I'm a bad man - leaving them better than you found them: September 24, 2007
Sigmund Freud himself believed that these anxious feelings were created by an association between a past negative experience and the current situation. These associations are often false and not related through causality - the idea that one situation directly affects another, but through correlation - one thing "tends to affect another over repeated attempts".
When people begin to see this correlation as a fact, it is commonly referred to as "Magical thinking".
There are two governing principles behind magical thinking.
The first is the law of similarity. The notion that things that resemble each other are casually connected in some way that defies scientific testing.
For example:
Here people will typically see vertical columns of squares and circles as opposed to horizontal mixed rows of squares and circles.
The second law is the Law of Contagion, which is the belief that "things that have been in physical contact or in spatial or temporal association with other things retain a connection after they are separated." Contagion effects have been noted to be more effective with negative associations than with positive ones. This is probably best explained by the notion of getting "bad luck" or having a bad time every time you go to a specific venue.
Freud believed that the anxiety or fear was maintained through a form of operant conditioning. Essentially the feeling of anxiety is reinforced everytime you are in a similar situation.
You then "learn" to remove the negative feeling of anxiety by not approaching. These connections of patterns or "magical thinking" are common throughout all the human societies across the world. The human brain is adept at forming these patterns, though we do not have a particularly good system for distinguishing between real and perceived connections.
Theoretically this is due to a simple survival tactic. If we notice rustling behind a bush it is better for us to assume it is some form of threat and begin to prep our bodies to defend ourselves, rather than ignore it and risk being eaten.