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.