Do 77% of Americans fear public speaking? No! That percentage described stage fright in Swedes who also had social anxiety disorder.

 

In some recent articles I was perplexed to find a claim that 77% of American fear public speaking. When I looked on Google I found an article by Lisa Fritscher at VeryWellMind on April 12, 2020 that is titled Glossophobia or the Fear of Public Speaking and subtitled symptoms, complications, and treatments. She says:

 

“Glossophobia, or the fear of public speaking is remarkably common. In fact, some experts estimate that as much as 77% of the population has some level of anxiety regarding public speaking.”

 

Lisa didn’t say who or where ‘the population’ was, but one might assume incorrectly it was Americans. She referenced another article by Alexandre Heeren et al titled Assessing public speaking fear with the short form of the Personal Report of Confidence as a Speaker Scale: confirmatory factor analyses among a French-speaking community sample which appeared in Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment for 2013, Vol. 9, pages 609 to 618. The first sentence in its introduction says:

 

“About 77% of the general population fears public speaking.”

 

It refers to still another article by T. Furmark et al titled Social phobia in the general population: prevalence and sociodemographic profile that appeared in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology for 1999; Vol. 34 No. 8, pages 416 to 424. (I found the full text in an EBSCOhost database at my friendly local public library). But I recognized that article because I had blogged about it back on March 25, 2011 in a post titled Almost 1 in 4 Swedes fears public speaking.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As shown above in a bar chart for the 14 social fears which they surveyed (and listed results in Table 4), they found that 24.0 percent of the Swedish general population feared speaking (or performing) in front of a group of people. Strictly speaking this is stage fright, and was the most common fear, followed by using public lavatories (11.1%), writing in front of others (8.0%), maintaining a conversation with someone unfamilar (7.2%), and being addressed in a group of people (6.1%). Note that this survey reported point prevalence (are you now) rather than the more commonly studied lifetime prevalence (have you ever).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where was the  ~77 percent? It also is in Table 4, as is shown above in a second bar chart. But that instead describes Swedes with social phobia. 77.1% of them feared speaking (or performing) in front of a group of people. So, the 2013 article by Alexandre Heeren et al. had misquoted a 1999 article! And in 2020 Lisa Fritscher made it vaguer “as much as 77%.” What can we learn from this nonsense? Go back to the source before you quote a statistic. Don’t assume that others actually did their homework.

 

But then Lisa Fritscher’s article got quoted by other articles and spread around the Web. One at Entrepreneur on September 11, 2020 titled Overcome your fear of public speaking with this $40 course claimed:

 

“One study has found that as many as 77 percent of Americans have some level of glossophobia – the fear of public speaking.”

 

A second article by Roger A. Reid at Medium on September 30, 2020 titled 4 steps to tame your nerves when fear of speaking brings you to your knees similarly incorrectly said:

 

“In fact, some experts estimate that as much as 77% of the population has some level of anxiety in facing a crowd— no matter how many presentations they’ve done.”

 

Even worse, a third article by Andrea Chen at Medium on October 5, 2020 titled How you can become less anxious presenting over Zoom said that:

 

“According to an infographic by Orai, 77% of the US population struggles with public speaking.”

 

That infographic, titled 48 Fear of Public Speaking Statistics You Should Know in 2020, is a burgoo of baseless crap, which I will discuss in another post.   

 

By the way, it also is possible to misuse another result from the Furmark et al article to underestimate the fear of public speaking. Peter Khoury made that mistake in an article at Magnetic Speaking titled 7 Unbelievable “Fear of Public Speaking” Statistics. I blogged about it on December 15, 2016 in a post titled Believable and unbelievable statistics about fears and phobias of public speaking. He looked at Table 1 in T. Furmark et al. and saw that for Sweden a total of 15.6% have social phobia. Then he multiplied this by 0.894 to get that 13.5% of Swedes fear public speaking. (That multiplier came from an article on epidemiology of social phobia which had studied people around Florence, Italy). Of course that is ludicrous.