At the National Social Anxiety Center there is an article by J. R. Montpoli on February 20, 2017 titled Public Speaking Anxiety and Fear of Brain Freezes which began by claiming that:
“The fear of public speaking is the most common phobia ahead of death, spiders, or heights. The National Institute of Mental Health reports that public speaking anxiety, or glossophobia, affects about 73% of the population. The underlying fear is judgment or negative evaluation by others. Public speaking anxiety is considered a social anxiety disorder.”
That claim was widely cited and is still being cited, most recently in a blog post by Heather Pogue at the University of Florida [Institute of Food and Agriculture] on January 20, 2023 titled Public Speaking Tips and Tricks.
On March 22, 2019 I blogged about it in a post titled An apparently authoritative statistic about fear of public speaking that really lacks any support, in which I pointed out the 73% didn’t really come from the National Institute of Mental Health. Instead it was from some jerks at a commercial web site called Statistic Brain. (I didn’t mention that the fears list omitted darkness, which should have come after spiders and before heights).
Recently, almost six years later that web page was incompetently revised (without any notice of a change) to instead read:
“The fear of public speaking is the most common phobia ahead
of death, spiders, or heights. The National Institute of Mental Health reports
that public speaking anxiety, or glossophobia, affects about 40%* of the
population. The underlying fear is judgment or negative evaluation by others.
Public speaking anxiety is considered a social anxiety disorder.
* Gallup News Service, Geoffrey Brewer, March 19, 2001.”
When I looked on the Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive, I found that change was made sometime after November 29, 2022.
The 40% is a real statistic from a news article by Geoffrey Brewer at Gallup titled Snakes Top List of Americans’ Fears. But fear of public speaking really was second, heights were third, being closed in a small space was fourth, and spiders and insects were fifth. Death isn’t on the list from Gallup.
Why did Mr. Montpoli use a two-decades old statistic rather than a recent one from 2022? On September 24, 2022 I blogged about how A YouGov America poll in June 2022 found public speaking was the fourth most common fear for adults (23%) and women (26%), but the second most common fear for men (20%). And on October 22, 2022 I blogged about how The 2022 Chapman Survey of American Fears has a forest with 92 fears. Public speaking was feared by 34% of adults and only ranked 46th.
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