The Halloween holiday is coming up, so this month we get fear surveys as click bait. They appear at web sites with no obvious interest in surveying our fears. For example, there is an article by Rhiannon Odonohoe at Casino.org on October 18, 2023 titled Phobias: America’s Biggest Fears Across the Nation. In October 2023 they surveyed 2,500 U.S. residents across the country about their biggest phobias (really fears). The average age of respondents was 37.9 years old. Their sample was 50.9% female, 46.8% male, 1.7% non-binary, 0.4% transgender, and 0.2% other. Results for each state (and DC) are shown in an infographic with a table and U.S. map. My state of Idaho and Hawaii both had trypophobia (fear of clusters of holes) as the biggest fear.
It is really scary when the text of an article does not match the accompanying infographic. I tallied up the results and show them above on a bar chart. 21 states feared heights, 5 each feared social situations and spiders, 4 each feared death, failure, and snakes, 2 feared clusters of holes, crowds and public speaking, and only one each feared enclosed spaces and needles.
But the text instead claimed her key findings are that:
“Acrophobia (the fear of heights) is America’s #1 phobia, according to 21 states.
Who said Americans were loud? Social phobia was voted as 6 states biggest phobia, making it America’s 2nd haunting fear.
Arachnophobia, the fear of spiders, ranks 3rd nationwide, according to 5 states.
Atychiphobia (the fear of failure), Thanatophobia (the fear of death), Trypanophobia (the fear of injections) and Ophidiophobia (the fear of snakes) tied for 4th overall.”
The other scary thing is that she confuses a fear with a phobia. As shown above via a Venn diagram, the definition for a phobia has conditions beyond just a fear. On December 8, 2019 I blogged about how Toastmasters press releases confuse a fear of public speaking with a social phobia.
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