A common strategy for opening a speech, blog post, or book section is to quote a Startling Statistic. Hopefully that statistic is real, not like one I blogged about in a post on March 22, 2019 titled An apparently authoritative statistic about fear of public speaking that really lacks any support. And when you look it up you should get back to its primary source, and also check for the most recent results.
On October 20, 2022 I blogged about how David Gergen’s 2022 book Hearts Touched with Fire – How Great Leaders Are Made has an excellent chapter on The Art of Public Persuasion. Chapter 9 in it, on pages 154 to 169, is titled The Art of Public Persuasion and its second section titled The Basics of Public Speaking opens on page 161 by stating:
“Some years ago, a pollster reported on the three greatest fears of Americans. Their results: Number three were bugs, snakes, and other animals; second was heights; the greatest fear was speaking in front of an audience.”
Notes in the back of his book indicate he was referring to a commonly cited article by Christopher Ingraham in the Washington Post on October 30, 2014 titled America’s top fears: public speaking, heights and bugs. I first blogged about it in a post on October 27, 2014 titled What do the most Americans fear? The Chapman Survey of American Fears and the press release copying reflex. Then I blogged about it on October 29, 2014 in another post titled Chapman Survey on American Fears includes both zombies and ghosts, and included a series of bar charts.
What did the primary source say about that survey? There is a press release by Sheri Ledbetter at Chapman University on October 20, 2014 titled What Americans Fear Most – New Poll from Chapman University. Instead it listed the following top five things Americans fear most as: Walking alone at night, Becoming the victim of identity theft, safety on the internet, Being the victim of a mass/random shooting, and public speaking. Why is that list different?
That top ranking for public speaking in the 2014 survey Gergen mentioned came because it only considered 12 ‘phobias’ although there really were questions about 61 fears, worries, or concerns. Those twelve are less than a fifth of the survey questions. You can find detailed results from Chapman, but will see those questions were asked in seven different ways: Safety (6 questions) – How safe do you feel? Internet-related Fears (5 questions) – How concerned are you about the following internet-related problem? Environmental Attitudes & Concerns (12 questions) - Indicate the extent to which you feel concerned about the following environmental issue. Disasters (14 questions) - How worried are you that the following natural/manmade disasters or event could occur in the United States in the next 25 years? Governmental Concerns (4 questions) – How worried are you about the following? Fear of Criminal Victimization (8 questions) – How afraid are you of being victimized in the following way? Phobias (12 questions) – How afraid are you of the following?
When you add the eight similar questions about Criminal Victimization to Phobias for a total of twenty (still just a third of the results), you find, as shown above, that 49.7% feared Identity theft/credit card fraud versus only 25.3% for public speaking. So, public speaking came in second rather than first, as I discussed on January 10, 2022 in a post titled The opening paragraph of an article on public speaking earns two pinocchios for telling us lies.
Is the 2014 survey the only one from Chapman University? No, they repeated it annually seven more times, but with the questions asked in a consistent way, and a bigger list with 79 to 95 questions. They skipped the pandemic year of 2020, so there was just a survey titled 2020/2021. As shown above via another bar chart, in 2015 through 2022 the most common (#1) fear was of Corrupt Government Officials, and it was much larger than that for Public Speaking, which ranked from #26 to #59. You can find articles from Chapman discussing their surveys in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020/21, and 2022.
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