choices. From car commercials that imply that having fewerairbags will cause the audience's family harm, todisinfectant commercials that showpathogenic bacteria lurking onevery surface, fear-based advertising works.[16] While using fear in ads has generated some negative reactions by the public, there is evidence to show that "shockvertising" is a highly effectivepersuasion technique, and over the last several years, advertisers have continued to increase their usage of fear in ads in what has been called a "never-ending arms race in the advertising business".[17]
AuthorKen Ring was accused of scaremongering by New Zealand politicianNick Smith. The Auckland seller of almanacs made predictions about earthquakes and weather patterns based on lunar cycles, and some of his predictions were taken seriously by some members of the public in connection with the2011 earthquakes inChristchurch, New Zealand.[18]
Fearmongering is routinely used inpsychological warfare for the purpose of influencing a target population. The tactics often involves defamation of an enemy by means ofsmear campaigns.False flag attacks have been used as a pretext for starting a war in many cases, including theGulf of Tonkin incident, theShelling of Mainila, andOperation Himmler.Terrorism is also a kind of psychological warfare. It is creating violence and terror in order to get media attention or to scare an enemy.[19][20]
A remarkable tactic is thestrategy of tension, which is based on making violence and chaos in order to createpolitical instability, todefame an opponent, to pave the way for a moreauthoritarianism orfascist government, or to prevent thedecolonization ofcolonies. The strategy of tension is associated in particular with the widespreadpolitical violence in theYears of Lead in the 1960s to 1980s inItaly. There were manyterrorist attacks in the country in these years, some committed byright-wing andneo-fascist groups, and others byleft-wing groups. Some attacks initially attributed to left-wing groups to were suspected or confirmedfalse flag attacks. The main purpose of the strategy of tension in Italy was to prevent thecommunists from gaining power and to pave the way for aneofascist government. Historians disagree about who were controlling the strategy of tension, but there is evidence that both national neofascist groups and foreign powers were involved.[21][22][23][11]
