On September 7th I got a fraudulent email (shown above), which claimed to be from PayPal. It was intended to get me to say, no, I didn’t add a phone number to my account and then click in a blue action box marked No it wasn’t me. But, when I read the next to bottom line, I saw it refers to PayPal Canada in Toronto – who I never have dealt with.
And a second email, instead was headed PayPaI support.
The image of a Cuban cigar came from Openclipart.
At Psychology Today on August 31, 2022 there is a useful article by Amanda Nimon-Peters titled You’re nervous about public speaking. She covers a lot of ground. But she begins by claiming:
“Studies from around the world indicate that anxiety related to public speaking occurs in more than 75 percent of the adult population [Ref. 1, Ref. 2].”
Is that true? No, unfortunately it just is a myth. Her reference 1 is to another article by Erica Crome and Andrew Baillie in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders (Volume 28, 2014, number 5, pages 471 to 479) titled Mild to severe social fears: Ranking types of feared social situations using item response theory. Table 1 in that article presents results for biased subsamples (subgroups of people with fears) from four different surveys: two from the United States and two from Australia. The first one from the United States is the National Comorbidity Survey – Replication (aka NCS-R). The second one from the United States is the National Epidemiologic Survey in Alcohol and Related Conditions (aka NESARC). Those two Australian surveys are the 1997 and 2007 versions of the National Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing (aka NSMHWB). Reference 2 is a web link to the description of the research methodology for the 2007 survey, and is redundant.
A table shown above lists the percentage for fear of public speaking reported for those four surveys in Table 1. It also shows the sampling for each survey. There is a total sample size, n, a response rate in percent, and the product of those two, the number n0 responding to the survey. That table also lists the number n1 for the biased subsample listed in the title for Table 1. Amanda was confused by, and misinterpreted the data presented in Table 1. A biased subsample is quite different from the random sample of size n0 that responded to the survey, which can be validly used to estimate a percentage for the population. Furthermore, in the 1997 NSMHWB fear of public speaking was at just 55.1% rather than more than 75%. (But when we average results from all four surveys, we get 76%).
For example, in the NCS-R n = 9282, and the response rate is 70.9%, so n0 = 6581. In Table 1 n1 is only 2261, so that biased subsample is just 34.4% of n0, as is shown above via a Venn diagram.
Percentages for various fears in the NCS-R from Table 1 are shown above via a horizontal bar chart. The largest, 87.9%, is for public speaking or stage fright (Acting, performing or giving a talk in front of an audience).
How does that compare with the percentages for the full random sample? Those results can be found in a 2008 article by A. M. Ruscio et al in Psychological Medicine (Volume 38, number 1, pages 15 to 28) titled Social Fear and Social Phobia in the United States: Results from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication, whose full text can be found here at PubMed Central. The first column in Table 1 of that article shows for NCS-R, the percentage for public speaking or stage fright is just 21.2%, or less than a fourth of that reported by Crome and Baillie. The last column shows results for fears among those (n2 = 1143) with lifetime social phobia, where 88.7% feared public speaking or stage fright. Those results are shown above via another horizontal bar chart.
Back on February 3, 2014 I had blogged about Busting a myth – that 75% of people in the world fear public speaking. Eight years later I’m again busting a version of that myth. There is a similar myth with 73% which I blogged about on March 22, 2019 in a post titled An apparently authoritative statistic about fear of public speaking that really lacks any support. I first blogged about results from Ruscio et al in a post way back on June 23, 2009 titled You are not alone: fear of public speaking affects one in five Americans.
Using the correct percentage (21.2% rather than 87.9%) from the NCS-R results in an average for fear of public speaking from those four surveys of 59.3%– a drop of 16.7%.
UPDATE
I emailed Amanda and received the following reply on September 13th:
Dear Richard,
At Forbes on September 7, 2022 there is an article by Jennifer Stephens Acree titled Back to Basics: 5 tips to nail any speaking opportunity. Her five tips are:
Prepare and practice
Visualize your surroundings
Channel your mentor
Tailor your speech to fit your audience
Don’t expect perfection
But she opens by claiming that:
“To the vast majority of people, public speaking is terrifying.”
