On September 12, 2017 there was an article by Scott Mautz at the Inc. web site titled 11 Famous failures that will inspire you to success. (It also appeared the next day as a post on his blog. And it is on page 28 in the Google Books preview of his Find the Fire: Ignite Your Inspiration – and Make Work Exciting Again). He began with a startling statistic about fear of failure:
In fact, research indicates that our fear of failure tops the list of our phobias with nearly one in three people having a fear of failure (31 percent), ahead of our fear of public speaking or fear of spiders (30 percent each) or even our fear of the paranormal (15 percent).
A close fifth was our fear of another Transformers movie being made.”
The last one is obviously meant to be humorous, but the
others seemed serious. I didn’t recall seeing those numbers before, so I
clicked on his link for that research, which led me to a press release from October
14, 2015 titled Research reveals fear of failure has us all shaking in our
boots this Halloween. It said that Linkagoal had a survey of 1,083 American adults
done by the commercial polling firm YouGov.
The press release talked about fears, not phobias. Back on October
11, 2011 I blogged about What’s the difference between a fear and a phobia? That press release listed the
percentages shown in the following bar chart:
Compare them with Scott’s Top Five list:
His begins with fear of failure (31%) rather than fear of horror films (32%). He also adds fear of public speaking (30%).
I try to get detailed results from a survey, so I searched
on Google but couldn’t find them for Linkagoal. Instead I found a blog post
titled What scares us most: spiders or failing? Linkagoal’s Fear Factor Index
clears the cobwebs that showed an infographic with another top five fears list with
horror movies first (but that added fear of flying at 20%):
I emailed Scott Mautz as follows:
Scott:
How did you decide that fear of failure tops the list? The
press release about research you linked to in your second paragraph instead
says it was fear of horror films. And, it says nothing about fear of public
speaking, so where did you find that 30% statistic?
An infographic in a blog post from Linkagoal lists the Top 5
Most Scariest Things, which were: Horror movies - 32%, Failure - 31%, Spiders -
30%, Flying - 20%, and Ghosts - 15%.
Public speaking isn’t on that list either.
Richard Garber
He replied:
Hi
Richard-
thx
for taking the time to engage with your question. I should have made it clearer
in the article that the top fears we humans have comes from a cross section of
a number of sources, not just the one I linked to. Also, important to note that
what humans find scary and what they have a fear of are two different
things. For example, for certain watching scary movies is very scary to
adults. But it does not rank at the top for what humans are afraid of- they
are not afraid of watching scary movies- they're afraid of failing. Hope
this helps.
Scott
Based on that evasive and condescending reply, I don’t think ANY of Scott’s discussion of the Linkagoal survey should be taken seriously. How
fears rank can be stated either as what more people fear (like Scott did, in
units of percent) or in terms of what people fear more (on a scale from say one
to ten, via something psychologists call a fear survey scale). Back on October
23, 2012 I blogged about how Either way you look at it, public speaking really
is not our greatest fear. That post linked to another one from October 13, 2012
titled In a 1992 study of U.S. university students, fear of public speaking
ranked sixth for men and eighth for women. In that study fear of failure
really was ranked first.
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