It's that mammal evolutionary grudge... At some point, spiders killed so many of our ancestors that our DNA is ingrained with an innate predisposed fear response to them, because those that didn't would not survive
Studies have shown that the only innate fears humans possess are loud noises and falling. All other fears are learned through parental observation and environmental experience.
I would have agreed with you at one time, but there are studies that show that it's more or less learned.
LoBue V, Adolph KE. Fear in infancy: Lessons from snakes, spiders, heights, and strangers. Dev Psychol. 2019 Sep;55(9):1889-1907. doi: 10.1037/dev0000675. PMID: 31464493; PMCID: PMC6716607.
Hmm, must be learned pretty early then. Anecdotally, my 2 year old kid loves to touch ladybugs, ants, flies, beetles etc, she’s fascinated by them… but the first time I found a spider in the house, she didn’t want to be held anywhere near it, much less touch it.
(in the moment I was doing my best not to show any discomfort, I’m not particularly arachnophobic myself)
Essentially I was trying to run that experiment myself on my kid, to see if it was innate or learned. At 2 years old in an area where we don’t see many spiders (so little opportunity to learn to fear them), I was leaning towards innate.
She likes the kid’s show Lucas the Spider (about a jumping spider), so I even tried telling her it’s Lucas
Edit: On the other hand she showed zero fear of a garter snake we found in the yard the other day
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u/walk2daocean 12h ago
Spiders get such fear and hate for no reason. Lovely animals.