Comments on: Closer threats inspire a more primitive kind of fear https://www.isegoria.net/2020/08/closer-threats-inspire-a-more-primitive-kind-of-fear/ From the ancient Greek for equality in freedom of speech; an eclectic mix of thoughts, large and small Sun, 14 Jun 2026 19:08:36 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.6.1 By: McChuck https://www.isegoria.net/2020/08/closer-threats-inspire-a-more-primitive-kind-of-fear/comment-page-1/#comment-3231812 McChuck Sun, 02 Aug 2020 13:26:35 +0000 https://www.isegoria.net/?p=46927#comment-3231812 Amazing. Psychologists have discovered that people have personal space, and that threats close enough to touch you are more dangerous (and thus frightening) than potential threats far enough away to run from.

Amazing what money gets spent on.

Oh, and PTSD is when the reaction to the threat doesn’t go away after a year.

]]> By: Kirk https://www.isegoria.net/2020/08/closer-threats-inspire-a-more-primitive-kind-of-fear/comment-page-1/#comment-3231663 Kirk Sat, 01 Aug 2020 20:28:31 +0000 https://www.isegoria.net/?p=46927#comment-3231663 I remain ever skeptical of these lab-experiment psychological studies. No matter how well-constructed, the fact is that the experimenters are still “in the loop”, and imposing their notions on things. Meanwhile, out in the real world, people are exposed to things that don’t include third parties either making it all worse, or all better.

There may be something to this idea of proximity; the idea rings true, but as I said… It’s all artificial, staged, and entirely constructed along the lines of the experimenter’s own ideas. Of course they’re going to get results that they’re expecting–What else could happen?

When you include humans as your experimental subjects, I think that what needs to happen is that you use pure observation of real-world events, and then try to form your ideas based off of observations, rather than construct artificial proxies. There are way too many variables with it all–I know guys who went for multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, shrugging off crap that broke other men with utter aplomb. Then, when things changed in their lives, something relatively minor broke them, too.

Way too many variables in the human mind, I’m afraid. I’m a life-long observer of it, and even after fifty-plus years of doing it, I’m still surprised by how other people respond or don’t respond to things.

As well, there are different forms of PTSD–Some I think are due to empathy with victims, others to personal trauma. I watched one of our medics go through things, and I found it very interesting that he was sufficiently self-centered that even having to pull still-living crispy critters out of one of a vehicle that had burned after an IED strike, he was completely (seemingly, at least–Who the hell knows what really goes on in someone else’s mind?) unaffected. Yet, when he himself got wounded in a relatively minor fashion, he went full-bore shaking and losing his shit because he couldn’t handle things. I’d still like to know what was really going on with him–We all had several theories about it, one being that he didn’t internalize the risks he was taking until he got hurt himself, and the other was that he was a bit of a sociopath and the people he was working on didn’t register as “real”. Either way, it was not something that a lab experiment would have likely turned up…

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