Scared of spiders? Science says it can be cured – with wheels and long-legged chairs

Scared of spiders? Science says it can be cured – with wheels and long-legged chairs

Fear of spiders (known as arachnophobia) is widespread, but just why are we so terrified of our eight-legged friends?


There’s a large spider in the cupboard. What do you do? Do you panic and flee the scene? Or do you stride forward confidently, cup and paper in hand, ready to save the day?

Do you bask in the adoration of your onlooking family as you deftly lift the delicate creature high, and stare entranced at the glossy black eyes and glistening fangs on the other side of a thin sheet of glass, before depositing it safely outside? Or do you just close the cupboard door and decide not to worry about it?

This everyday situation, and the choices we make in response, say a lot more about human nature than we might first think. Spiders hold a special place in our lives. They are some of the most common animals we encounter daily, yet are our greatest source of fear. And not just among animals: spiders are our biggest fear of all fears. In psychological studies of people’s fears and phobias, a fear of spiders consistently ranks as the most common – more common than fears of heights, dogs, losing your smartphone or bumping into an ex.

Why are people afraid of spiders: nature vs nuture

This raises the important question of why. Why, in a world of existential threats, from global pandemics to nuclear warfare, does a group of tiny, eight-legged invertebrates take the top spot?

Two main ideas try to explain our dislike of spiders, and they boil down to a question of nature vs nurture. The ‘nature’ explanation supposes that our brains are hardwired to fear spiders because of our evolutionary past. In short, our ancient ancestors who feared spiders and avoided them were more likely to survive and pass on their genes to future generations. Those who didn’t fear spiders would have more close encounters with them and, as a result, wouldn’t survive to pass on their genes.

This idea has an intuitive appeal that seems to make sense. However, probe a little deeper and it starts to fall to pieces. It hinges on the large assumption that spiders are dangerous – so dangerous that people immune from spider fears must find themselves carelessly stumbling into early graves. This just isn’t true: on the whole, spiders are harmless.

Of course, there are a handful of venomous species that can cause serious medical problems. The Australian Sydney funnel-web spider holds the most-venomous-spider trophy for its fast, lethal venom, but hasn’t been responsible for a fatality since the development of an effective anti-venom in the 1970s. The brown recluse spider of North America is famed for having venom that can cause necrosis (the death of tissue surrounding the bite), while the bites of the Brazilian wandering spider can cause intensely painful and prolonged erections.

Yet these exceptions, scattered across the globe, can’t explain the global phenomenon of spider fear. Stop and ponder how many of your ancestors would have been stumbling across wandering spiders in remote Amazonian jungles and I imagine the number, for most of you reading this, will be quite low. Most spider bites are, at worst, similar to a bee sting.

Even if we follow through with this argument and assume that the inconvenience of the pain and swelling from a spider bite was enough to influence the evolutionary trajectory of our ancestors, we should expect similar fears to have evolved in response to other annoying creatures. Again, this doesn’t seem to be the case. While we are generally cautious of ants, bees, wasps, hornets, jellyfish and stinging nettles, they don’t hold court in the dark recesses of our minds in the way that spiders do.

So if nature isn’t to blame for our spider fears, what about ‘nurture’? Are spider fears just stories that we tell ourselves – myths that infect their way through society, anecdote by anecdote?

It seems a bit of a stretch to think that the world’s number one fear could be nothing more than an infectious idea. But as counterintuitive as it might feel, this seems to be exactly the case. Psychological surveys show that people with a fear of spiders are statistically more likely to have one or more parents with a fear of spiders. People often point to their parents’ behaviour around spiders as a source of anxiety. Think about what happens whenever the topic of spiders comes up around the dinner table. Straight away, people will enthusiastically share their close encounters with the big hairy spider that suddenly scuttled across the carpet while they were watching television, or the exploding egg sac in the garage. All of us, even the spider lovers out there, have a skin-crawling story we love to share.

While spider fears may not be an innate feature of our psyche, our tendency to preferentially focus on negative perceptions of our experiences most certainly is. Researchers have shown that news articles about spiders are significantly more likely to be shared online when they include negative language and perspectives compared to those with neutral or positive perspectives. The old journalist’s adage “If it bleeds, it leads” is as true today as it ever was.

Peacock spider
Peacock spiders are native to Australia and so-called because of their iridescent and colourful patterns. Credit: Getty

Where did our fear of spiders come from?

Where did all these spider rumours start? It’s hard to say. Spiders were supposedly rumoured to spread the bubonic plague back in the Middle Ages. Others point to ancient mythology as a launchpad for spider fears, such as the ancient Greek tale of Arachne, who was cursed to spend her life as a spider for daring to challenge the goddess Athena.

