What is collective fear and how to overcome it?

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Victor Vakhstein

Candidate of Sociological Sciences, Professor, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, MSSES.

Usually, by "collective fear" is meant some general emotional state of some large social group - "society", "people". Something like this is shown in play "Fear and Despair in the Third Empire" by the German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht.

However, in reality, there is no "collective fear".

Even if you are afraid of something just because your friends, parents, neighbors, or just acquaintances are afraid of it, this is not a collective fear. And even when many people independently of each other are afraid of what they think of the same thing - nuclear war, hunger, infection, sudden arrest - this is also not a collective fear.

So where does the myth of collective fear come from, then? From habitual thinking by analogy. There is a man. He may be scared, he may be anxious about something, he may have phobias, obsessions, panic. And there is a "collective" or "society". This is such an assembly assembled from many people. And it turns out that if you search well, you can also find some kind of phobia.

Sociologists at the end of the 19th century in Europe (and at the end of the 20th century in Russia) enthusiastically played the collective psychodiagnostics, talking about "anxious society", "neurotic society", "public fears" and "Social phobias". However, such concepts have no more meaning than “collective love” or “social sadness”.

However, the fact that society is not a gigantic organism, but a collective state is not melting the cauldron of individual emotions does not mean that our feelings cannot be caused by the behavior of others of people. In contrast, deeply personal experiences - from mild anxiety to panic attacks - are social through and through.

So it's worth talking not about collective, but about induced fear.

That is, an individual emotional reaction that is "triggered" by external triggers - events, actions, or words - after something is recognized as a threat. Moreover, the threat and the trigger do not necessarily coincide. Actually, the external trigger (source of induction) is what makes the threat a threat.

For example, you learn from the parent chat that the school where your child is studying is selling drugs. A father immediately appears, who knows for sure (he saw it himself, reliable people told him) that suspicious-looking teenagers are selling heroin to fifth graders behind the school playground. And now, after several hours of parental hysteria, you are in the past rational, sane, not emotion-prone person - take time off from work to join your parent patrol. "

And about the moral panic associated with rumors about "blue whales", there is an interesting study"Groups of death": from play to moral panic a team of anthropologists led by Alexandra Arkhipova.

Sources of fear induction vary in scope and type.

• The introduction of a self-isolation regime or searches of friends are "frightening" events that do not depend on what your closest circle says and thinks about it.
• The actions of your acquaintances - those who in the early days of the pandemic purchased pasta and cartridges for the Saiga carbine.
• Words, sayings, narratives, permeated with a sense of fear - from a post of an unfamiliar person on Facebook to programs on Channel One.

Moreover, as the means of communication develop, the methods of infection with fear also change. He verbalizes, becomes more "chatty". This is no longer the silent horror of an American farmer digging a bunker in his backyard in anticipation of a nuclear apocalypse. Today, fear is a seething of panicky posts and comments on social media.

As for the fight against the epidemic of fears, studying them is the best weapon.

Moreover, the sociology of emotions has already established itself well as a field of research. You can start diving into it with the book "An Invitation to the Sociology of Emotions" by Scott Harris. I also recommend Fear. The History of a Political Idea "by Robin Corey.