Most commonly searched fears in U.S. states for both 2017 and 2018

On March 27, 2019 there was an article by Laura Schmitz at the Your Local Security web site about a study titled YIKES! America’s Top-Searched Phobias in 2018. (I saw it mentioned in an article at CBS Local Chicago on April 2nd titled Study reveals Illinoisans fear being alone more than most Americans). At the end she described how:

“The YLS team used Google’s autocomplete feature to find the 15 most common ways to end the phrases ‘why am I afraid of/to’ and ‘why am I scared of/to.’ Gathering data from August 29, 2017 to August 29, 2018, these phrases—and the respective scientific names of those fears—were then put into Google Trends to determine which phobias each state was searching more than any other state.”

A similar article titled Everybody Scream: America’s Biggest Phobias had appeared on October 16, 2017. It showed a map with the most searched phobia in each state (and also an alphabetical list by states which omitted my state of Idaho. For both 2017 and 2018 spiders topped the Idaho list.). There also was another list of the five most searched phobias in America. Note that these articles are confusingly titled, since they report fears rather than phobias (which are more severe, etc.)  For an explanation, see my October 11, 2011 blog post titled What’s the difference between a fear and a phobia?

Results from both studies are shown above in a pair of bar charts. In 2017 The Unknown (10 states) was most searched, while in 2018 People and Spiders were tied at 10 states each. Driving was not in the 2017 study but was for 3 states in 2018. In the 2017 study the fear of public speaking (Glossophobia) was most searched only in the state of West Virginia. (Fear of public speaking didn’t appear at all in the 2018 study).

The 2017 study also lists the top five most searched fears in the country as: The number 13 (Triskaidekaphobia), The Unknown (Xenophobia), Clowns (Coulrophobia), Holes (Trypophobia), and The Ocean (Thalassophobia). The unknown was the most-searched fear in 10 states, holes was in 4 states, clowns was in 2 states, but neither the ocean nor the number 13 was in any states.

Back on March 7, 2015 I had blogged about Is that Top Ten list from a real survey or just a glorified stack of web searches.

  

The image of people searching the web was adapted from this one at Openclipart.