Tuesday, May 28, 2019

Is public speaking the number one fear in the world?
















No! I’ve been hearing that sort of nonsense for the past eleven years. As shown above, it usually is just an assertion made but not proved or even referenced – an ipse dixit. For example, an article at Lifehack by Kyle Pott titled How to get over your fear of public speaking proclaimed:

“The number one fear in the world, ahead of even the fear of death, is the fear of public speaking.”   

That claim also showed up back in a 2002 book by Pat Williams titled The Paradox of Power: A Transforming View of Leadership:

“Poll after poll has shown that the number one fear we face in life is not the fear of death or snakes or the dark. No, the number one fear in the world is fear of public speaking.”

Other times a reference is hinted at – but does not stand up to scrutiny. Over at VitalityLIVINGCollege Dr. Rangana Rupavi Choudhuri wrote another article about What are the common fears and phobias, eliminate them for good! She said:

“I was surprised to learn that according to the Institute of Mental Health (April 2015), the fear of public speaking is the number one fear in the world – beating the fear of death and spiders. People would rather die than speak in public!”

But the bar chart she showed displayed baseless nonsense, which I has blogged about in a post on December 7, 2014 titled Statistic Brain is just a statistical medicine show.


















As shown above, the number one world fear claim is a paper dragon – a Startling Statistic brought up to get attention before going on to describe how that fear can be eliminated.

On February 3, 2014 I blogged about Busting a myth – that 75% of people in the world fear public speaking. In that post I pointed out there is a silly tendency to jump from real surveys of much narrower groups to the entire world. On April 9, 2012 I blogged about how a Poll by Reader’s Digest Canada found fear of public speaking wasn’t ranked first in 15 of 16 countries surveyed.

How would you even go about surveying the entire world? Perhaps a quarter of the people speak English, so you would need to ask question in several different languages. I have not seen such a survey, and doubt that one exists. On October 16, 2014 Pew Global had an article titled Greatest dangers in the world. It only discussed 44 countries about five dangers: AIDS & other diseases, Inequality, Nuclear Weapons, Pollution & Environment, and Religious and Ethnic Hatred.  

An image of Enrico Caruso came from Wikimedia Commons, and an image of the Dragon of Wantley came from the Library of Congress.  

No comments:

Post a Comment