Falling down at the start of an article by quoting a bogus statistic based on superficial research

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At GCU Today (from Grand Canyon University) there is a decent article by Mike Killen on December 15, 2021 titled Fear not, Public Speaking Lab will … um … help. But it starts by showing an image captioned with a claim that:

 

“The fear of public speaking, or glossophobia, affects 73% of the population.”

 

and that statistic is discussed more in the ninth paragraph:

 

“The fear of public speaking is the most common phobia, and the National Institute of Mental Health reports that public speaking anxiety, or glossophobia, affects about 73% of the population.”

 

Unfortunately that is a bogus statistic (really from Statistic Brain), which I blogged about back on March 22, 2019 in a post titled An apparently authoritative statistic about fear of public speaking that really lacks any support. What does real research sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health say? In an earlier post on August 12, 2015 titled There’s really no mystery about how common stage fright is I mentioned that public speaking/performance was feared by just 21.2% of U. S. adults (roughly a third of the bogus percentage). Also, speaking up in a meeting/class was feared by 19.5% of them.

 

The image of a man falling over was adapted from this one at Wikimedia Commons.