Do people who have never been high/elevated have a fear of heights?

This is not a question about being high on drugs.

I am wondering about someone who has lived their whole life in a place with no cliffs, no tall trees, no tall buildings etc. would they have any kind of interesting reaction to finding themselves on the precipice of some highly elevated place?

Would they completely freak out at being in such an apparently dangerous situation? Or would they fail to recognise the risks associated with falling?

I mentioned in another thread about a psych test, where the psychologists had a small room painted in large checked square pattern of black and white, including the floor. One half of the room the floor was about 3 feet higher than the other half, and the side with the drop off there was a solid glass continuation of the high floor. They tested puppies, kittens, and even crawling babies and all instinctively avoided going out onto what appeared to be (visually) going off a cliff.

Instinctively all grasped the concept of distance and the geometry of what they were seeing (the checked pattern making it very obvious) and understood that “vertical drop equals bad”.

OTOH, humans have rational thought, and some can overcome this instinct. I suspect familiarity may have something to do with overcoming fear of heights. I know my fear is that a simple stumble (not that we ever have them) is why I choose to avoid approaching serious unprotected drops when I can, when I don’t need to.

If I recall correctly, heights and loud noises are the only two fears that humans have instinctively, and all the others need to be learned (though some of them, like snakes and darkness, we’re instinctively predisposed to, so it’s easier to learn those fears).

That sounds interesting. Is there a photo of the room?

You’ll see a whole bunch of pictures, both photos and diagrams, if you google “visual cliff experiment” and select Images.

One example:

It’s been replicated, too.

In college in the 1980s, I saw narrated color films of the experiment that were obviously-- be the dress of the experimenters, and even the babies, done in the 70s.

The woman in the photo, incidentally, is visually and verbally coaxing the baby to come to her, and he still won’t.

IIRC the films I saw, when an experimenter tried to coax an unknown baby, the baby just sat there ignoring her (it was always a woman), but when a baby’s mother did it, the baby would usually cry.

Up and down, the physical dimension, is deeply important to us. No surprise given our heritage of evolving to walk on hind legs, and being tall and massive enough that falling from our default standing posture is at least a little hazardous to us.
Elephants are very massive animals that stand, and they’re quite afraid of heights, I’ve read. But walking animals that are small in size don’t need to be, such as ants.
I read years ago that probing our thought processes has made clear that human brains do much of our rational thought by analogies. And I don’t mean the way we construct arguments and communicate with each other (in which of course we often use analogies). I mean at a much deeper level. We have a base understanding of up and down, of verticality, which any animal strongly influenced by gravity would have. Humans, though, extend this idea of high and low to other quantitative concepts. Good and bad (high morals and low), wealth (high/low income or assets), speed, temperature, numbers, and on and on. We seem to have a built in circuit for understanding altitude, and also more recently built in circuits for shifting our altitude circuit for application in other concepts. [I know somebody is quite reasonably going to want to see a cite for this, and I’m trying to remember where I saw it.]

All of this is to say that an inbuilt fear of up and down situations involving mortal hazard would hardly be a surprise.

Fear of heights seems to be innate. In rats, it seems to be associated with the activation of a very specific cluster of brain cells, and the unlearned activation is correlated with standing in a visibly elevated location with a risk of falling.

Is avoidance behavior around falling the same thing as a fear of heights? I know people with genuine phobias of heights.

When I was at basic, several women were not crazy about the idea of being assigned the top bunk, but one woman actually got hysterical and started crying at the very idea of it.

I slept on either the top bunk of a bunkbed, in the open with no bar on either side, or a loft, most of my life, and volunteered for the top-- I actually had less fear of falling than of the top collapsing, although I have no idea what the statistics are regarding either.

But I would not dance around on the edge of a cliff, and proceed cautiously on a road on the edge of anything.

I know people who feel nauseated or dizzy looking over steep falls even when they are behind a high rail, and know people who get a fear rush any time there’s an over-the-edge of anything scene in a movie. I don’t experience anything in particular, unless there’s a genuine reason to think a character is in jeopardy, and then I feel the same way I do if a character is cornered my a guy with a gun, or stalked by the monster in the film.

So I would guess that avoiding falling is what is innate-- actual fear of heights might take something more.

That’s a good question. I have a strong phobia of heights, such that I can’t even watch a movie or TV scene that shows someone near a large vertical drop, I have to look away. I believe I didn’t have this kind of fear before a traumatic experience that happened to me at age 9, so it was acquired (if I’m right).

Yeah-- the babies in the experiment would not cross the apparent drop, but just stopped and sat by the edge of it. The only time they showed distress (IIRC-- psych 102 was 33 years ago) was when their moms were on the other side of it.

I think your conclusion is correct.

I’ve told this story before. As a career pilot who started flying as a kid I obviously spent a relative lot of time a mile or several above the ground. Any fear of heights was long gone early. And as a frequent traveler I spent a lot of nights in tall hotels looking out of tall windows.

