A scary web article based on a couple of press releases

On October 27, 2017, at the Inc. web site, there was a scarily superficial article by Eric Mack titled Forget dying and public speaking: here’s the 47 things Americans fear more in 2017. First, the title is wrong - he ends by listing what more people fear and not what they fear more. In my October 29, 2017 blog post titled What do Americans fear most? Fear Scores from the 2017 Chapman Survey of American Fears I show what people fear more. Superficial journalism based on reading press releases is scary. There were press releases issued in 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017. There also were blog posts in 2015, 2016, and 2017 all titled America’s Top Fears (year). Those fears were ranked based on the sum of percentages for Very Afraid and Afraid. Detailed results for 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017 are in a set of .pdf files you can download.     

Eric’s first three paragraphs say:

“You've probably heard over the years that public speaking tops the list of things people fear most, freaking us out more than even the inescapable existential problem of death. But fear in America has grown and shifted dramatically over the last year or two, leaving death and public speaking buried beneath a long list of more pressing things to stress about. 

When Chapman University first conducted its ‘Survey on American Fears’ in 2014, ‘walking alone at night’ topped the list, followed by ‘becoming the victim of identity theft,’ ‘safety on the internet,’ ‘being the victim of a mass/random shooting’ and that familiar fear of public speaking rounded out the top five.

Earlier this month Chapman released the fourth annual edition of its fears survey and ‘walking alone at night’ has dropped all the way to be ranked number 56 on a list of 80 total fears that a sample of over 1,200 Americans were asked about. Public speaking ranks as fear number 52, while random mass shootings are at 35, safety on the internet didn't make this year's survey and fear of identity theft is ranked 14.”

When you actually look at the questions from the detailed results of that 2014 survey, you find a rather different picture than what Mr. Mack described in his second paragraph. Two questions were not on how afraid you are but how safe you feel, so they had answers on a scale running the opposite way from three others.

A question on page 18 under the heading for Safety asked:

“(Walking alone at night?) How safe do you feel:”

with possible answers of Not at All Safe, Somewhat Safe, Safe, Very Safe.

A question on page 53 under the heading for Fear of Criminal Victimization asked:

“How afraid are you of being victimized in the following ways? (Identity theft/Credit card fraud).”

Another question on page 18 under the heading for Safety asked:

“(On the Internet) How safe do you feel:”

again with possible answers of Not at All Safe, Somewhat Safe, Safe, Very Safe.

A question on page 55 under the heading for Fear of Criminal Victimization asked:

“(Being the victim of a random/mass shooting) How afraid are you of being victimized in the following ways?”

A question on page 66 under the heading for Phobias asked:

“[Public speaking] How afraid are you of the following?”

The press release for 2015 contained this warning about the 2014 rankings, which Eric apparently missed:

“The researchers continue to improve the survey as its results and continuing interviews provide more information about fear, as well as how best to collect fear-based information. The second wave of the survey modified question wording such that all questions about fear use the same response categories: ‘Very afraid,’ ‘Afraid,’ ‘Slightly afraid,’ and ‘Not afraid.’ Consequently a comparison of fears between 2014 and 2015 should not be conducted without consultation with the researchers, who can explain the proper method for conducting comparisons across waves."

Presumably the proper method is to use a lot of hand waving and weasel words. Let’s take a look at the answers - detailed results for those questions across all four surveys. In the following comparison tables I’ve included both the sum for Very Afraid and Afraid, and the grand sum for Very Afraid, Afraid, and Slightly (or for 2014 Somewhat) Afraid. (Click on each table to see a larger, clearer view).

First, as shown above, for fear of Walking Alone at Night the percentages were (56.0), 16.0, 20,8, and 20,2. As soon as the question changed from safe to afraid the percentage plummeted.

Second, as shown above, 2014 was the only year with a combination for fear of Identity Theft/Credit Card Theft – which likely explains getting a higher percentage. For Identity Theft the percentages are [49.7], 38.4, 34.8, 41.7. For Credit Card Theft the percentages are [49.7], 35.7, 36.4, 42.5.

Third, as shown above, the 2014 question How Safe Do You Feel on the Internet (53.1) was replaced by Cyber-Terrorism 43.1, 30,0, 47.8.

Fourth, for Random/Mass Shooting the percentages are 24.7, 15.9, 26.4,30.8.

