At the LeadingBlog on July 7, 2023 there is an article by Gabe Zichermann titled Afraid of Public Speaking? You Should Be. Six things in it exasperated me, starting with the first sentence in the title. It should obey Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, which is that:
“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
Let’s look at the first six paragraphs of that article, which are:
RECEIVED WISDOM is that public speaking is one of people’s greatest fears. But the Chapman University Survey of American Fears (yes, that’s a thing) - the gold standard for fear assessment - doesn’t seem to agree. In the 2020–2021 findings, public speaking is fear #54 on the list, scoring lower than another pandemic (#6), identity theft (#21), and even sharks (#51).
This seems reasonable. You should be more afraid of pollution (#9) than giving a toast at your best friend’s wedding - though the obvious connection between the two (cocaine, hairspray, tik-tok based dances) - need not be underestimated.
It never really made sense to me that public speaking caused this much fear in a world filled with so many things to be fearful of. So I was naturally relieved to see in my research that most Americans were plump with the same anxieties that actually keep me up at night.
Make no mistake - public speaking put in a great showing. It’s basically the only work-related fear that even makes the top 100, other than the quirky “fear of being caught in an embarrassing zoom moment” (#87) - a perfect distillation of the pandemic’s mental health hangover if there ever was one. Thanks, Toobin.
But does that mean that public speaking is no longer something to be afraid of? Does this mean that if you fear getting up on stage or Zoom or leading a meeting - assuming you’re fully clothed - that you should be derided like someone with a debilitating fear of clowns (#94)? Or does this mean that you don’t have anything to worry about if you’re pursuing a career path that involves public communication and effective persuasion?
Au contraire. You should be afraid of public speaking. Very afraid.”
Second, the Chapman surveys aren’t the gold standard for assessing fears. Surveys by social psychologists are – because they know the difference between a fear and a phobia. The Chapman surveys are contracted out to a polling firm, and then the university analyzes them and puts out their blog posts or press releases. Sometimes there are lots of gaffes, like in the 2017 survey which I blogged about in a post on October 14, 2017 titled What do the most Americans fear? The fourth Chapman Survey on American Fears, and being innumerate. In that post I pointed out their press release was mistitled What do Americans fear most?, while the blog post instead reported on what the most Americans fear, and as usual listed percentages for the sum of Very Afraid and Afraid (and their rankings).
Third, there is no Top 100. That survey had a total of just 95 fears. Also, three other work-related fears are #57, being unemployed and #62 computers replacing people in the workplace, and #82 technology I don’t understand.
Fourth, Gabe never got around to discussing what percent of Americans were Very Afraid of public speaking, or anything else. On September 27, 2021 I blogged about how In the 2020/2012 Chapman Survey of American Fears, public speaking was only ranked #67 (11.5%) out of 95 fears at the Very Afraid level. Survey results on how afraid are you of public speaking were 11.5% Very Afraid, 17.5% Afraid, 32.7% Slightly Afraid, and 38.4% Not Afraid.
Fifth, in that September 27, 2021 blog post I also discussed how to take results for all those fear levels to calculate Fear Scores. For public speaking that Fear Score is just 2.023 where 1.0 is Not Afraid, 2.0 is Slightly Afraid, 3.0 is Afraid, and 4.0 is Very Afraid. So on the average we are just Slightly Afraid – and that’s only how afraid you should be. Gabe later does discuss overcoming the fear, but he should not have started by saying you should be Very Afraid without using survey data to back up his claim.
Sixth, the 2020/2021 survey isn’t even the most recent one. There is a list of the fears from the 2022 one. And that list shows that Public Speaking now is #67 of 92 at 34.0%.
A cartoon of a woman speaking was adapted from one at Wikimedia Commons.
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