It’s almost Halloween, and therefore time for another scary survey about fears. On October 14, 2022 there is a blog post from Chapman University titled The Top 10 Fears in America 2022. The web page for that survey has a link to their report with detailed results of their eighth 2022 Chapman Survey of American Fears (for 1020 respondents done back in April), and to a list of the percentages (as usual based on the sum for Very Afraid plus Afraid).
A box in the blog post notes incorrectly that:
“Fear of corrupt government officials has remained the greatest fear for yet another year since first landing in the spot in 2015. The fear, however, has experienced a steep drop from 79.6% (2020/21) to 62.1% (2022), the lowest it has been since 2016.”
That 62.1% actually is the most common fear, as is shown above in a bar chart presenting the Top Twenty fears.
Where is public speaking? Not in the Top Twenty! It’s ranked right in the middle at 46th, feared by 34% (just over a third).
As shown above via a second bar chart, that’s higher than the 25.3% (just over a quarter) from the 2014 survey where it was ranked first, which has often been misquoted since it appeared in an October 30, 2014 Washington Post newspaper article by Christopher Ingraham (just about the Phobias category) titled America’s top fears: public speaking, heights and bugs.
We can instead rank fears based on a Fear Score, on a scale from one to four, where 1 = Not Afraid, 2 = Slightly Afraid, 3 = Afraid, and 4 = Very Afraid. This year Corrupt Government Officials (the greatest fear) has a Fear Score of 2.982, just below Afraid. As shown above via a third bar chart, Public Speaking has a Fear Score of 2.172, and over the eight surveys an average of 1.993, just below Slightly Afraid.
In surveys a small percentage of people typically don’t answer, so along with the four fear levels (Very Afraid, Afraid, Slightly Afraid, Not Afraid) there is a category for Refused or Don’t Know. In this survey it is labeled Web Blank, and 0.5% or less.
The Chapman blog post does not discuss a very curious feature for eleven of their fear data percentages. There are two more categories labeled Doesn’t Apply to Me and I Don’t Know Who/What This Is. There are three cases with huge percentages for Doesn’t Apply to Me: 56.3% for Not Being Able to Pay Off College Debt of Myself or a Family Member, 35.4% for Being Unemployed, and 19.4% for Not Having Enough Money to Pay My Rent or Mortgage.
There are eight more cases for I Don’t Know Who/What This Is with 29.8% for The Proud Boys, 27.6% for Antifa, 17.6% for Right Wing Extremists, 17.5% for Left Wing Extremists, 5.2% for White Supremacists, 2.3% for Muslims, 2.2% for Black Lives Matter (BLM), and 1.1% for Immigrants.
In all these cases they rescaled the data by multiplying by a factor like 100/(100 - % for Doesn’t Apply to Me), which for 56.3% would be 2.288 so a sum that was 18.8% got rescaled way up to 43.0%.
The ~1894 painting of fear by Maria Yakunchikova was adapted from Wikimedia Commons.
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