There is a rather silly article by Kyle Matthews at 104.3 Wow Country [KAWO Boise] on March 11, 2024 titled 10 Startling phobias that have a strangle hold on Idahoans. The list is shown above as a bar chart. It’s not from a survey. Rather it’s just a list of how common they were on web searches. (Back on March 7, 2015 I blogged about Is that Top Ten list from a real survey or just a glorified stack of web searches?) The list is clickbait which came from a sports betting web site called BetCarolina, but it is not shown there. Small holes were first, deep water was second, vomiting was third, spiders were fourth, and confined spaces were fifth. Public speaking came in tenth.
Kyle’s filler article has the following paragraph which cites public speaking as first (25.3%) for the sum of Afraid and Very Afraid from the 2014 Chapman Survey, which I blogged about in a post on October 29, 2014 titled Chapman Survey on American Fears includes both zombies and ghosts:
“Americans grapple with a diverse range of phobias. Notably, fear of public speaking, also known as Glossophobia, stands out as America's most common phobia, affecting a significant 25.3% of the population. Acrophobia, the fear of heights [24.7%], and Entomophobia, the fear of bugs and insects [animals or insects 22.2%] closely follow this. However, an interesting revelation is that nearly one in three U.S. adults confesses to Ophidiophobia, the fear of snakes [not even on that list!]. These fears underline the complexity and diversity of phobias prevalent across the country.”
And more careful research instead would have used results from the percent list of fears in the most recent 2023 Chapman Survey.
Also, Kyle’s article confuses fears and phobias, whose difference is shown above in a Venn diagram from my blog post on December 11, 2013 titled Spouting Nonsense: July 2013 Toastmaster magazine article fumbles fears and phobias.
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