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roland comments on The Mystery of the Haunted Rationalist - Less Wrong
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I disagree. Compare spending the night in a normal hotel with spending the night in an old mansion that is widely believed to be haunted.
In the normal hotel, I would shrug off any unusual noises. In the old haunted mansion, I would run out screaming. The difference between them can best be explained by the mansion's ghostly associations.
I did see that in the article about fan death, but there are a lot of things that can cause very occasional deaths in very specific circumstances. Compare this to a Korean I used to know, for whom sleeping with a fan would be literally a terrifying experience.
Sure, because there are other people around in the hotel. You probably would feel the same if you spent the night in the haunted mansion if it's full of people. Now take that hotel, put it in a remote location and without anybody except yourself. Scary, right?
Going alone into a dark forest at night is scary, going with a group of people can be quite fun.
No, my experience with alone/together situations is quite different.
I usually don't laugh when I'm watching a funny movie by myself and, although I might flinch during jump scenes, I don't normally find scary movies to be all that scary when I watch them by myself.
There are hotels that tout themselves as "haunted hotels" and even bring in teams of "ghost experts" to get an official certificate proudly declaring the amount and type of "haunting" taking place at that location.
If it's known to be a joke, then sure, it's all fun and games - just as there is a sense of security in walking through the woods with a group of friends. But if even one of those friends is genuinely terrified, then that's a whole other story. It's enough to put everybody in the group on edge. You would be much better off walking through the woods alone.
Perhaps it's herd mentality - but knowing that other people are genuinely scared has a way of bleeding into your own psyche. Even if you rationally know better.
You have to be careful when dismissing subconscious fears as irrational. They were put there for a reason, and they may still be relevant. If I was staying in a "haunted house" in a city where it was not isolated or abandoned or anything, I don't think it'd scare me one bit. A secluded/abandoned haunted house might be scary, and for good reasons. It would be unwise to assume that your fear is entirely irrational.
I went to a local park with some friends one night to hang out. Both I and another friend were uneasy about it, but dismissed our fears as irrational (and didn't mention it). We both figured that we didn't have any reason to think that something bad was gonna happen in the sense that you can't predict the future through "ESP", but it didn't occur to us that "you're scared because that isn't a safe place to be at night you dolt!"
Turns out some guys showed up and tried to stab us, nearly succeeding. I learned the "almost hard" way not to disregard fears right off the bat.
That's pretty much how I see it-- if you've spent your life in a culture where it's common to believe in dangerous ghosts, your default reactions will be affected, and likewise if you've spent your life in a culture where it's common to believe in fan death. I bet it doesn't even take a lifetime-- I'm expecting something like five or ten years.
I think a lot of emotional reactions are picked up from images and body language.
Maybe this is a case of honestly different intuitions. My intuition is that if we control for everything except for one building having a reputation for being haunted and the other not, I would still be more scared in the haunted building.
I think if we ensured the complete "natural" (as opposed to supernatural) safety of the house, the fear would be equal.
So if the house had been checked out to ensure it was physically sound, it had been checked for hidden serial killers etc and was surrounded by an army cordon to ensure nothing dangerous could get in then I don't think the haunted nature of the house would make a difference to a skeptic.
In this totally controlled case, I think the levels of fear would be the same. Your intuition may differ in which case I suppose it's hard to come to a sense of the truth.