By Pavol Prokop, Martina Zvaríková, Milan Zvarik, Zuzana Ježová, and Peter Fedor.
Read the full paper here.
Both lay people and scientists show a strong preference for large, “charismatic” animals, particularly terrestrial mammals. This preference is apparent when people share information about large animals on social networks, make donations supporting large animals in zoos, or when conservation journals put animals on their covers. Although scientists are concerned with this long-lasting trend and trying to move human attention to threatened species that are not popular, it is not clear why there is such a strong preference for large-bodied animals.
We hypothesized that large-bodied animals must attract human attention, because many of them were harmful to ancestors in our evolutionary past. We further speculated that our fear of large animals is inherited from fear of giant reptiles that co-existed with our mammalian ancestors more than 100 million years ago. Finally, we suggested that human perception of large animals is ambivalent, because except for fear, we also admire the characteristics that we desire, such as power or dominance.
Our research was based not only on ratings of fear and admiration of various mammals differing in body mass, but also on the same ratings applied to non-animals objects. We found that fear of large animals correlated with how much people admire them, but also with fear of nonanimal objects. For example, if someone was afraid of a large bear, they were also afraid of large trees or buildings. Large non-animal objects were also more admired than small non-animal objects. Finally, we found that human willingness to pay for animal conservation was greater when animals were of large size and if the person admired the animal. In contrast, fear of animals showed a negative impact on willingness to pay for its conservation.
Our hypothesis states fear inherited from a long co-existence between our mammalian ancestors and large reptiles is generalised to various large objects and is beneficial also in the modern environment (e.g., avoidance of large cars or tall buildings), but it also has something to do with nature protection. Admiration, which comes hand-in-hand with fear, can be further used in conservation campaigns to persuade people to actively contribute to protection of (at least) large animals, which will be ultimately beneficial also for other organisms occupying the same habitats.
Relational Thinking 