Spouting nonsense: Another 16 books refer to a bogus statistic that 74% fear public speaking (suffer from speech anxiety)

Back on October 9, 2017 I blogged about how It must be true, since I read it in a book. Unfortunately books sometimes are not always backed by careful research. In a another post on August 14, 2020 titled Toastmaster magazine is spreading nonsense from John Bowe about how common the fear of public speaking is I described how John Bowe’s 2020 book I Have Something to Say had incorrectly claimed (using baseless numbers originally posted by Statistic Brain) that:

“According to the National Institutes of Health, 74 percent of Americans suffer from speech anxiety.”

I wondered whether that nonsense also was in other books, so I looked at Amazon, on Google Books, and elsewhere. Sixteen other books had that baseless percentage, so they all get one of my Spoutly awards. In chronological order they are:

2013

Jared Bauman, Simple Steps to Master Public Speaking

“According to a recent fear of public speaking study performed by the National Institute of Mental Health, 74% of people suffer from some form of speech anxiety.”

Cindy Locher, Vanquish Your Fear of Public Speaking

“Fear of public speaking is the number one fear in America. If you're one of the 74% of Americans who fear public speaking, this five-step process can dramatically increase your comfort and confidence.”

2014

Cheryl R. Stinchcomb, Presentation Skills That Rock: captivating your audience in the digital era

“Can you believe that 74% of people suffer from speech anxiety?”

Jennifer Witter, The Little Book of Big PR

“According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), 74 percent of people have fear of public speaking.”

Bill Hoogterp, Your Perfect Presentation

“According to the National Institutes of Health, 74 percent of Americans suffer from a fear of public speaking.”

2015

Anthony Fasano, Engineer Your Own Success

His Table 6.1 reproduced the numbers from a Statistic Brain web page. (74% of people, 75% of women, and 73% of men suffer from speech anxiety).

Eamonn O’Brien, How to Make Powerful Speeches 2ed 

“According to the National Institute of Mental Health, this fear is so pervasive that 74 per cent of American adults (and the figures are worse elsewhere) admit to some degree of speech anxiety.”

D.J.D. Carducci and Lisa Kaiser, Shyness: The Ultimate Teen Guide

“According to a 2013 report from the National Institute of Mental Health, 74 percent of Americans fear speaking in public, far more than the 40 percent of us who are shy.”

2016

Thomas Miller, Fear Busters: 14 ways to kick fear to the curb

“Studies indicate that 74% of the population is afraid of public speaking and 68% fear dying.”

Kenny Nguyen, Gus Murillo, Robert Killeen, Luke Jones, The Big Fish Experience

“According to the National Institute of Mental Health, the fear of public speaking, which is called glossophobia, is the number one fear in America (that’s right, over spiders, heights, and even death). A whopping 74 percent of Americans are said to suffer from this fear.”

2017

Deborah Shames, Out Front

“This may not sound like a surprising admission, since 74 percent of the US population surveyed in 2013 shares a fear of public speaking.”

2018

Rick Lewis, Confident Under Pressure

“The National Institute of Mental Health reports that 74 percent of people suffer from speech anxiety.”

2019

Sara Latta, Scared Stiff

“According to statistics from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), fear of public speaking is the most common phobia, with nearly three out of every four people (74 percent) surveyed saying they have this fear.”

2020

Cody Smith, Public Speaking Panic: how to go from stage-fright to stage-ready in less than 24 hours

“Not to mention, a whopping total of 74% of people suffer from speech anxiety.”

Alex Crickets, Public Speaking

“Entrepreneur.com has published research from the National Institute of Mental Health, which claims that 74% of adults suffer from a fear of public speaking.”

Michael J. Gelb, Mastering the Art of Public Speaking: 8 secrets to transform fear and supercharge your career

“Seventy-four percent of Americans suffer from glossophobia, the fear of public speaking.”

Back on March 1, 2015 I had blogged about A high mound of manure from Bill Hoogterp about fear of public speaking.

Another fraudulent ‘Nutflix’ email

Yesterday I received another phony email which pretended to come from Netflix.

As shown above, they misspelled the word subscription without the second s. They also had the sender identified as the Dutch Netflix International B.V., and had a question mark at the end.  

