UC Berkeley political scientist Marika Landau-Wells first watched the 1990 movie Arachnophobia as a kid. Her mom warned her not to see it: The horror-comedy, about a California town terrorized by a deadly species of spider accidentally imported from a Venezuelan jungle, was PG-13, and Landau-Wells was a lot younger than 13. But some of her friends were going to the theater to see it — at least one of their parents thought it was fine — so she went.
“I now have this deep-seated conviction that all spiders are at least 8 inches in diameter, hairy and can jump,” says Landau-Wells, an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science.
She knows this isn’t true. But her fear of spiders is governed by that mental image, burned into her brain at a young age. When she encounters a spider now, she has to pause and ask herself, “Are my eyes seeing this thing? Is it 8 inches wide? No, it isn’t. Is it probably going to leap at my face? No, it’s not.”