Fifth, as shown above, for Public Speaking the percentages are 25.3, 27.5, 25.5, 23.3. The mean is 25.4%, so the deviations from it are relatively small: -0.1% for 2014, 2.1% for 2015, 0.1% for 2016, and -2.1% for 2017.

Finally, for Corrupt Government Officials in 2014 the question was being Worried About (64.3%) rather than a fear by 56.1% in 2015, 58.9% in 2016, and 73.8% in 2017.    

The takeaway from this blog post is that to see what actually is going on, you need to look at the actual data not just press releases.

The image came from the collection of Images from the History of Medicine.

What do Americans fear most? Fear Scores from the 2017 Chapman Survey of American Fears

In the 2017 Chapman Survey on American Fears 1,207 adults were asked 81 questions that began with:

“How afraid are you of the following?”

They were asked to choose from one of four answers (fear levels):

1] Not Afraid

2] Slightly Afraid

3] Afraid

4] Very Afraid

(There also was a Blank category for the less than 1% who didn’t answer a question).

In the Chapman blog post about the survey on October 11 titled America’s Top Fears 2017 there was a Complete List of Fears ranked by the sum of the percentages for Afraid and Very Afraid (and also shown alphabetically). The most common fear was Corrupt (federal) government officials (74.5%). But the press release on that same day was incorrectly titled What Do Americans Fear Most? It instead should have said What Do the Most Americans Fear? Sadly many others have copied that incorrect description.  

In my previous post on October 26, 2017 titled How can you make a public speaking coach run away like a scared zebra? Just tell them where fear of public speaking ranked in the fourth Chapman Survey on American Fears I showed a series of six bar charts ranking the percentages.

 

SO, HOW AFRAID ARE AMERICANS OF CORRUPTION AND OTHER THINGS?

Where was that fear score for Corrupt government officials? Was it way up near 4.0, and enough to make us Scream like that man in the famous painting by Edward Munch? A fear score can be calculated from the answers for each question in the Survey Methodology Report. The formula simply is a weighted average of the proportions:

Fear Score = [ 1x(% for Not Afraid) +  2x(% for Slightly Afraid)

 + 3x(% for Afraid) + 4x(% for Very Afraid)]/100  

I discussed Fear Scores in an October 30, 2015 blog post titled According to the 2015 Chapman Survey of American Fears, adults are less than Afraid of federal Government Corruption and only Slightly Afraid of Public Speaking. All the Fear Scores are shown above in a horizontal bar chart. (Click on it to see a larger, clearer view).

For 2017 the Fear Score for Corrupt government officials was 3.118, or somewhat above Afraid (3.0) In 2016 it was 2.678.

For Public speaking the Fear Score is 1.909, or not even Slightly Afraid The very lowest Fear Score for Your significant other cheating on you was only 1.048.  

Those fear scores cover a range of 2.07 out of a possible 3.0, or 69% - not much over 2/3 the total. Things still could get even worse. Stay tuned for next year. 

TOP 20 LIST OF FEAR SCORES

How do rankings based on Fear Score and the Sum of percentages for [Very Afraid + Afraid] from my previous post compare? As shown above in a table, sometimes they are very similar – within one or two places. But other times, like for Global warming and climate change (17 vs. 10) and Extinction of plant and animal species (18 vs. 11) they differ by seven.  

How can you make a public speaking coach run away like a scared zebra? Just tell them where fear of public speaking ranked in the fourth Chapman Survey on American Fears.

This year it ranked #52 out of 80 fears. Last year it ranked #33 out of 79 fears, and in 2015 it ranked #26 of 89 fears.

Why wasn’t it first out of 12 fears, like for the 2014 survey, as was reported in an extremely popular Washington Post blog post titled America’s top fears: Public speaking, heights and bugs. In that first survey questions about fears weren’t asked in a consistent way, so you couldn’t really compare them all. But this year they didn’t divide the fears into domains, so you can’t spin them as I discussed in a June 25, 2016 blog post titled How could you spin the results of a fear survey where public speaking wasn’t even in the top 5, 10, or 20?