A little flexibility is crucial

Being too rigid can get you into trouble. A few days ago our laptop computer was misbehaving. Even though the AC adapter was plugged into an extension cord (as shown above) the battery was not charging. The little white LED on the left side of the laptop next to the power connector was staying dark. What had gone wrong?

As is shown above, the two nickel-plated blades on the plug for the AC adapter are quite rigid.

The mating female socket from another disassembled extension cord is shown above. A pair of flexible brass fingers surround each blade so contact can be made. The molded single socket on one side of the extension cord I had used apparently did not have enough flexibility. But when I put the plug into one of the dual sockets on the other side it made contact. Problem solved. I stuck the child-proofing insert in the single plug to remind me not to ever use it again.    

A touching two-minute speech at the Democratic National Convention

I did not watch much of the Democratic National Convention. Later on I watched videos of the very polished acceptance speeches from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and Barrack Obama’s 20-minute one.

I had missed this one by 13 year-old Brayden Harrington though. Then I saw an article by John Hendrickson in The Atlantic titled Stuttering Through It. A year ago Mr. Hendrickson had interviewed Biden about his stutter in an another article titled What Joe Biden Can’t Bring Himself to Say.  

My Tall Tale for a Toastmasters speech contest

At our August 19, 2020 Zoom meeting Pioneer Toastmasters Club held a Tall Tales Speech Contest. I was one of three contestants and came in third. A Tall Tales speech is nominally three to five minutes long (but can run thirty seconds over or under those limits). Its subject should have a theme or plot, and be of a highly exaggerated, improbable nature. My contest speech about the stealthiest cover band in the country was cut down from a 5 to 7 minute humorous speech I had given way back in 2010. I still had some props based on thrift store purchases. Here is the script:

This story is absolutely true, like all the stories I tell you. I heard in Pittsburgh from a friend of Stan Ruckzynski. You’ve never heard of the Ruczynski brothers or their rock and roll band from Youngstown, Ohio. And you never heard them play. They only released one record on their own label. But that’s all right with them. They didn’t have to play to make money. But you probably have heard the name of their band hundreds of times - without ever realizing it.

The four Ruczynski brothers started a band called the Kielbasa Brothers in the late sixties. A kielbasa is a big, long Polish sausage. Their day jobs were making steel pipe at the Youngstown Sheet and Tube mill. Theo played guitar, Leo played bass, Dan played keyboards, and Stan played drums. Every weekend they played covers, versions of other people’s songs. Their gigs were in bars from Pittsburgh to Wheeling. But they never made enough money to quit their day jobs.

In 1975 Theo decided to get advice from the wisest man in the family. Their old uncle Thaddeus, or Tad, worked as an attorney for the Democratic political machine over in Pittsburgh. It started running things back in the mid 30’s and kept on going. They and Tad had their fingers in everything and knew how to make money. Tad listened to Theo and told him to change how you think. You need to become a record company, not just a band. Theo asked how will that help?

Tad explained, “We rename the band Dozens More. Then we trademark and copyright it. We start our own record company and release an album on an LP record. Every night I see TV ads for collections of golden oldies. They all say things like contains ‘Rock around the clock’, ‘ Leader of the pack’ and dozens more. Every time someone runs an ad that says the magic phrase Dozens More I send them an angry letter. It says they damaged us by infringing our trademark and copyright. I tell them they need to change their commercial to remove that phrase. Otherwise we’re going to sue them here in Pittsburgh.” When they ask around, they’ll find they can’t win. I play poker or golf with every judge in town. After a while I will agree to instead settle for some money, provided they don’t tell anyone else. Paying us will be cheaper and easier.

September 19, 1977 was Black Monday in Youngstown. That day Sheet and Tube closed the mill. They laid off 5000 people including all four brothers. That fall lots of Youngstown residents were sitting at home all day watching TV. The difference was that the Ruczynski brothers got paid from doing it. Each brother watched a different network to check out the commercials.

Record companies all over the country and the alphabet tripped over their trademark. Folks like: Atlantic, Columbia, Decca, Mercury, Vanguard, and Warner Brothers. Uncle Tad threatened to sue them all. Enough money rolled in so the brothers never worried about losing their homes. They kept changing formats to keep the album alive. There was a 8-track, and then a cassette, and finally a CD.