I was about 35 when I bought a condo in a highrise. 16th floor and a sheer drop from our balcony to the ground. With a rather flimsy-looking railing. No nearby tall buildings and a downtown in the distance. Quite a view.

When I first bought the place I couldn’t get more than about a step past the door onto the balcony. There was a repulsive force field pushing me back from approaching the railing or edge closer than about 8 feet. Fast forward a week and I could lean on the railing with half of me out over the edge looking up, down, sideways, whatever, without any concern.

Nearly everybody who visited us had a similar reaction. There was something really unsettling about that view and that height that took exposure to overcome.

I knew a man who couldn’t go out on open water in a boat. I mean, a wide expanse of water like a big lake or the ocean. He said it wasn’t that he was afraid of drowning but that it triggered his fear of falling. Like he felt he would ‘fall’ all the way to the bottom of the sea or whatever. He was okay with crossing rivers or streams on bridges – he could walk across them, or ride in a car or similar, but on his feet, as in a boat, nope.

I never thought to ask him if he’d be okay riding his car across on a ferry.

I grew up at the beach in SoCal. Lotta water but none of it transparent. I swam, surfed, boated, etc., from a young age with no qualms.

When I was about 14 we took a vacation to a tropical paradise. Quiet lagoons protected by coral reefs, utterly transparent water, pretty colored fish & corals, the whole shebang.

It was very unsettling paddling a canoe across the lagoon seeing the sandy bottom & coral 20 or 40 feet below. It was as if at any moment the water would stop supporting me/the canoe and I’d fall to the bottom then be looking up with no way to swim back to the surface. Seeing the shadow of the canoe traveling along the bottom was especially disturbing. A strange sensation I really didn’t get over completely during my week-plus there. I could go out there and have fun, but it took some mental effort to overcome the upwelling aversion every time.

After many other clearwater vacations since over the decades and now living in such a place full time, boating or snorkeling in transparent deep water doesn’t bother me in the slightest. But I sure have the memory of when it did.

I think fears are often be triggered by unexpected context clues like seeing the actual bottom of the lagoon. My fear of heights isn’t usually triggered by looking down, but by looking outward or upward. Sitting high up in the bleachers watching a race didn’t bother me until I noticed I could see the top cap of an ordinary street light. It made me aware of the height and gave me a sense I wasn’t supposed to be there. Illogical, but disturbing.

I had a similar experience the first time I snorkeled in a fresh water cenote in Mexico. The water in cenotes is very very clear. Sitting on the rocky edge and looking down into the water felt like sitting on the edge of a 50 foot high cliff. I literally could not push myself off into the water, even though I could feel that my feet were in the water. I had to turn around and lower myself into the water while hanging on to the rock. I had had a lot of experience snorkeling in ocean water before that and had never experienced that fear before.

To return to the OP, is everyone born on equal footing, so to speak-- that baby who won’t crawl over what appears to be a sudden drop, but while all retain an avoidance of falling, some develop an actual fear of being high up, even when they know they are safe-- they can’t sleep on a top bunk, even with safety bars, they can’t ride ski lifts, they have difficulty even going up several flights of stairs.

Now, why do some people develop that fear?

Is merely never being exposed to high places enough for the fear to develop in an adult who has so other reason for it, or does it take a traumatic event around heights? In other words, while we all are born knowing to avoid falling, there is no fear of heights-- but we develop one in the absence of contrary evidence.

The Phobia - Wikipedia article says fear of heights is a very common phobia. And provides a lot of woolly discussion about how phobias in general form, with no clear answer given. IOW, psychological science doesn’t really know of a single simple proximate cause for phobias. But a scary exposure or two at a very young age can certainly set the train to phobiatown in motion.

It seems to me that people who are afraid of heights are not typically afraid of being on an upper floor of a building or going up stairs, or even being inside an aircraft. That panicky feeling is typically triggered by a visual stimulus where you are exposed to the height by either looking straight down (e.g. on a ski lift or standing on a glass surface) or over a nearby edge. It can even be triggered vicariously by seeing YouTube videos of other, less fearful, people who put themselves in danger of falling from great heights on buildings, etc.

I am speaking as someone who is moderately nervous of heights but did learn to fly and often had to work on platforms at heights of up to 35 metres. If I am on a stable surface, I’m fine, but if I climb a few metres up a tree my legs start shaking.

Of course there are people who are afraid of flying, but I don’t think that’s the same thing.

I agree. I think fear of flying has more to do with claustrophobia, because apparently people who have it don’t even like getting onto planes that aren’t going anywhere.

And I did really know someone who insisted on taking elevators, even one flight, because stairs scared her. I thought she meant because of the number of horror films where bad things happened in stairwells, and on staircases, but she said no, it was because she was afraid of heights, and if she somehow caught a glimpse over the railing, she freaked if she was more than a couple of flights up.