I find it extremely curious that Toastmasters International has never mentioned the Chapman Surveys in its monthly Toastmaster magazine, although its headquarters in Rancho Santa Margarita is located only about 20 miles from that university (in Orange, California). Their last discussion of fear statistics was an article which I blogged about in a post on December 11, 2013 titled Spouting Nonsense: July 2013 Toastmaster magazine article fumbles fears and phobias. There also is an old Toastmasters press release titled Teaching People to Talk Turkey Without Turning Chicken.   

   

On October 11th Chapman University released results from their fourth Chapman Survey on American Fears with a press release mistitled What do Americans fear most? and a blog post titled America’s Top Fears 2017. Their overall web page provided a link to an Acrobat .pdf file with details for the survey methodology and results. I blogged about it on October 14, 2017 in a post titled What do the most Americans fear? The fourth Chapman Survey on American Fears, and being innumerate.

A commercial polling firm, SSRS, had surveyed 1207 American adults from June 28 to July 7, 2017. In their main survey each was asked around eighty questions with the general form:

“How afraid are you of the following…:”

and with multiple-choice replies of

“Blank (skipped answering this question)

Not Afraid

Very Afraid

Afraid

Slightly Afraid”

Data processed by the university for their blog post apparently was blank corrected (rescaled) to correct their results in percent by multiplying by a factor of (100/(100 – Blank percent). The list of fears in the blog post reportedly was ranked by the sum of the percentages for Very Afraid and Afraid. So they actually reported what most Americans fear and NOT what Americans fear most.

 When I compared the list of fears in the blog post with percentage results in the .pdf file, I found lots of discrepancies larger than what could be explained as rounding errors of plus or minus 0.1%. The worst discrepancy was for Cyber-terrorism which was listed as 39.1% and ranked nineteenth but really was 47.9% and should have been ranked tenth. There actually also were 81 fears rather than the 80 shown in the blog post, and the 81st fittingly was that of Being fooled by ‘fake’ news. I made my own list for the sum of the percentages for Very Afraid and Afraid.

Have results for the fear of public speaking changed much over the past four years? Not really. As shown above in a table, the results have been rather similar. From 2014 to 2017 the Chapman Survey rank (by the sum of percentages for Very Afraid and Afraid) went from 25.3% in 2014 to 27.5% in 2015 to 25.5% in 2016 to 23.3% in 2017. The grand sum for Very Afraid, Afraid, and Slightly Afraid went from 61.9% in 2014 to 60.0% in 2015 to 60.2% in 2016 to 57.9% in 2017.    

How about results over the past four years for the fear of corrupt government officials? As shown above in another table, those results changed. From 2015 to 2016 the Chapman Survey percentage for Very Afraid plus Afraid increased by just 2.8% from 56.1% to 58.9%. But then from 2016 to 2017 it went up by almost 15% (14.9%) to 73.8%. The grand sum for Very Afraid, Afraid, and Slightly Afraid went up from 78.5% in 2015 to 82.8% in 2016 and to 92.3% in 2017. (In 2014 people were asked about being worried rather than fearful).    

For this post I entered the percentage data into an Excel spreadsheet, and prepared a series of bar charts listing all the fears, similar to what I had done last year for the Top 40 fears in my October 14, 2016 blog post titled In the 2016 Chapman Survey of American Fears public speaking was ranked 33rd out of 79 fears. This time I didn’t bother with blank correcting (rescaling) to correct results in percent by multiplying by a factor of (100/(100 – Blank percent).

The first bar chart shows results for the sum of percentages for Very Afraid and Afraid, as used in the Chapman blog post. (Click on it to see a larger, clearer view). The Top Ten most common fears are (public speaking was 49th):

Corrupt government officials 73.8%

The American Healthcare Act, also called Trumpcare 55.4%

Pollution of oceans, rivers, and lakes 54.0%

Pollution of drinking water 52.5%

Not having enough money for the future 51.3%

High medical bills 49.2%

The U.S. will be involved in another World War 48.3%

North Korea using nuclear weapons 48.3%

Cyber-terrorism 47.8%

Global warming and climate change 46.7%.

