At Gitnux on March 20, 2023 there is a blog post by Oness
Skander (originally from February 17, 2023) with a misleading title of
Public Speaking Statistics: Recent Data from 2023. But some are not from 2023, others are not recent, and some not even statistics. A box near the top is titled Public Speaking: The Most Important Statistics, and those three are:
The percentage of people who fear public speaking increased significantly from 73% in 2010 to 85% in 2019.
89.4% of people with social anxiety conditions had a fear of speaking publically.
61% claimed that public speaking improved their career opportunities.
Her first misleading and incomplete statement uses some results in a table from an article by Steven Zauderer at Cross River Therapy on January 11, 2023 titled 31 Fear of Public Speaking Statistics (Prevalence). But she omits his final entry of 75% for 2020, which breaks the preceding pattern, including the perfectly linear increase of a percent per year from 2011 to 2017. As shown above via a graph, for both 2011 and 2020 there was the same 75%.
And the 85% claimed to be for 2019 really comes from a 1988 article by Michael Motley. I blogged about it in a September 29, 2020 post titled A quantified version of a discredited Mark Twain quotation about fear of public speaking. Also, the 77% for 2013 likely really come from a 1999 article, which I blogged about in a post on October 12, 2020 titled Do 77% of Americans fear public speaking? No! That percentage described stage fright in Swedes who also had social anxiety disorder.
The article by Mr. Zauderer doesn’t identify where he got these percentages. They may come from different surveys asking somewhat different questions, and thus not be comparable. Instead I looked at the detailed results for the annual Chapman Survey of American Fears, and got the less clear pattern of percentages shown above. They are for a grand sum of Very Afraid plus Afraid plus Slightly Afraid. (There was no survey for 2020. One was done in January 2021 and reported as 2020-2021. The Chapman blog posts tabulate the sum for Very Afraid plus Afraid.)
The second claim, of 89.4% is also cited in that article by Mr. Zauderer. It comes from an article she referenced by Peter Khoury at Magnetic Speaking back in 2016 and titled 7 Unbelievable “Fear of Public Speaking” Statistics. He refers to an article by C. Faravelli et al at European Psychiatry on February 2000 titled Epidemiology of social Phobia: a clinical approach. That 89.4% comes from a survey on residents of Sesto Fiorentino, a suburb of Florence, Italy. I blogged about Mr. Khoury’s article in a post on December 15, 2016 titled Believable and unbelievable statistics about fears and phobias of public speaking.
Ms. Skander’s third Most Important Statistic is that:
“61% claimed that public speaking improved their career opportunities.”
But I could not find that percentage mentioned in any of her references.
Later she also claimed:
“This statistic is further corroborated by an online survey conducted by the National Speech Anxiety Institute, which found that 95% of those surveyed indicated some level of fear when giving a speech.”
Wikipedia defines a Googlewhack as a search that returns only one result. That’s what you get if you look up the phrase “National Speech Anxiety Institute” – just the Gitnux blog post. And a Bing search finds no results. But we can imagine their headquarters (shown above).
The Gitnux blog post also states (and shows this bogus pie chart, annotated by me in red):
“44% of women and 37% of men reported feeling anxious and afraid about speaking in front of an audience.”
Those percentages come from an article by Geoffrey Brewer at Gallup on March 19, 2001 titled Snakes top list of Americans’ fears. How they should look in a horizontal bar chart comparing those two different genders is shown above.
The 1920s building came from Openclipart and The Scream came from Wikimedia Commons.
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