Don’t be dogged by making a blanket statement

At the GQ website on February 12, 2020 there is an article by Clay Skipper titled How to overcome insecurity, according to Hollywood’s favorite therapist. It contains an interview with Dr. Barry Michels which has useful Jungian advice on confidence and self-doubt. But it also contains a hilariously overconfident statement that:

“This is why public speaking is the number one fear in every single survey that's ever done. It actually ranks higher in people's minds than death.”

Blanket statements are dangerous. You have to do a lot of serious research before you can confidently say either EVERY or NONE rather than just SOME. The best known survey contradicting his statement is described in another article by Geoffrey Brewer at Gallup on March 19, 2001 titled Snakes top list of Americans’ fears. That one did not include death though.

Chapman University is in Orange, California – just a 35 mile drive from Hollywood. The most recent 2018 Chapman Survey of American Fears ranked dying (death) at #54 (27.9%) and public speaking at #59 (26.2%). On January 27, 2020 I blogged about Why do we often hear about the 2014 Chapman Survey of American Fears, but not about the other four done in 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018? The 2014 survey had ranked fear of public speaking at #1, but did not include death. The 2015 survey ranked public speaking #26 (28.4%) and death #43 (21.9%).

An image of a dog wrapped in a blanket came from Tashdeed at Wikimedia Commons.