But we could just as easily point to ancient mythology that takes a much more positive spin on our eight-legged companions, such as the creation stories of the Navajo people of the south-western USA, where the fabric of the universe is woven together by the spider woman Na’ashjéii Asdzáá. Perhaps the most well-known spider fable of the modern day is Charlotte’s Web by EB White, which portrays spiders as gentle matriarchs.

Despite the numerous positive portrayals of spiders in pop culture, from the heroics of Spider-Man to the animated Lucas the Spider, they are overshadowed by more terrifying portrayals, such as those of Aragog and Shelob, the giant spiders from Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings.

Treating arachnophobia

The good news is that stories are just stories. Even serious spider fears hold a very loose grip on our minds. Clinically significant arachnophobia is relatively easily treated by professionals using standard exposure therapy. Studies even show that exposure to objects with a glancing similarity to spiders, such as long-legged chairs or the spokes of a wagon wheel, goes some way to reducing our sensitivity to real spiders.

Virtual and augmented-reality applications are bringing about means for people to treat arachnophobia without ever having to sit face-to-face with a real spider. Serious arachnophobia needn’t be a burden on people’s lives, and it needn’t be exacerbated by unjust urban myths about harmless spiders. If we choose to, we could change our relationship with spiders, and it starts with the stories that we tell ourselves.

The amazing lives of spiders

As a professional spider fancier, I obviously find it a shame that the general creepiness of spiders has taken a foothold in our collective psyche. Especially since this is such a small part of what makes spiders interesting. In fact, there are overwhelming amounts of much more interesting spider stories to be told.

There are more than 50,000 spider species worldwide, living everywhere from the icy slopes of the Himalayas to rocky intertidal flats. They can swim underwater, burrow underground, cartwheel across desert dunes and, yes, they can fly. Some spiders walk on water, others disguise themselves as wet, glistening bird droppings, some are almost entirely vegetarian, and many live in cooperative family groups.

As scientists work to uncover the mysteries of spiders’ daily lives, they seem to be constantly stumbling across aspects of their biology that can defy belief. In 2022, scientists found evidence of REM sleep patterns in the common jumping spider, so it’s entirely possible that spiders can dream. In 2018, scientists discovered the world’s only lactating spider, Toxeus magnus, whose spiderlings are reared solely on spider milk from their mothers for the first few weeks of life.

The success of spiders as a group lies not only in their adaptable eight-legged body plan but how they can explore and interact with the world using one of the most astonishing substances to exist on the planet – silk. Using nothing but a handful of protein-producing glands, spiders construct a material that is unmatchable by anything human chemists and engineers have ever invented. Darwin’s bark spider, which can be found in Madagascar, weaves gigantic webs that span riverbanks. Their silk outpaces that of all other spiders and ranks as the toughest biological substance known to science.

Scientists and entrepreneurs have for generations been trying to harness the power of spider silk. In the 17th century, French Jesuit missionaries attempted to turn Madagascar into a new silk-producing capital by establishing local factories that would harvest and weave the silk of golden orb weaver spiders into fabrics.

Fast-forward more than a century to 1999 when American scientists attempted to genetically engineer goats that contained spider silk genes in the part of their DNA that coded for milk production. Silk proteins could be extracted and isolated from goats’ milk in the hope that it could be the secret ingredient for new generations of bio-inspired super-materials, from bulletproof vests to parachute cables.

Despite all this, when the topic of spiders comes up around the dinner table, we still inevitably end up back at the stereotypes of spiders as creepy-crawly monsters. The next time this happens, I’d like you to ask yourself why this is the case, and could it ever be different? What would your household dinner conversations sound like if the spider stories we told were not about how big and hairy they are, but about the medical applications of spider venom or the numerous spiders, or ‘arachnauts’, that NASA has taken into space?

When you open the cupboard door and see a great big house spider staring back at you, what would you feel if you knew that this spider was a doting mother that protects her eggs in a carefully constructed silk pillow? What would it mean to know that the small spider in your garden hedge has intelligence and problem-solving abilities similar to a toddler?

Behind the small black eyes and fuzzy coat of spiders is a whole world of wonder. Scientists are only scratching the surface of what spiders are capable of, and what complex lives they lead. For many, watching a spider meticulously spin its web or slowly navigate its way around the garden brings a sense of amazement, intrigue and inspiration. I hope it does the same for you.

Discover more amazing wildlife stories from around the world

Top image: silhouette of spider at dusk. Credit: Getty

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