An abysmal article about fear of public speaking based on shallow research

According to his LinkedIn profile, Michael Hanson is Director of IT Technology for UnitedHealth Group in New Port Richey, Florida (in the Tampa metro area). He writes a blog titled The Middle Manager. Beginning on April 2, 2019 he posted a series of 13 articles on Public Speaking. The first blog post, just titled Public Speaking, is truly abysmal, but the rest are OK. The first three paragraphs in that first post say:

“I want to start a series on a subject that affects a lot of people. The technical term is Glossophobia – fear of public speaking. This fear is considered a social phobia, and a paper published with the US National Institutes of Health noted that of people that had social phobias, the most common was speaking in public, by a significant – 89.4% – margin (Source: Epidemiology of social phobia: a clinical approach). 

An inability to speak in public can actually negatively impact your career. It can reduce your compensation by as much as 10%, and there’s a 15% chance that it would affect a opportunities for career advancement to higher leadership positions (Source: Columbia University: Social Anxiety Disorder). 

I’ve heard that fear of public speaking ranks up with life-changing events such as divorce or death of a loved one. It’s frequently quoted, but I couldn’t find any actual support sources. But given the above numbers, it’s probably fairly accurate.”

First, a phobia is different from just a fear, as is illustrated in the Venn diagram shown above, which appeared in my December 11, 2013 blog post titled Spouting Nonsense: July 2013 Toastmaster magazine article fumbles fears and phobias. You can find the detailed differences discussed on this web page at PubMed. And I’d call glossophobia a pseudo-technical term.

Second, the PubMed abstract from a magazine article that Michael linked to was published in European Psychiatry. It described results from a survey done in Sesto Fiorentino, which is a suburb of Florence, Italy. What percent of people there had a phobia of public speaking? The abstract says 6.88% had social phobia. Multiply that by 0.894, and you find just 5.88% of the population in that suburb there had a phobia of public speaking. That’s a rather small percentage. Does it have any relevance to a U.S. audience? Not really!

According to a 2008 article by Ruscio et al 12.1% of a U.S. sample had social phobia sometime in their lives. Of those, 88.7% had a phobia of public speaking/performance, which multiplies to 10.7% with public speaking phobia. That’s about half of the 21.2% with a fear of public speaking/performance (stage fright). It’s purely coincidence that the percentages with speaking phobia, 89.4 and 88.7 were nearly equal.     

Third, the Columbia University article Michael linked to was about social phobia, not fear of public speaking. Both it and the European Psychiatry abstract were used before by Peter Khoury in a horrible article at Magnetic Speaking, which I blogged about on December 15, 2016 in a post titled Believable and unbelievable statistics about fears and phobias of public speaking.

  

Fourth, the blog post about results from the 2018 Chapman Survey of American Fears had percentages for People I love dying 56.4% (rank #6), Dying 27.9% (#54), and Public speaking 26.2% (#59). The percentage for people I love dying is over twice that for public speaking, so it is not close at all.

Fifth, how about divorce? On December 14, 2016 I blogged about how Public speaking was the 7th most commonly stressful activity in an online survey done for Hired.com. Percentages were: Death of a loved one 94%, Going through a divorce or break up 92%, Looking for a job 83%, Moving 82%, Planning a wedding 78%, Getting a root canal 73%, public speaking 70%.