How to Overcome Fear of Steeps

A new scientific study has revealed that people who are simply too scared of steep slopes should move in closer to the edge in order to make their anxiety go away. The conclusion comes from an investigation that showed slopes appeared increasingly mild as you got closer to them. Standing at their very edge makes them look a lot more tame than they did when you first looked at them, and less so than they actually are, ScienceNow reports. A paper detailing the findings appears in last month's issue of the Journal of Vision.

The research was conducted by scientists at the Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, led by psychologist Frank Durgin and his colleague Zhi Li. “There's a creek that has very high banks that go down very steeply on both sides. So we went out to one of these paths along the top of one of these banks and just tried to see what happens [as we moved away],” Durgin, who is also actively involved in studying human perception of visual information in natural environments, explains.

Some experts argue that these processing abilities that we have may be a reminiscence of our earliest days, when our ancestors really used them. No point in remaining paralyzed at the edge of a slope with a hungry predator behind you. The finding is also remarkable for an additional reason – it contradicts the “danger hypothesis,” which holds that our brains should, in fact, exaggerate the inclination of the slopes, in order to prevent us from being harmed. “It's actually the other way around,” University of California in Santa Cruz (UCSC) psychologist Bruce Bridgeman, who has not been part of the recent investigation, says. He calls the results surprising.

Durgin has also managed to come up with a basic explanation of why he thinks our perception changes at the edge of slopes. He argues that, as we approach the slope, our eyes and our heads are forced to look downwards in order to assess the dangers, and not mostly straight ahead, as it is the case when looking at the slope from a greater distance. The expert also created a geometrical model of his idea, which seems to back up these claims. However, more research into the issue is required before a clear answer is given. All the scientists can say for certain is the fact that most of those in a large group of students they tested exhibited the same behavior and type of perception.