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What are we scared of?
February 23, 2009
In his book Click (which has just been published in the UK), one of the topics that Bill Tancer discusses is using search data to get an understanding of what people really think about a topic – as opposed to what they tell researchers or friends. One example cited in the book is people’s fears.
According to a US study, the most frequently expressed fear is of bugs, mice, snakes or bats. But looking at our search data, Bill found that the most searched for fear was ‘fear of flying’ – which didn’t even appear in the survey top 10. Similarly, the highest ranking animal fear according to the Hitwise data was ‘fear of snakes’ at number 8, which appeared below the likes of heights, clowns, intimacy, death, rejection and people.
For the 12 weeks ending 14/02/09, UK Internet users searched for over 8,500 distinct terms containing the phrase ‘fear of’. Here are top 10:
1. fear of flying (2.27% of all ‘fear of’ searches)
2. fear of cats (1.72%)
3. irrational fear of cats (1.34%)
4. fear of clowns (1.10%)
5. fear of long words (1.01%)
6. fear of heights (0.86%)
7. fear of the dark (0.62%)
8. fear of death (0.61%)
9. fear of spiders (0.43%)
10. fear of crime (0.36%)
So, the most popular phrase is ‘fear of flying’ - as it was in the US - but the combined volume for ‘fear of cats’ and ‘irrational fear of cats’ was higher. However, there are over 500 variations on the term ‘fear of flying’, and once these are added together they beat the 90 or so variations on the cat theme. I must admit to being surprised by the popularity of cat fear, so had to check it wasn’t the name of a film or something. But, no, lots of people really do seem to have an irrational fear of cats!
While looking into the ‘fear of’ searches, I also checked on the variations of ‘scared of’, Over the same 12 week period there were less variations on ‘scared of’ (3,000) than ‘fear of’ (8,500), but the results were similar. The top variation on ‘scared of’ was ‘scared of lonely lyrics’, which is actually a Beyonce song, while ‘scared of flying’ was the second most popular.
One interesting term in the ‘scared of’ list was ‘I’m not scared of becky taylor’, which ranked 10th out of over 3,000 variations on the term for the 12 weeks ending 14/02/09. This is a line from a current anti-smoking TV ad, and nicely illustrates how search behaviour is influenced by other media. Interestingly none of that search traffic is going to government of health related sites, implying that the campaign has missed an opportunity in terms of paid search / SEO.
You can buy a copy of Bill Tancer’s excellent book Click:What We Do Online and Why it Matters here, and follow Hitwise on Twitter here.
Posted by Robin Goad at 11:40 AM
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Comments
I'd agree with Adi. What the search data tells us is the popularity of the desire to find out more about a fear. That desire is most likely to be triggered by particular events - I'm flying next week, my child has trouble sleeping and says they're afraid of the dark etc. That's not the same as knowing which fears are most widely held.
Posted by Mark Pack | February 23, 2009 04:49 PM
I'm really surprised to see 'fear of failure' not listed there?????? Alice
Posted by Alice | February 23, 2009 10:25 PM
I've got to side with the other two commenters.
Your own reaction to the fear of cats thing demonstrates what might be happening here. People are probably looking these up out of curiosity or novelty value, to see whether they are real and/or widely held fears. The presence of 'clowns' and 'long words' in the top 10 seems to support this also.
Posted by Tom | February 24, 2009 02:03 AM
Thanks for all of your comments! I'll happily concede that much of this search behaviour is driven by curiosity rather than genuine fear. Looking into the historical data it does seem that there was a big spike in cats searches recently - maybe this was driven by a newspaper column or TV program on the topic (sort of thing they might discuss on QI, perhaps?).
The fear of flying searches, however, do illustrate a genuine concern, and the sheer number of variations proves this. They also peak in the summer when most flying takes place. Last summer, for example, there were about twice as many as there are currently.
Posted by Robin Goad | February 24, 2009 07:58 AM
Interesting but I don't think you can discount survey results completely. For instance I'm pretty scared of spiders but here in England we don't get many to be truely scared of, so it's unlikely I'll search for that. If I was scared of flying however then that particular phobia is something I'm much more likely to come into contact with, and therefore search about.
So survey results probably cover a wider range of fears whereas search results reveal our more practical fears.
Posted by Adi | February 23, 2009 01:11 PM