Their uncle said that when you pick a few dollars (just a tad) out of enough pockets it adds up to a very nice living. Things picked up further when record companies started running thirty minute long infomercials on late night TV. They definitely didn’t want to redo them. Eventually the story about how Dozens More operated leaked onto the WorldWide Web and blew their cover. But for two decades they were the stealthiest cover band in the country.

  

Very little of that story is true. There never ever was a band called Dozens More. But there really was a guy named Ruckzynski in the Air Force Reserve unit I belonged to in Pittsburgh.

The idea is based on the concepts of a copyright troll and a trademark troll. You do need to have a product to keep a trademark alive. I was making fun of how in trademark law there can be absurdly broad claims. For example, Amstar Corporation, who owned the Domino Sugar trademark once sued Domino’s Pizza to keep them from also trademarking a Domino.  

The image of Jack and the Beanstalk is from a WPA poster at the Library of Congress.

Jumping from a fear to a phobia

I just ran across an article by Gary Waldon at CEOworld Magazine on August 19, 2020

titled 4 Key ways to get over your fears. His first key is titled Houston we have a problem, or do we? Gary asks:

“How much of a negative impact is your phobia having? My fear of sharks wouldn’t be much of a problem if I didn’t like the ocean. However, I love to surf and my fear was preventing me from indulging one of my true passions so I became motivated to face my phobia. If, as an example, you have a fear of public speaking, but aren’t required to address an audience in your everyday working life, your phobia likely won’t impact your career. Therefore, because the likelihood of you being in a situation where you have to face your fear is low, you will probably not be that motivated to address it and nor would you need to. Assess how much of a problem your phobia is on your life.”

He merrily jumps from a fear over to a phobia. But those are two very different concepts to psychologists and psychiatrists. As shown above via a Venn diagram, a phobia additionally is interfering, persistent, and intense. By definition a phobia always is a problem which interferes with your life. I blogged about this topic on December 8, 2019 in a post titled Toastmasters press releases confuse a fear of public speaking with a phobia.

The cartoon was adapted from one on a Career Change Jump at Wikimedia Commons.

Masks for singing, teaching and speaking

Cloth masks we wear to protect from Coronavirus pose a problem for singers. When you open your mouth to take a deep breath, the close-fitting cloth is sucked into your mouth.  

Yesterday I saw an article from West Virginia University at WVU Today titled The masked singers: How a WVU choir director composed the perfect masks for performance art. Kym Scott designed new masks with built-in frames. The cloth then sits further from the mouth. The new designs provide more volume inside. They still fit well enough to filter most droplets. The article links to a product web site called Sing-Safe. There is a $30 performers mask for singers, and a $28 teachers mask (also for public speakers).   

The cartoon of a glee club was cropped from an 1896 Puck magazine at the Library of Congress.

Savage Chickens cartoon on how NOT to give a TED talk

On July 28, 2020 Doug Savage published the Savage Chickens cartoon shown above titled Cat Talk. As might be expected for a cat, the topic is all about himself - and he plans to meow for an hour (60 minutes) rather than the 20 minute upper limit for a TED talk.

Instead, as was discussed by Nick Morgan in a March 22, 2016 Public Words blog post, the topic you select should tell your audience What’s in it for me?

  

Autological and pareidolia

Sometimes you can add words to your vocabulary just by reading a cartoon. On August 12, 2020 Zach Weinersmith published a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal web cartoon with the following dialogue:

Woman: Autological words are my hobby.

Man: What’s that?

Woman: Words that describe themselves.

Polysyllabic is polysyllabic.

Man: This is stupid.

Woman: ‘Term” is a term for term.

Man: Stop.

Woman: And then there’s ‘pareidolia.’

Man: What’s that?

Woman: It refers to the perception of meaning in a random pattern. Like seeing faces in clouds

Man: So…

Woman: It looks just like a caterpillar.

Asking for an autological word probably would be too difficult for a Table Topics question at a Toastmasters club meeting. Pareidolia also is an impressive term!

Toastmaster magazine is spreading nonsense from John Bowe about how common the fear of public speaking is

The August 2020 issue of Toastmaster magazine has an article by Suzanne Frey on pages 14 and 15 titled I have something to say. She interviewed John Bowe, who said:

“I was thinking about the fact that 74% of Americans suffer from speech anxiety (it is the same or higher in most other cultures).”

