This article first appeared on newrepublic.com
When Ron Weasley was a child, he reveals in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, his brothers Fred and George magically transformed his teddy bear into a giant spider, thus triggering in their younger sibling a life-long and totally understandable fear of spiders. What’s harder to comprehend is that one in three (Muggle) women and one in four men have arachnophobia – even though none of them has witnessed the transformation of a favorite toy into an oversized arachnid, and most have never had a traumatic encounter with a spider (one study found that out of 118 adults with a fear of spiders, only eight had ever had a “traumatic” experience involving spiders).
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