Lunch Lecture - Luca Corlatti and Mario De Cristofaro

Landscape of fear: A bridge across disciplines? 

Fear is a major driving force in evolution. Animals, however, rarely have perfect information on the occurrence of risks. But they need to maintain a certain level of fear to survive. The "Landscape of Fear" is a visual model. It tries to explain how fear could alter an animal’s use of an area as it tries to reduce its vulnerability.

In this talk we introduce the ecological basics of the "Landscape of Fear" model, and attempt to extend it to the domain of politics. Much the same as animals, “political animals” employ fear as an adaptive contrivance. Nevertheless, their greater ability to gather information makes them more prone to fallacies, and, paradoxically, fallacies turn fear into a sinister rather than evolutionary force.