In press releases from 2015 and 2019 Toastmasters International had claimed that:

“Glossophobia, the fear of public speaking, is a common social phobia, with an estimated 75 percent of the population experiencing some form of anxiety before giving a speech.”

Now instead of just an estimate (three out of four) Mr. Bowe and Ms. Frey give us an exact percentage for Americans. Toastmasters clubs will be tempted to use this 74% for their marketing and public relations efforts. They should not because that percentage just is baseless rubbish.

I bought (from Amazon for Kindle) but have not yet read John Bowe’s new book, I Have Something To Say: Mastering the Art of Public Speaking in an Age of Disconnection. In his introduction, which you can see at Amazon via the Look Inside feature, he more specifically claims:

“According to the National Institutes of Health, 74 percent of Americans suffer from speech anxiety.”

But the 74% really comes from a 2012 web page at Statistic Brain titled Fear of Public Speaking Statistics, and also appears in their 2012 page on Fear/Phobia Statistics. Currently Statistic Brain is hiding behind a paywall, but I have retrieved those pages via the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive. Both pages claim their source is the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). I emailed Statistic Brain and asked where specifically they got those percentages, but did not ever get a reply. I looked at the NIMH web site and did not find a reference, so I emailed them. NIMH told me those percentages did NOT come from them, as I described in a blog post on December 7, 2014 titled Statistic Brain is just a statistical medicine show. I discussed that topic more recently in another blog post on March 22, 2019 titled An apparently authoritative statistic about fear of public speaking that really lacks any support.

How about John Bowe’s other claim in the Toastmaster article - that the percentage is the same or higher in most other cultures? I don’t think so. But in the 2015 second edition of his book How to Make Powerful Speeches Eamonn O’Brien says in the second paragraph of Chapter 1 that:

“According to the National Institute of Mental Health, this fear is so pervasive that 74 per cent of American adults (and the figures are worse elsewhere) admit to some degree of speech anxiety.”

John Bowe has another article in Make It at CNBC on August 13, 2020 titled Bad at public speaking? The trick is to distill your message to these 15 words, says speech trainer. In that one he says:

“My journey in public speaking started in 2010 after I discovered that 74% of Americans suffer from speech anxiety.”

His second link is to a web page titled Any Anxiety Disorder at the National Institute of Mental Health. But it doesn’t have that 74%. Data sources are pair of surveys – the National Comorbidity Survey Replication (NCS-R) and the National Comorbidity Survey Adolescent Supplement (NCS-A). I have previously blogged about results from magazine articles on fear of public speaking from both. On August 12, 2015 I blogged about There’s really no mystery about how common stage fright is. From the NCS-R, 21.2 percent of adults feared public speaking/performance (and 19.5% feared speaking up in a meeting/class). The real 21.2% is 3-1/2 times lower than the bogus 74%! On June 11, 2012 I blogged about What social situations scare American adolescents, and what are their top 20 fears? From the NCS-A, 35.8% feared performing for audience and 24.9% feared speaking in class.   

How about other countries? How do they compare with the 21.2% for U. S. adults? They are lower! On August 15, 2012 I blogged about how Surveys show that public speaking is not feared by the majority of adults in nine developed and eleven developing countries. For developed countries 13% feared public speaking/performance and 12.5% feared speaking up in a meeting/class. For developing countries 9.4% feared public speaking/performance and 9.0% feared speaking up in a meeting/class.

Neither John Bowe nor Suzanne Frey did careful research on fear of public speaking before putting out a bogus statistic. I am awarding them both a Spoutly for spouting nonsense. Many others also have been fooled by the Statistic Brain nonsense. In future posts I will discuss both books and articles.

The globe was adapted from an image at Wikimedia Commons.

A phishing email from 'PayPaI'

Look very carefully at the fraudulent email I got this morning. In the title they misspelled the name PayPaI rather than PayPal. That final upper-case I instead of a lower-case L gave away that it was phony. The misspelled name is pronounced PayPie. And, I’m not going to give them even a little piece of my Pie!

What does a ‘thin lines’ flag mean?

A couple blocks from my home I saw the two flags shown above flying, but was not familiar with the dark gray version of the American flag with its green, orange, and blue lines.

