When reading this, I was trying to instantiate it for myself using spiders as the class of things. I sort of see what you mean, but perhaps I picked a poor instantiation. I was hard put to imagine a new instance of this class that I might encounter, until I remembered a picture I once saw in the Radio Times of a deep-sea horror they'd dredged up from the Marianas Trench or somewhere - a ten-legged thing about two feet across that looked more like a spider than a spider does, IYSWIM - it certainly evoked my arachnophobia to a remarkable extent, so that I was afraid of the Radio Times itself for some time :-) I suppose in light of that, I might well avoid encounters with potentially-spiderish things in future, for fear of being frightened of them! Is that what you meant?

That sort of thing, I suppose. Perhaps a better spider-related analogy might be: suppose you're terrified of poisonous spiders, and you see a newspaper article talking about a species of spider previously unknown to the UK which has been coming in from abroad in (say) fruit shipments. Now if you're really concerned about poisonous spiders, you'd want to read about this thing so you know how to recognise and avoid one if you see it; but if you avoid the news reports so as not to be scared by them, it sort of implies that you're more concerned with not being scared than you are with (as you might naively expect) not being lethally bitten.

Then, of course, after a month or so someone manages to get through to you that this new species of spider isn't poisonous at all, and you feel silly because you could perfectly well have found that out for yourself...