There is a curious article by Adam Berinsky at CMSwire on July 16, 2025 titled 4 Types of Survey Bias That Can Skew Your Customer Insights.
It begins as follows:
“Poorly designed questions can skew results and taint market research. Watch out for these four types of bias.
The Gist
Survey fears can be misleading. Early polls exaggerated fear of public speaking due to flawed question structure, not genuine ranking.
Four major biases affect survey accuracy. From wording confusion to social desirability, biases can distort data if not addressed up front.
Design matters more than you think. Marketers must ask the right questions the right way – starting with how they frame response options.
Don’t Believe Everything You’ve Heard About Public Speaking
Everybody knows that people fear public speaking even more than they fear dying. Right?
Well, like many such ‘facts,’ this idea is actually the result of a flawed survey question [reference to 2012 article by Dwyer and Davidson]. In 1973, a poll taker asked more than 2,500 Americans to identify their fears from a list of options, and public speaking came out on top. Forty-one percent of respondents said they feared speaking in front of a group, compared to just 19% who said they feared dying.
(Insects and bugs, cited by 22% of respondents, also edged out dying, but no one ever talks about that.)
The problem? Respondents weren’t asked to rank these fears against each other. When a research team replicated the survey in 2010, public speaking once again topped the list. But this time, researchers asked a second group of respondents to rank their top three fears. When the fears were positioned against each other like this, death claimed the top spot.”
But that one 1973 Bruskin survey (as shown above) - not “early polls” asked how many people had each fear, with an answer in percent on a horizontal scale. Heights was second at 32.0%, insects & bugs was third at 22.1%, financial problems was fourth at 22.0%, deep water was fifth at 21.5%, sickness was sixth at 18.8%, and death was seventh at 18.7%.
It did NOT ask how much they feared each one, which would call for another type of answer: a fear score (as shown above) on a vertical scale. Their question was not flawed, but wasn’t the same as could answer what people feared more. Right after whining that “Marketers must ask the right questions the right way,” Adam got it wrong!
Way back on October 27, 2009 I blogged about The 14 Worst Human Fears in the 1977 Book of Lists: where did this data really come from? Overall it is my most popular post, and still number two for the last year. The 1973 survey had asked a national sample, while the 2010 survey instead asked 815 students at a large Midwestern university (perhaps the University of Nebraska).
By the way, the 1973 survey was really replicated in 1993 on a national sample, in a survey done by the successor to the original polling firm. I blogged about it on May 19, 2011 in a post titled America’s Number One Fear: Public Speaking – that 1993 Bruskin-Goldring Survey.
Results from another pair of surveys were reported in a March 19, 2001 article by Geoffrey Brewer at Gallup News titled Snakes Top List of Americans’ Fears. The first was done between November 20 and 22 of 1998; the second was done between February 19 and 21 of 2001 (and its results are shown above). They did not rank these 13 fears against each other.
Fear scores have been around since a 1965 article by James H. Geer titled The Development of a Scale to Measure Fear. I blogged about it October 10, 2012 in a post on 51 fears titled In a 1965 study of university students, fear of public speaking ranked sixth for men and seventh for women. And in another post on October 23, 2012 titled Either way you look at it, public speaking really is not our greatest fear I discussed both surveys with results in percent and those with fear scores.
If a survey asks about several levels of fear, like the 2024 Chapman Survey of American Fears (as was shown above), then we can also calculate fear scores. On October 24, 2024 I blogged about how In the tenth Chapman Survey of American Fears for 2024, public speaking was only ranked #59 of 85 fears at 29.0%. And in another post on November 9, 2024 titled Overblown claims about fears from investigators for the 2024 Chapman Survey of American Fears I discussed some fear scores.
The ancient 1973 Bruskin survey is still mentioned as if public speaking still was the number one fear (in percent), although that is belied by the last decade of Chapman Surveys, which found the rank to be as follows:
2014 [ # 1] not really, see this blog post
2015 [#26]
2016 [#33]
2017 [#52]
2018 [#59]
2019 [#54]
2020/21 [#54]
2022 [#46]
2023 [#53]
2024 [#59]
And, as shown above, the fear score for public speaking just is at the Slightly Afraid level, as I discussed in a blog post on June 1, 2025 titled An article on stage fright by David Pennington claimed public speaking was the #1 fear in a Chapman Survey, but ignored their nine other surveys where it was ranked from #26 to #59.
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