It turned out to be an expanded version of the ‘thin blue line’ flag shown above, where blue represents Police and other law enforcement – providing a line between order and chaos.

When I looked it up, I found the meaning shown above, adding colors both for the Military and Search & Rescue.    

But why stop there? Others will indignantly retort that Firefighters (Red) also belong on any flag. Why isn’t there a brown line to represent the Water and Sewer Workers, who bring the water we need to drink (and make the earth bloom) and take away the sewage?  

The Thin Blue Line flag came from Wikimedia Commons.  

Today’s Pearls Before Swine cartoon can be explained via a bar chart

Most of today’s Pearls Before Swine cartoon about Pig’s worries is described in the PowerPoint bar chart shown above.

When doing research, your attention span should be more than 10 seconds

Back on January 21, 2017 I blogged about Is the attention span of a marketer shorter than that of a fruit fly? Recently I decided to take another look to see if people were still spouting some nonsense statistics about human attention spans. Unfortunately they were.

Not reading a report carefully

At Jim Donovan Health Solutions on July 29, 2020 there was an article titled What goldfish do better than humans. He linked to a 2015 Microsoft report which you also can find here, and then discusses the research in it. As shown above, on page 6 it has a graphic with three statistics on attention span which DID NOT actually come from there.

Instead they came from a web page cooked up by some jerks at the so-called Statistic Brain Research Institute. There are three versions of that Statistic Brain web page, as shown above (currently hidden behind a paywall) which I instead retrieved from the Wayback Machine. The earliest lists The Associated Press as a source, implying it was in a newspaper article sometime somewhere. The next version adds the authoritative-sounding National Center for Biotechnology Information, U. S. National Library of Medicine. A third updates from 8 to 8.25 seconds.

Did those statistics come from any of their indicated sources? No! Two skeptical researchers checked and both came up empty.  Jo Craven McGinty had an article at the Wall Street Journal on February 17, 2017 titled Is your attention span shorter than a goldfish’s? Simon Maybin at BBC News on March 10, 2017 had another article titled Busting the attention span myth. You can find them both here.

By the way, if you look carefully at the Statistic Brain web pages they just refer to a gold fish. That Microsoft report changed it to one word. As two words it could just refer to the color for a fish (not the species) as shown above based on the 1960 Dr. Seuss children’s book title One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.

I read it in a TIME magazine article, so it should be true

Some recent articles are lazy and don’t even go back to that Microsoft report. Instead they just link to a TIME magazine article on May 14, 2015 by Kevin McSpadden titled You now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish. One example is an article by John Stevens at Bitcha on July 29, 2020 titled 7 Research-proven tips for boosting credibility on your website. Another example is an article by Melody Wilding at Forbes on July 27, 2020 titled How to be a confident concise communicator (even when you have to speak off the cuff).

I read it in a TOASTMASTER magazine article, so it must be true

Even sillier is an article by Peggy Beach on pages 22 to 25 in the July 2020 issue of Toastmaster magazine titled Are You Listening? She says vaguely that:

“….Our society is so fast-paced that according to a Microsoft study, the average attention span of people has declined from 12 seconds to 8 seconds since the year 2000.”

Why is that silly? A typical speech at a Toastmasters club is 5 to 7 minutes long. The five minute minimum is twenty-five times the quoted 12 second attention span. If people really just had a 12 second span, then they would fall asleep long before a speech was done. There could not be any Toastmasters clubs, but there are more than 16,800 of them!

Our attention span really is about twenty minutes. Many people enjoy watching 18-minute long TED Talks as YouTube videos.

I read it in a book title, so it really must be true

There is a 2017 book by Paul Hellman titled You’ve Got 8 Seconds: communication secrets for a distracted world. Presumably Paul was distracted when he came up with a title based on a bogus statistic. The Notes for his Introduction just refer to the Microsoft report and the TIME article.

Based on this, you now should do that

Heck no! We are free to ignore advice based on those bogus statistics. An article by Dr. Heather McKee at ThriveGlobal on July 9, 2020 is titled The impact our phones have on our attention and health and what to do about it. Another article there by Joyce Shulman on July 20, 2020 is titled How to be better than a goldfish tells us seven things to do to retrain our brains.

Images of a stopwatch, a toaster and a trout came from Wikimedia Commons. The phony TIME cover came from NBC News.