I’m a zoo educator, and my experiences agree with Troppus (hi, colleague!) - kids don’t generally fear snakes, or any animal, unless that fear has been modeled to them. We visit kids of diverse backgrounds with our outreach program scholarships, and have found that fear of snakes (and animals more generally, including spiders, birds, and other reptiles - my top 4 for fear responses) follows pretty strongly along socioeconomic trends. Here in California, I find a lot of kids from immigrant communities, be they Vietnamese, Latino, whatever, exhibit more fear.
It’s actually a pet peeve of mine, when adults don’t or can’t model appropriate behavior around animals. I think some parents just don’t seem to realise what little sponges their children are?. Why would you want to instill that same needless fear in the next generation? Teachers, too, should show their students how they want them to behave around animals.
To be fair, in many parts of the world (and the US) a healthy respect for, if not outright fear of, snakes is not a bad trait to have.
Ah, it seems I draw a much finer line between fear and respect. I think there’s a big difference between keeping your distance from a wild snake (sensible!), and shrinking away from/making a fuss about being near a captive non-venomous snake being handled responsible (silly).
I’m not an educator like Troppus or araminty, but once upon a time my children were small and I owned a grey rat snake. I was asked to bring the snake into school several times, mostly for share and tell for my oldest. It was an area where people moved a lot, so this wasn’t the same set of kids each time, just similar kids.
In preschool, none of the kids were even slightly afraid. In fact my main concern was making sure that nobody suddenly grabbed the snake and hurt it.
In kindergarden, the kids were less grabby, and a lot of kids weren’t very interested, but no one seemed afraid.
In first grade, no one seemed afraid, but there was one assured little girl who announced with pride that no, she didn’t want to touch the snake because she was afraid. I looked over and she was sitting very still and upright toward the back of the room with a clutch of other girls in the desks around her, all of whom were obviously in the process of taking their cues from her.
They were settling back in their seats and looking both abashed and disappointed as they murmurred that no, they wouldn’t come touch it either because snakes were scary. Queen Bee obviously saw girls being afraid of snakes as a social rule and her circle were not going to rebel. She seemed pleased to have figured out the rule ahead of them, as if that put her one up.
In second grade, about a third of the girls were actually afraid. It wasn’t something that they were thinking about, it was a reaction.
After that, the snake was no longer with us. I’ve always wondered how representative that little tableau in the first grade was.
I’ll join the other educators who employ living examples in stating that kids have no fear of snakes until and unless they are taught to have that reaction. Of course, the teaching isn’t always, or even primarily, directed or intentional. In our culture (US of A) the first snake scare story is probably that famous one involving Eve. Snakes are identified as bad, as evil, and from there it isn’t a large step to fear. Children also swiftly take up the reactions of adults and older kids, who are seen as being experienced, more mature, and thus worthy of emulation. That’s an innate part of human learning, after all. And it makes evolutionary sense that something which produces a marked fear reaction in a member of the population (“Eek! A SNAKE!!”) would probably benefit other individuals to copy it (I was going to say “ape it”, and perhaps that just emphasizes the point).
ETA: Yes, Yllaria, that’s exactly the kind of “cultural inculcation” I’ve seen as well.
I wouldn’t say that I’m particularly afraid of snakes, although I’d be lying if I said I liked them. Spiders, on the other hand, give me the heebie-jeebies.
Heights: not quite, but kind of. See the visual cliff.
While not related directly to snakes, you might be interested (or horrified) in the Little Albert experiment.
It showed fear was largely learnt.
As many of you have pointed out explicitly or can be inferred, acculturation, personal/familial/social or in larger forms (eg Biblical) is a great factor. Which, by the way, makes araminty’s observation about “immigrant communities” all the more interesting. MLS on learning to fear flowers is noteworthy here–but once you’ve said “learning” you’re out of the running.
I am using the word “instinct” in a different sense. I obviously am unfamiliar of the academic debate on the concept–hello Straight Dope–but let me pose the following exclusionary delimiter:
PlainJane suggests that humans’ instinctively fear heights, loud noises, and, uniquely among the animal kingdom, snakes. Der Trihs seconds the latter, effectively, buy stating a predispositive hair-line-trigger for snakes.
I am leaning toward the fear of heights–I remember some study of how different-aged infants cross a clear glass table (but I can’t remember its conclusions :)). What I know of what have been called human instincts are when newborns suck and when they grip their hands around anything–necessary for survival for mammals that have to hold on for locomotion.