Is there survey data which addresses that claim? Yes, there is for Americans, but it contradicts what she says.
Chapman University did seven annual surveys on American Fears (2014 to 2020/21), which asked about four different levels of fear: Very Afraid, Afraid, Slightly Afraid, and Not Afraid. Very Afraid is an approximation for Terrified. Their blog posts report the sum for the top two levels, Very Afraid and Afraid (average 26.9%). But you can look up the detailed results for all levels. It also is of interest to look at the other sum for the two lowest levels, Not Afraid and Slightly Afraid. As is shown above in a table, just 8.8 to 12.8% (average 10.6%) were Very Afraid, but the vast majority, 68.8% to 76.5% (average 71.8%) were just Slightly Afraid or Not Afraid.
Where did public speaking rank at the Very Afraid fear level? On September 27, 2021 I blogged about how In the 2020/2021 Chapman Survey of American Fears, public speaking was only ranked #67 (11.5%) out of 95 fears at the Very Afraid level. And on September 29, 2021 I blogged about how Based on the Grand Sum, the fear of public speaking was only ranked #45 (61.7%) out of 95 fears in the 2020/2021 Chapman Survey of American Fears. In the latter post I also calculated Fear Scores, and reported public speaking at 2.023 where Very Afraid = 4.0, Afraid = 3.0, Slightly Afraid = 2.0, and Not Afraid = 1.0.
Jennifer’s business is in Santa Monica, which is less than a fifty-mile drive from Orange (where Chapman University is located).
The cartoon of a woman speaker was modified from an image at Wikimedia Commons.
There is an ill-informed article by Art da Rosa at the Gem State Patriot News on September 5, 2022 titled Is America a Racist Nation? His answer is:
“My conclusion is that America is not a racist nation. In fact, she is the most racially tolerant nation on earth. People from all over the world dream of coming to America, to be free. When they arrive, they are welcomed and given an equal opportunity to participate, have a better life, and succeed.”
But, as shown above, that conclusion is belied by the history of what happened eighty years ago, presented at the Minidoka National Historic Site. An article at the National Archives describes President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 from February 19, 1942 which led to the imprisonment of about 122,000 Japanese people, nearly 70,000 who were American citizens. About 13,000 people were held at Minidoka. And a recent article by Jim Jones at the Idaho Capital Sun on June 22, 2022 is titled Idaho’s Minidoka National Historical Site reminds us to remain vigilant against racial injustice.
The article by da Rosa notes that he is ethnically Chinese. (Art is a Senior Engineer at the City of Pocatello). He lost to incumbent Jim Guthrie on May 17, 2022 in the Republican primary election for Idaho State Senator in District 28. His web page says he only became a U.S. citizen in 1986, which explains but does not excuse his ignorance of World War II Idaho history.
At the Idaho Freedom Foundation there is an article by Anna Miller on September 2, 2022 titled Idaho’s $330 million increase in K-12 education spending should fund students, not systems. Her fourth paragraph begins by claiming:
“Recent polling shows that 75% of parents support school choice policies like education savings accounts.”
She links to a web page at edCHOICE that is about Idaho. It has a donut chart that presents that 75% statistic, but it is for a sample consisting of just 50 School Parents (and a total of 98 persons). The claimed 75% is highly questionable, because for a sample of 50 people there only should be even-numbered percentages like 74% or 76% (75% corresponds to 37.5 people). There is a mauve advisory at the top of the page which reads as follows:
“The following data reflect rolling 12-month results through the most recent monthly General Population survey. We advise caution on interpreting the polling results for any state or population size having less than 100 respondents.”
How far can you trust that percentage? Wikipedia has an article on the Margin of error in surveys, which says that the maximum margin of error (in percent) for a sample size of n at a confidence level of 0.95 is 98/sqrt(n). A typical phone survey uses a sample with n=1,000, where the margin of error is 3.1%. For the School Parents with n=50 the margin of error instead is a much larger 13.9%!
