An optimist’s view - six (or two) things that a majority of American adults are not afraid of at all

An optimist would say the glass shown above is half full, while a pessimist would say that it’s half empty. On Friday the 13th George Will’s editorial in the Washington Post even was titled Curb your pessimism.

Results of surveys about fears usually give the pessimistic version. I did that last October with a Halloween post titled Chapman Survey on American Fears includes both zombies and ghosts. Their general question on phobias was: “How afraid are you of the following?” for twelve situations and it had five possible answers of:

A) Very Afraid
B) Afraid
C) Somewhat Afraid
D) Not Afraid At All
E) Refused (which includes don’t know)
I charted the first three fear categories, the sum of the first two, and the sum of the first three, but omitted the fourth. What does it look like?

As is shown above, a majority (more than 50%) of adults are Not Afraid At All of six things: clowns (80.4%), zombies (77.8%), ghosts (72.3%), the dark (62.9%), flying (57.2%) and blood or needles (50.2%). For another three things almost half are not afraid: enclosed spaces (49.2%), drowning (49.0%), and strangers (48.7%). Coming in last, slightly over a third (34.1%) were not afraid of public speaking.

On January 5th I blogged about Is public speaking universally feared? Of course not! This post adds the other fears from the Chapman survey.

Another chart shows the percentages for the sum of the first three categories - Very Afraid, Afraid, and Somewhat Afraid. It isn’t quite the same as what you’d get by taking 100 percent and subtracting the numbers in the previous chart, because a few percent had refused to answer.

Last year there also were two YouGov surveys on fears - one on American and one on British adults. Today we’ll discuss the American one, which I blogged about on April 2, 2014. Their fear questions for thirteen situations had four possible answers of:

A) Very Afraid
B) A Little Afraid
C) Not Really Afraid
D) Not Afraid At All

As is shown above, a majority of adults are Not Afraid At All of just two things: clowns (72%), and dogs (56%). Blood is third, right at 50%. I don’t know why the percentages are so different from those in the Chapman survey, but they are.

Another chart shows the percentages for the sum of the first three categories - Very Afraid, A Little Afraid, and Not Really Afraid. It isn’t just what you get by taking 100 percent and subtracting the numbers in the previous chart.

When I last discussed the YouGov survey, I also looked at the gender differences. I will cover those in my next post.