A second bar chart shows results for the sum of percentages for all fears (Very Afraid, Afraid, and Slightly Afraid), which yields the largest and most impressive numbers. The Top Ten most common fears are (public speaking was 40th):

Corrupt government officials 92.3%

Identity theft 83.5%

Cyber-terrorism 83.3%

Economic/financial collapse 83.0%

The U.S. will be involved in another World War 82.8%

Pollution of oceans, rivers, and lakes 82.0%

Pollution of drinking water 81.6%

North Korea using nuclear weapons 81.3%

Not having enough money for the future 80.7%

Terrorist attack 80.3%

A third bar chart shows percentage results for Very Afraid. The Top Ten most common fears are (public speaking was 47th):

Corrupt government officials 46.2%

The American Healthcare Act, also called Trumpcare 37.8%

Not having enough money for the future 28.4%

High medical bills 26.0%

Pollution of drinking water 25.7%

Pollution of oceans, rivers, and lakes 24.1%

Global warming and climate change 23.7%.

The U.S. will be involved in another World War 22.5%

People I love dying 22.1%

North Korea using nuclear weapons 21.9%

A fourth bar chart shows percentage results for Afraid. The Top Ten most common fears are (public speaking was 54th):

Pollution of oceans, rivers, and lakes 29.9%

Cyber-terrorism 29.1%

Identity theft 28.6%

Credit card fraud 28.5%

Corrupt government officials 27.6%

Economic/financial collapse 27.3%

Pollution of drinking water 26.8%

Widespread civil unrest 26.6%

North Korea using nuclear weapons 26.4%

The U.S. will be involved in another World War 25.8%

A fifth bar chart shows percentage results for Slightly Afraid. The Top Ten most common fears are (public speaking was 24th):

Break-ins 44.6%

Theft of property 43.4%

Being hit by a drunk driver 40.9%

Becoming seriously ill 40.8%

Identity theft 39.0%

Economic/financial collapse 38.5%

People I love becoming seriously ill 38.4%

Losing my data, photos, or important documents in a disaster 37.8%

Pandemic or major epidemic 37.5%

Heights 37.1%

A sixth bar chart shows percentage results for Not Afraid. This is complementary to the second chart of the sum of percentages for all fears (Very Afraid, Afraid, and Slightly Afraid). The Top Ten most common fears are (public speaking was 42nd):

Zombies 88.2%

Clowns 83.9%

Ghosts 82.7%

Blood 78.2%

Others talking about you behind your back 77.8%

Whites no longer being the majority in the U.S. 75.4%

Murder by someone you know 73.6%

Sexual assault by someone you know 72.7%

Animals (dogs, rats, etc.) 68.8%

Needles 68.3%

The image was modified from this one of two Cape Mountain Zebras running away at Wikimedia Commons.

Stories about troubleshooting in the Tales from the Cube blog at EDN Network

Before I retired I did failure analysis – figuring out why things busted or rusted. I just looked through the Tales from the Cube blog at EDN Network and found a bunch of interesting stories. But many of them have enough engineering jargon that they are difficult for an outsider to understand without looking at Wikipedia or elsewhere. (EDN stands for Electrical Design News, a publication that began back in 1956).

One of my favorites is Orin Laney’s February 5, 2015 story about Fixing a mainframe with a lunch bag. Back when he was just eighteen he had a summer job on the overnight “graveyard shift” as a supplemental customer engineer at an IBM computer center. One of their mainframe computers, a System/360 Model 50 would not turn on properly. Mr. Laney read the manuals on the power supply circuits and started checking the control relays.

As shown above, a relay just is an electromechanical switch. Applying a current to the coil (1) attracts the armature (2) and switches the moving contact (3) between fixed contacts. The fourth or fifth one was faulty – the blackened, dirty contacts moved, but no power came from the fixed ones. He knew that the contacts needed to be cleaned, but didn’t have a burnishing tool for rubbing them off. (That’s a very mild version of a file, as shown in Figure 7 of this article on Hard to find maintenance tips for electromechanical relays). But in the customer engineering room he found a discarded brown paper lunch bag. He tore off some strips, put them between the dirty contacts on the offending relay, applied power to close them, and repeatedly pulled them through until the contacts were clean enough to conduct electricity again. That improvised repair is an example of jugaad, a Hindi word that means:

“to make existing things work, or to create new things with meager resources”   

   

A couple other stories involve external alternating currents getting in due to insufficient shielding. One is Paul Mathews’s May 31, 2012 story Day at the races, where the current came from a radio station located a mile away. A second is John Loughmiller’s January 21, 2010 story Brown’s buzzer busts business at a broadcast studio where both the remote start control for a videotape recorder and power for a doorbell buzzer connected to a button on their loading dock wall used unshielded twisted-pair cables sitting in the same cable tray. When the United Parcel Service driver rang to deliver his packages, the recorder malfunctioned.

