The Fear Knot: Ruth DeFoster Explores How Fear Shapes Culture and Media

A longtime journalist and professor, Ruth DeFoster, has spent her career examining how stories about danger, tragedy, and risk shape public perception. Her new book, The Fear Knot, co-authored with psychologist Natashia Swalve, unravels the cultural and psychological threads of fear, revealing how it drives our politics, media habits, and daily lives.

What first inspired you and your co-author Natashia Swalve to explore the topic of fear and how it shapes our culture?

I’ve always been fascinated by the stories we tell about fear, danger, risk and tragedy. As a journalist and a storyteller, I think these stories tell us a lot about who we are and what we value. I was 15 on September 11, and observing the cultural narratives around fear and risk that emerged in the United States afterward was both fascinating and eye-opening in regard to what—and who—we pivoted toward fearing. This childhood experience inspired me to study media coverage of terrorism as an adult. 

The perceived danger of international terror—a risk so small that it statistically approaches zero, as you’re exponentially more likely to be killed by a lawnmower—was suddenly the primary cultural fear that Americans all shared. It was reflected in everything from newscasts to sitcoms and pop music, and it was ubiquitous. I learned that fears are cyclical, and almost all fears are socially constructed. It made me curious about how we learn to fear what we fear.

How did your background in journalism and your co-author’s background in psychology come together to shape The Fear Knot?

This project was a long time in the making. My coauthor, Tasha, and I have worked together for over a decade, coauthoring several research projects at the intersection of our two fields. I am a journalist and journalism professor who studies media coverage of violence and tragedy, particularly terrorism and mass shootings. Tasha is a neuroscientist who focuses on drug addiction. 

Together, we’ve written about everything from the 2012 so-called “Miami Zombie” attack to Americans’ perceptions of illicit drugs and terrorism. This book is the culmination of all those years of research, as we realized that together, we were uniquely qualified to tell a larger story about fear from our blended intersection of science and media. We believe that big problems like fear have to be understood from multiple perspectives and disciplines, and that’s what we tried to do here—to tackle this huge problem of fear and break it down in an accessible way.

If readers took away one key idea about managing cultural fears, especially in today’s world, what would you want it to be?

One of the things we emphasize in the book is the difference between innate fears, or fears we are born with, and fears that are culturally constructed. It may surprise you—it surprised me!—to learn that humans are only born with two innate fears: fear of loud sounds and fear of falling. Every single other fear we develop is socially and culturally constructed—which means that these fears can be unlearned, too. 

We believe that American society is driven in large part by fear—and especially now that we derive most of our news and information from the algorithmic Wild West of social media. Companies like ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, and Meta, which owns Instagram, know that outrage is one of the best mechanisms for continued engagement on these platforms, and thus these sites devolve quickly into rage-bait and incentivized negativity. There’s no better way to get and keep people clicking than to weaponize their anger. This anger is often tied to fears of cultural others, like immigrants. You can certainly see this in the current tenor of political discourse in this country—civil discourse is truly becoming a thing of the past. 

We’re already seeing the ways that overblown, sensationalized fears have poisoned our political and cultural discourse—from the misplaced widespread fear of vaccination to the way we glamorize and sensationalize serial killers and murderers in the burgeoning true crime pop culture community. Realistically, I don’t see this changing anytime soon—the system is stacked against large-scale change. But as individuals, we can choose to educate ourselves and to reject those fears that we learn are misplaced.

How has today’s news cycle and social media changed the way we experience fear?

We are in the midst of an unprecedented epistemological crisis in this country. Whereas for most of the 20th century people derived their news from the work of trained journalists, today most Americans receive information algorithmically. This is dangerous because social media algorithms cannot discern truth; they are designed to maximize the time you spend on the platform. To achieve this, they avoid showing you anything that challenges your existing beliefs. 

As author Eli Pariser noted in his prescient book The Filter Bubble, algorithms on sites like YouTube, X, and TikTok don’t serve “information vegetables”—they feed you “information junk food” that reinforces what you already like and believe. As you can imagine, for groups that hold fringe or harmful beliefs—like vaccine skepticism or climate change denial—living within these algorithmic bubbles only reinforces and strengthens false narratives that can cause real harm. The QAnon conspiracy is another clear example of this.

Misinformation on social media is rampant on all sides of the political spectrum. It’s so important to subscribe to whichever organization in your area is still doing local journalism. I promise there are still a lot of us out there, working hard to tell objective, balanced stories. It may be easier to lay back and allow an algorithm to passively deliver you “information junk food,” but we all need “information vegetables” today more than ever. 

We are very lucky in the Twin Cities to have a robust array of local reliable journalistic outlets—the Pioneer Press, the Minnesota Star Tribune, the Reformer, MinnPost, the Minnesota Women’s Press and the Sahan Journal, among others.

When fear feels constant, how can we learn to recognize which threats are real versus manufactured?

The hardest fears to wrap our heads around are actually the most pressing, ironically—climate change, systemic racial and gender inequality, childhood poverty, pervasive American gun violence and domestic (not international) terrorism. These aren’t problems with one clear cause or a single villain to blame, which makes them easy to ignore. We often feel powerless to make a difference, so we tune them out. 

But I think about issues like climate change the same way I think about voting. Sure, my individual vote doesn’t carry much weight in the grand scheme of the entire country. Likewise, it’s easy to feel fatalistic about tackling huge, complex social problems when our individual impact seems so small. Take climate change: yes, using a metal straw on its own won’t make much difference. But if we all pivot away from single-use plastics, shop locally, call our representatives in Congress, donate, vote, and show up for the environment, we actually can mitigate the effects of climate change—just as, if we all vote, we can produce policies and leaders who truly reflect the will of the people. So even as large-scale change feels elusive, as individuals we have the power to choose what we believe—and what we advocate for and seek to change. Knowledge is power!

This story was written by Bayleigh Bergner, an undergraduate student in CLA.