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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
Listen to the Intro
The Fear Factor summary
Abigail Marsh
How One Emotion Connects Altruists, Psychopaths and Everyone in Between
18 mins
What is The Fear Factor about?
The Fear Factor (2017) examines the multifaceted role that fear plays in our lives. Though commonly perceived as a purely negative emotion, fear is in fact linked to several virtuous human characteristics, such as empathy and altruism.
Table of Contents
The Fear Factor
summarized in 7 key ideas
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Key idea 1 of 7
Empathy and the ability to recognize fear are closely linked.
Empathy refers to the ability to understand another person’s emotional state, and can sometimes result in the direct experience of another person’s feelings. Usually, we tend to see people as either naturally empathetic and nice, or innately mean and cruel. However, empathy isn’t an inherent trait, but rather a result of where your focus lies.
As such, empathy can, at least to a certain extent, be manipulated.
For example, inspired by the 1978 study by psychologist Daniel Batson, which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the author conducted an experiment where the subjects were asked to listen to a radio interview.
The interview was of a woman named Katie, who’d lost both her parents and was responsible for taking care of her younger siblings. She worked several jobs while simultaneously studying to earn her college degree.
Before listening to the interview, some participants were asked to focus on the technical details of her story, while the rest were asked to focus on and identify the emotions Katie was expressing. Afterward, the author asked if anyone would like to donate money to Katie. The results showed that those who had been asked to focus on Katie’s feelings donated more than those who focused on technical details.
What the author also discovered during the study was that empathy was strongly related to the ability to recognize when others are experiencing fear.
Following the interview exercise, the author asked the participants to study photographs of faces and identify whether they were expressing happiness, sadness, anger or fear. Interestingly, the participants who didn’t do well at recognizing happy expressions, but who were able to identify fearful expressions, had also donated the most money to Katie.
What we can infer from this is that people who are good at recognizing fear in others also tend to be more altruistic. Let’s explore this concept further in the next blink.
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Best quote from The Fear Factor
Fear was a better predictor (of) altruism (than) gender, mood and how empathetic people report themselves to be.
—Abigail Marsh
Who should read The Fear Factor?
- People who want to become more altruistic
- Those interested in neurology and how it affects certain behaviors
- Individuals who want to turn their fears into something useful
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