Stanley Pitman’s June 1, 2017 story titled False alarm involved an unexpectedly large signal to a radiation detector for a mill’s incoming train track spur located about 100 feet from the main line. It turned out that false alarms occurred every time a carload of bananas came down the main line. Bananas contain a small amount of naturally radioactive potassium, and there even is a Wikipedia page titled Banana equivalent dose. To shield that detector they had to put up a concrete block wall between the main line and their spur.  

     

Another unusual mishap is Douglas Forst’s August 25, 2011 story Going against the grain dust, where an unintentionally insulated replacement return roller on a conveyor belt became a Van de Graaff generator for high-voltage static electricity, creating half-inch long arcs.

Sometimes the wrong materials or processes accidentally get used during manufacture. In David R. Bryce’s March 17, 2011 story titled Acid test, the wrong type of room-temperature-vulcanizing (RTV) silicone was used to seal the ends of ultraviolet lighting tubes. The page on Wikipedia about RTV silicone mentions that some types release acetic acid during the curing process. That’s fine if you are caulking around your bathtub, and just get a temporary smell of vinegar. Sealing acid vapors inside an enclosure can corrode copper wires, lead solder, etc. (Two decades ago I ran into this problem in a load cell used for weighing trucks).

Images of an IBM System/360 Model 50 computer and a schematic relay came from Wikimedia Commons. The image of bananas came from the National Cancer Institute.

F Minus cartoons about public speaking, listening, debates, and open body language

I enjoy reading Tony Carrillo’s single-panel F Minus cartoons. Today’s was about how someone got started:

“When I gave my first lecture on personal responsibility through the closed door of my teenager’s bedroom, I never imagined it would become a national tour.”

 On October 17th his subject was hearing versus listening, on October 13th it was biting in a debate, and on October 11th it was overly open body language.  

On September 26th it was about a prom date ready to make a dramatic entrance.

Ask your speech audience to write their questions down on note cards

The Toastmasters International guide for trainers, TRAINING BASICS Getting it right, Making it Work, discusses dealing with difficult participants including The Silent Type, The Talker, and The Interrupter.

 At the Faculty Focus website there was an excellent article by Professor Meriah L. Crawford on October 13, 2017 titled A Simple Trick for Getting Students to Ask Questions in Class. She described getting a magic increase in feedback from passing out note cards and asking students to just write down their questions. If there are multiple questions, you can shuffle the cards to keep the responders anonymous. When there are multiple questions on the same topic, you can combine them. Written questions can draw out The Silent Type.     

This strategy also will work for speeches. Getting the questions in writing will help them be more organized, and shut down The Interrupter (a long-winded audience member who just wants to hear themselves talk). 

Professor Crawford also suggested that for large audiences you could ask for questions online (perhaps at Twitter).

The image of note cards came from openclipart.

What do the most Americans fear? The fourth Chapman Survey on American Fears, and being innumerate

It is almost Halloween, and thus time for folks to scare us with surveys about fears. On October 11th Chapman University released results from their fourth Chapman Survey on American Fears with a press release mistitled What do Americans fear most? and a blog post titled America’s Top Fears 2017. Their overall web page provided a link to an Acrobat .pdf file with details for the survey methodology and results.  

A commercial polling firm, SSRS, surveyed 1207 American adults from June 28 to July 7, 2017. In their main survey each was asked around eighty questions with the general form:

“How afraid are you of the following…:”

and replies of

“Blank (skipped answering this question)

Very Afraid

Afraid

Slightly Afraid

Not Afraid”

Data processed by the university for the blog post apparently was blank corrected (rescaled) to correct their results in percent by multiplying by a factor of (100/(100 – Blank percent). The list of fears in the blog post reportedly was ranked by the sum of the percentages for Very Afraid and Afraid. So they actually reported what most Americans fear and NOT what Americans fear most. (You actually can calculate the latter as a Fear Score, as I have previously blogged about back in 2015).    