How imprecise are these results for Idaho? As shown above, there is an impressive looking vertical bar chart on the web page for If given the option, what type of school would you select in order to obtain the best education for your child? But, when you replot as a horizontal chart, including the plus or minus for the margin of error, the only real difference is between the 37% for Regular public school and the 9% for Charter school.
If we wanted to compare results for Idaho with those for neighboring states, what margins of error would we find? As shown above via a table, results for Washington (4.7%) are reasonable, but those for both Montana (11.7%) and Wyoming (17.6%) are pathetic.
That web site has another page with trustworthy results for a much larger national sample (n=2,200 and a margin of error of 2.1%). When looking at surveys, don’t forget to check the margin or error. It might be worse than you think!
On August 20, 2022 Toastmasters International held the finals for their world championship. Results were announced via a press release on August 22, 2022 titled Zimbabwean software engineer living in Poland wins Toastmasters’ 2022 World Championship of Public Speaking.
Cyril Junior Dim won with his speech titled Ndini, which means “this is me.” You can watch it on YouTube. Alexandre Matte took second place with his speech, Missing Ingredient, which you can watch on YouTube. Mas Mahathir Bin Mohamad took third place with his speech, Two Gifts, which you can watch on YouTube.
For both the winning and third-place speeches the video has a relatively wide-angle (and tall) format, with the frame being nine or ten times the height of the speaker’s head. For the second-place speech the video has a relatively narrow format, with the frame being only about 2.3 times the height of the speaker’s head.
According to the rule book for this contest, the winner of the World Championship is not eligible to compete in the International Contest again at any level.
An article at Toastmasters 101 on October 15, 2020 titled Toastmasters Speech Contest: Are you in? discusses winning speeches:
“The rule book says that any type of speech is acceptable for the international speech contest. However, it’s one of those ‘everybody knows’ rules that only inspirational speeches make it to the top level. While the style of speech for that contest has changed over the years – as it should – it gets a lot of negative comments from people who don’t like the style that it developed into in the past 20 years or so. Non-Toastmasters criticize the content – bland, lacking any substance – and the styles – clownish, or over-acted. I’ve spoken with some people who don’t like Toastmasters because they think that’s what Toastmasters wants its speakers to sound like.”
I just enjoyed reading a new book by the economist Russ Roberts titled Wild Problems: a guide to the decisions that define us.
Tame problems have the characteristics shown above via a table. They have clear starting points, and can be analyzed rationally. Conversely, wild problems lack starting points. Examples of both types are shown in another table. Dr. Roberts explains further on pages 2 and 3:
“Whether to have a child is what I call a wild problem – a fork in the road of life where knowing which path is the right one isn’t obvious, where the pleasure and pain from choosing one path over another are ultimately hidden from us, where the path we choose defines who we are and who we might become. Wild problems are the big decisions all of us have to deal with as we go through life.
A lot of wild problems can give us butterflies and make our hearts ache. Knowing which path is the best one can’t be answered until we arrive in that distant land known as the future, a land we know fully only when we arrive. That tends to unnerve us. Lacking nerve, we procrastinate.
How should we proceed, then, especially if we want to make a rational decision? An obvious strategy is to import help from other challenges we’ve faces and know how to solve. To beat the traffic or develop a vaccine against the coronavirus, for example, we rely on data, algorithms that can be tested, and experiments that can be replicated. For certain problems – I call them tame problems – the relentless application of science, engineering, and rational thought leads to steady progress.
But the big decisions we face in life, the wild problems – whether to marry, whether to have children, what career path to follow, how much time to devote to friends and family, how to resolve daily ethical dilemmas – these big decisions can’t be made with data, science, or the usual rational approaches.”
There is a long (hour and 17 minute) YouTube video discussion of the book at his EconTalk podcast, titled Russ Roberts and Mike Munger on Wild Problems 8/8/22.
Social problems include another type called wicked problems. There is an article by John C. Camillus at Harvard Business Review on May 2008 titled Strategy as a wicked problem. Headings for characteristics of wicked problems are shown via another table adapted from that article.
Images of a square knot and a knot pattern were adapted from Openclipart.
