A decade-old claim the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) determined that 74% of Americans fear public speaking is hogwash

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a good, brief article by Lynda Katz Wilner at LinkedIn Pulse on August 2, 2023 titled Six Tips to Help You Harness Public Speaking Anxiety. (She has been a speech & communication trainer for four decades). A similar article had previously appeared on March 31, 2022 as a post titled 6 Strategies to harness your public speaking anxiety at her Successfully Speaking blog.  

 

Those tips can be summarized as follows:

 

1] Reframe your nervousness [as excitement]

2] It’s not about you

3] Know your material

4] Exercise in the morning

5] Get there early

6] Avoid caffeine

 

Her second paragraph which precedes them says the following:

 

“Glossophobia, or the fear of public speaking, is a common phobia. In fact, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, about 74% of people experience it. I meet with clients every day who struggle to face this fear. While each person has unique insecurities, here are 6 simple things you can do to minimize public speaking anxiety.”

 

But the claim that NIMH found 74% feared public speaking is absolute hogwash. I first discussed it in a blog post on July 15, 2012 titled Another bogus statistic on the fear of public speaking. It really came from some liars at a commercial web site called Statistic Brain. In another post on December 7, 2014 titled Statistic Brain is just a statistical medicine show I described how I eventually had emailed NIMH, who said the numbers at the Statistic Brain web site were NOT from NIMH.

 

That bogus 74% was repeated by John Bowe in an article published in the August 2020 Toastmaster magazine. I blogged about it on August 14, 2020 in a post titled Toastmaster magazine is spreading nonsense from John Bowe about how common the fear of public speaking is. Another post on July 2, 2021 was about another publication of his, and titled Article by John Bowe says 15 to 30 percent have speech anxiety, rather than the baseless 74 percent he previously had claimed. And, in the August 14, 2020 post, I showed a screen shot with the claimed gender effect, where 75% of women and 73% of men have speech anxiety.

 

Also, a phobia differs from a fear. I blogged about this back on October 11, 2011 in a post titled What’s the difference between a fear and a phobia? And I used a Venn diagram to illustrate the difference in another post on December 8, 2019 titled Toastmasters press releases confuse a fear of public speaking with a social phobia.

 

Versions with 73% often refer to an article by J. R. Montopoli at the National Social Anxiety Center on February 20, 2017 titled Public Speaking Anxiety and Fear of Brain Freezes. I blogged about it on March 22, 2019 in a post titled An apparently authoritative statistic about fear of public speaking that really lacks any support. On February 4, 2023 he partly fixed it to instead refer to real data from a 2001 Gallup Poll, which I blogged about in a post titled National Social Anxiety Center recently revised their web page on Public Speaking Anxiety and Fear of Brain Freezes.

 

The cartoon was modified from one by Gordon Ross titled Senatorial Courtesy and published in the April 19, 1911 issue of Puck magazine (archived at the Library of Congress).