So, what I think should be excluded as evidence is the anecdotal examples above of non-fear (using the emotion/response of fear itself*, broadly speaking, as subsuming others) because we, as humans, can overcome stuff mentally. Fear of pain or, Hell, the urge of self-preservation–which we share with amoebas–is overcome in a myriad of ways. Overcoming the evolutionary, “super-duper instinct”–as I fathom it–of self-preservation, can range from wearing a rubber to suicide. All done every day, but not dispositive of an absence of instinct.
Lions and tigers and bears** don’t seem to have the same effect on us, and are pretty threatening to self-preservation, as jas09 andFluffyBob*** remark. Perhaps they have enough lookalikes that familiarity provides ease of dealing with their threats (this is related, but does not have the same point, as only being fearful of snakes when they’re pissed-off-looking [gnoitall]).
I’m still in the dark. Isn’t that an instinctual fear for us, now that I think of it?
*Snuck that in.
**That too.
***Good username/topic match on fear of bunnies.
I Googled"humans innate fear of snakes" and found quite a few reliable and some dubious studies. On phone it’s hard to read in depth and cross reference,but this article in Cosmos brings together several studies for one conclusion. Looks like the answers are leaning towards yes, the fear is innate. http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/5080/scared-snakes-this-could-be-why
However, some of the psychology based studies seem to indicate it’s easily overcome, so I’m not sure a phobic person can get a lot of mileage out of “I was born to fear! Can’t help it!”
PS: Thanks on Little Albert and the visual cliff–which is the experiment I was thinking of and which will teach me to read the most-recent posts. The wiki entry on Little Albert has an egregious (I think) error in it’s summation, by following the line of its own text: the initial, non-conditioned, to-be-generalized in steps fear was of sound, not furry objects. Not sure if I’ll change that.
Are you my sister?
I always liked snakes and would try and catch them so I could pick them up and pet them. I would have one now, but I can’t cope with the idea of having to feed small dead furry things to my pet.
Not sure if you (or someone) changed it already, but if I’m looking at the paragraph before “Post experiment,” then it’s saying that he was trained to fear the rabbit, and this conditioned response led to him fearing things similar to a rabbit (based on texture, color, etc.) based on generalization. It is true that the initial rabbit was conditioned through use of the use of a sound that automatically caused a response.
I might just be! Because that is the one and ONLY reason I don’t have a pet snake… I wouold LOVE to have a pretty little corn snake. If they ever come up with a Purina Snake Chow… I’m IN!
I have always liked snakes, and frequently kept them as pets from about the age of 5 onwards. As an adult I also kept brown tarantulas as pets. They tickle as they walk on your arm 
My mother was terrified of snakes, and she passed that fear along to me. I am convinced that every snake in the world would like nothing better than to jump on me and chew my face off with its killer fangs.
The only time I’ve ever been able to get past my (irrational) fear was when my three year old son was in the backyard and reached down and picked up a 12 inch green garter snake and started talking to it. I very casually and calmly walked over to him, picked the snake out of his hand and put it back on the ground, telling my son that the snakes mom wanted him to come home for lunch.
Fortunately I was able to do this before the snake jumped on me and chewed my face off with its killer fangs, and my son is now 20 and LOVES snakes, so I didn’t pass on the family phobia.
I am going to try to find this study I read about a long time ago, in which adult subjects (probably college students) who had no phobias about any of the tested items, were given mild electric shocks while being shown images of generally neutral objects like shoes, chickens, jars of jam and so forth, and also images of snakes and spiders.
What was found was that immediately after the shock sessions, any of the images would evoke a physiological fear response, but after repeated showings without the shock, images of neutral objects evoked less and less of a response until a complete return of normality.
Not so, the images of snakes and spiders. No matter how indifferent the test subjects were at the beginning of the test, their startle/fear response to snakes and spiders stayed high no matter how many times there was no accompanying shock.
Leading to the hypothesis that there is indeed some latent genetic fear response that merely needs a trigger to set it going forever.
I don’t fear snakes if I see them first. It’s the surprise factor. Once, I had to remove a black snake from a broadcast transmittet. I assumed he was dead…Wrong! But hr was pissed. Tried to bite me. Yep, scary.
Today’s Best Mom award goes to LouLou7. Great work, Mom!