When I compared the list of fears in the blog post with percentage results in the .pdf file, I found lots of discrepancies larger than what could be explained as rounding errors. Fifteen of them were for items where there is no blank correction, so they must just be incorrect sums. Others had more complicated problems. The worst discrepancy was for Cyber-terrorism which was listed as 39.1% and ranked nineteenth but really was 47.9% and should have been ranked ninth. So, not even their Top Ten list was correct! The word to describe this sort of nonsense is innumerate, which the Oxford Dictionaries defines as:

“without a basic knowledge of mathematics and arithmetic”

There actually also were 81 fears rather than the 80 shown in the blog post, and that 81st fittingly was that of Being fooled by ‘fake’ news.

Here is my corrected ranked listing of all the fears, with the Chapman rankings shown second in curved brackets {} and the page number, question number, [blank corrected sum], (sum), and sum reported in the Chapman blog post :

1. {1} Corrupt Government Officials p79 q29c [74.1%] (73.8%) 74.5%

2. {2} American Healthcare Act/Trumpcare p79 q29e [55.7%] (55.4%) 55.3%

3. {3} Pollution of Oceans, Rivers, and Lakes p52 q13c [54.0%] (54.0%) 53.1%

4. {4} Pollution of Drinking Water p52 q13b [52.6%] (52.5%) 50.4%

5. {5} Not having enough money for the future p53 q14a [51.4%] (51.3%) 50.2%

6. {6} High Medical Bills p53 q14c [49.2%] (49.2%) 48.4%

7. {7} The US will be involved in another World War p62 q22n [48.6%] (48.3%) 48.4%

8. {9} North Korea using nuclear weapons p63 q22s [48.3%] (48.3%) 47.5%

9. {19} Cyber-Terrorism p58 q21c [47.9%] (47.8%) 39.1%

10. {8} Global Warming & Climate Change p53 q13f [46.8%] (46.7%) 48.0%

11. {12} Extinction of plant and animal species p52 q13d [45.9%] (45.9%) 43.5%

12. {10} Air Pollution p51 q13a [45.3%] (45.3%) 44.9%

13. {15} Biological Warfare p63 q22q [45.3%] (45.3%) 41.8%

14. {11} Economic/Financial Collapse p61 q22k [44.7%] (44.5%) 44.4%

15. {14} Identity Theft p72 q25o [44.6%] (44.5%) 41.9%       

16. {13} Terrorist Attack p63 q22r [44.1%] (44.0%) 43.3%

17. {17} People I love dying p51 q12d [42.1%] (42.1%) 39.7%

18. {16} Credit Card Fraud p72 q25p [41.9%] (41.7%) 40.3%

19. {18} People I love becoming seriously ill p51 q12b [41.4%] (41.4%) 39.1%

20. {21} Nuclear Weapons attack p61 q22i [41.3%] (41.3%) 39.0%

21. {20} Widespread civil unrest p62 q22m [41.1%] (40.9%) 39.1%

22. {23} Government restrictions on firearms and ammunition p79 q29d [40.9%] (40.7%) 38.6%

23. {22} Terrorism p73 q25r [40.2%] (40.0%) 38.8%

24. {26} Oil spills p52 q13e [39.0%] (39.0%) 36.2%

25. {24} Government tracking of personal data p59 q21e [38.2%] (38.0%) 37.4%

26. {28} Being hit by a drunk driver p69 q25e [37.8%] 37.8%) 35.5%

27. {27} The collapse of the electrical grid p61 q22h [37.4%] (37.3%) 35.7%

28. {25} Corporate tracking of personal data p58 q21d [36.6%] (36.5%) 36.7%

29. {30} Pandemic or a major epidemic p62 q22l [35.9%] (35.8%) 32.8%

30. {29} The Affordable Care Act/Obamacare p78 q29b [35.4%] (35.3%) 33.9%

31. {32} Nuclear accident/meltdown p61 q22j [32.6%] (32.5%) 30.3%

32. {31} Being unemployed p53 q14b [31.9%] (31.9%) 30.7%

33. {35} Random/mass shooting p71 q25j [30.8%] (30.8%) 28.1%

34. {36} Government use of drones within the US p78 q29a [30.6%] (30.5%) 27.2%

35. {34} Heights p66 q23l [30.0%] (29.9%) 28.2%

36. {33} Losing my data, photos, or other important documents in a disaster 

  p54 q14d [29.0%] (29.0%) 29.0%

37. {38} Break-ins p71 q25k [28.4%] (28.3%) 26.2%

38. {40} Theft of property p71 q25l [28.4%] (28.4%) 25.4%

39. {42} Computers replacing people in the workforce p58 q21a [28.0%] (27.9%) 25.3%

