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Likewise, it was suggested that ongoing urbanization is the key driver of the prevalence of disgust for insects and spiders, because exposure to animals in urban areas is less frequent 21.
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For example, a recent study suggested that arachnophobic behaviours may be reduced following an exposure to the superhero movie Spider-Man 20. What we do know is that arachnophobic sentiments have a significant social and cultural component 17, 18, 19. Since a limited number of fatalities due to spider bites have occurred in the past few decades 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, the reasons behind our exaggerated perception of risk associated with spiders remain uncertain.ĭespite gigantic leaps forward in cognitive science and neurology, we still do not know the exact reason why arachnophobia is so widespread. Second, the habitat of these few potentially dangerous species rarely overlaps with that of humans, making dangerous human-spider encounters unlikely 11. First, less than 0.5% of spider species can cause severe envenomation in humans 10.
However, such a skewed perception towards the potential harm that spiders can cause humans contrasts with two facts. This is nothing surprising: arachnophobia is likely the most widespread fear related to animals 5, with an estimated prevalence between 3.5–11.4% of the world population 6, 7, 8, 9. Of course, these are just anecdotes, but they illustrate how, even today, arachnophobic sentiments permeate our society at all levels 1, 2, 3, 4. There are tales about massive infestations of false black widows shutting down entire schools apocryphal stories of dangerous arachnids lurking under toilet seats of international airports and urban myths of tiny spiders crawling into your mouth while you are asleep. To facilitate data reuse, we explain the main caveats that need to be made when analysing this database and discuss research ideas and questions that can be explored with it. The database refers to 211 identified and unidentified spider species and 2644 unique human-spider encounters (1121 bites and 147 as deadly bites). In total, we collected 5348 unique news articles from 81 countries in 40 languages.
This database includes information about the location of each human-spider encounter reported in the news article and a quantitative characterisation of the content-location, presence of photographs of spiders and bites, number and type of errors, consultation of experts, and a subjective assessment of sensationalism. We compiled an expert-curated global database on the online newspaper coverage of human-spider encounters over the past ten years (2010–2020). Widely feared groups such as spiders frequently end up in the spotlight of traditional and social media. Mass media plays an important role in the construction and circulation of risk perception associated with animals. Scientific Data volume 9, Article number: 109 ( 2022) An expert-curated global database of online newspaper articles on spiders and spider bites
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