On May 28, 2019 I blogged about Is public speaking the number one fear in the world? In that post I pointed out that such claims referred to surveys of the U.S. – sometimes bogus ones.
I just saw an article at Gallup on September 30, 2021 by Steve Crabtree and Alden Lai titled The world prefers a calm life to an exciting life which really polled the world (116 countries) on a single question. (It could be an interesting speech topic). They found that across those 116 countries 72% preferred a calm life, 16% an exciting life, and 10% both. They reported that:
“The preference for a calm life is one of the most consistent findings from this new study. In 114 of the 116 countries and territories included in the 2020 research, the percentage of people who prefer a calm life outnumber those who prefer an exciting life by at least 15 percentage points -- and by more than 50 points in most countries. (The two exceptions were Georgia, where people were significantly more like to say they would prefer an exciting life to a calm life, and Vietnam, where there was no clear preference.)”
They provided a table for eleven regions of the world, which I have summarized above via a bar chart comparing percentages for calm and excited. For the U.S. and Canada 75% preferred a calm life while only 22% preferred an exciting life. In ten of eleven regions over 2/3 preferred a calm life.
Another bar chart adds the usually much smaller percentages for both.
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