40. {37} Devastating drought p60 q22f [27.9%] (27.8%) 26.6%

41. {43} Devastating tornado p58 q22c [27.6%] (27.6%) 24.3%

42. {39} Becoming seriously ill p50 q12a [26.9%] (26.8%) 25.7%

43. {41} Sharks p65 q23f [26.1%] (26.0%) 25.4%

44. {45} Devastating earthquake p59 q22a [24.8%] (24.8%) 22.6%

45. {47} Racial/hate crime p70 q25i [24.6%] (24.6%) 20.9%

46. {57} Gang violence p71 q25m [24.0%] (24.0%) 19.4%

47. {44} Reptiles (snakes, lizards, etc.) p64 q23d [23.9%] (23.9%) 23.6%

48. {51} Financial fraud p72 q25q [23.4%] (23.4%) 20.0%

49. {46} Devastating hurricane p59 q22b [23.3%] (23.3%) 21.4%

50. {59} Police brutality p70 q25f [23.3%] (23.3%) 18.4%

51. {52} Public speaking p67 q23m [23.3%] (23.3%) 20.0%

52. {50} Insects/arachnids p64 q23c [23.2%] (23.2%) 20.3%

53. {53} Devastating flood p60 q22d [23.0%] (23.0%) 19.8%

54. {60} Murder by a stranger p69 q25c [22.1%] (22.1%) 18.3%

55. {54} Mugging p68 q25a [22.0%] (21.9%) 19.5%

56. {58} Sexual assault by a stranger p70 q25g [21.9%] (21.8%) 19.0%

57. {48} Dying p51 q12c [21.6%] (21.6%) 20.3%

58. {49} Illegal immigration p63 q22p [21.1%] (21.1%) 20.3%

59. {55} Small enclosed spaces p67 q23n [20.9%] (20.9%) 19.8%

60. {56} Walking alone at night p57 q20b [20.2%] (20,2%) 19.8%

61. {61} Deep lakes and oceans p66 q23i [20.1%] (20.1%) 18.2%

62. {62} Abduction/kidnapping p72 q25n [18.9%] (18.9%) 15.5%

63. {65} Stalking p69 q25b [17.8%] (17.7%) 14.1%

64. {63} Devastating blizzard/winter storm p60 q22e [17.6%] (17.6%) 15.2%

65. {--}Being fooled by ‘fake’ news p57 q20d  [16.4%] (16.4%) ---

66. {66} Sexual assault by someone you know p70 q25h [15.6%] (15.6%) 12.4%

67. {67} Murder by someone you know p69 q25d [14.9%] (14.9%) 11.6%

68. {64} Technology I don’t understand p58 q21b [14.8%] (14.8%) 14.9%

69. {70} Large volcanic eruption p60 q22g [14.2%] (14.2%) 10.6%

70. {72} Flying p66 q23j [12.7%] (12.7%) 9.5%

71. {68} Germs p65 q23h [12.7%] (12.7%) 11.5%

72. {71} Needles p62 q23b [12.5%] (12.5%) 10.4%

73. {69} Whites no longer being the majority in the US p62 q22o [10.8%] (10.8%) 10.7%

74. {73} Strangers p67 q23p [9.8%] (9.8%) 8.4%

75. {75} Significant other cheating on you p57 q20a [9.2%] (9.2%) 7.5%

76. {76} Clowns p65 q23g [8.0%] (7.7%) 6.7%

77. {74} Others talking about you behind your back p57 q20c [7.2%] (7.2%) 7.5%

78. {78} Zombies p67 q23o [6.7%] (6.7%) 5.3%

79. {77} Blood p65 q23a [6.4%] (6.4%) 5.5%

80. {79} Ghosts p66 q23k [5.6%] (5.6%) 4.3%

81. {80}Animals (dogs, rats, etc.) p65 q23e [4.1%] (4.1%) 3.7%

Note that fear of public speaking came in around fiftieth, far from the silly usual claims that it is the number one or greatest fear. You won’t be hearing many speaking coaches quote that result for marketing purposes!

The image was adapted from this one at openclipart.