Purely anecdotal: I was a lot more frightened of spiders before I got a book about them out of the library and read it. They are pretty interesting little creatures. Mind you, I live where there are no actually dangerous ones.
Speculation: To the extent that a lot of fear is fear of the unknown, and curiosity attracts us to the unknown so we can know more of it, I can see how curiosity would help reduce fear.
Testable prediction: someone who reports a fear of something they don't know much about will report less fear of it after they can be encouraged to express and follow up some amount of curiosity about it. It's conditional on such curiosity actually existing. Possibly extreme phobias shut off any attempts to discuss or think about the object of fear.
Curiosity probably even helps with well-founded fears of things like bears, hydrofluoric acid or blue-glowing bits of metal. I'm content not to conquer well-founded fears I think.
This could be partially due to the idea of safety margins. If I meet something that I know very little about, I give it a wide safety margin, and get nervous if I am closer to it than my safety margin allows; once I know more about it, I can narrow down my safety margins considerably.
For example, if I know very little about snakes except that some are poisonous, and I happen to find a house snake in my house, my reaction would be one of caution (or, if I come across it very suddenly, even of fear) - with the aim of extricating myself from the situation unb...
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