Stage fright doesn’t impact 73% of the U.S. adult population, it’s really just 21%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes what we read from a usually reliable source is just plain wrong. There is an article by Mariana Bockarova at Psychology Today on March 16, 2023 titled Local Perspectives: Singing With Stage Fright. She opened it by claiming:

 

“According to the National Institute of Mental Health, ‘stage fright,’ or performance anxiety - the fear one feels when needing to perform or present in public, impacts approximately 73 percent of the population. In fact, stage fright is the most commonly cited fear people have.”

 

That’s hogwash. On August 12, 2015 I blogged about how There’s really no mystery about how common stage fright is. Research supported by the National Institute of Mental Health found 21.2 percent had stage fright – about three times less.

 

That 73 percent is a baseless number from a commercial web site called Statistic Brain – it is their claimed percent of men who suffer from speech anxiety. I showed their table in another blog post on August 14, 2020 titled Toastmaster magazine is spreading nonsense from John Bowe about how common the fear of public speaking is.

 

And the 2023 Chapman Survey of American Fears lists public speaking as the 53rd most common fear, at a similar 28.7%.

 

The image of Dmitry Bertman on stage was adapted from this one at Wikimedia Commons.