On October 23, 2025 I blogged about how In the eleventh Chapman Survey of American Fears for 2025, public speaking only was ranked #46 of 67 fears at 33.7%. Those results from the 2025 survey first were reported in a news release by Robert Hitchcock on October 21 mistitled What Americans Fear Most in 2025: Chapman University’s Annual Survey Reveals Top Fears and the Psychology Behind Them. And their detailed results are in a methods report pdf file.
There also is an 8-page pdf article titled Chapman University Survey of American Fears 2025 Key Findings. It includes five graphics that were prepared by students. The first one, by Madeline Southern, titled TOP 10 FEARS 2025 is correct.
But the other four are not. The third graphic, also by Madeline Southern, is a chart titled FEAR OF DRINKING WATER POLLUTION AND POLLUTION OF OCEANS, RIVERS, AND LAKES. It plots those two fears for years ranging from 2017 to 2025.
But that chart has four incorrect entries for those two fears because, as shown above in a pair of tables, it claims to include results for 2020. Actually there was no survey done in 2020 – just one identified as 2020/21. Those four entries are offset from where they belong.
The fifth graphic is a bar chart by Yasmine Hourie, which is titled FEAR OF MURDER AND PROPERTY CRIME. What she calls Property Crime in the 2021 to 2025 surveys is identified as Theft of Property. As shown above in a table, four of five entries are correct but the one for 2022 says 30.0% when the detailed results say 34.5%.
And, the bar chart for Murder is completely incorrect because it lists just one item while the detailed results show both Murder by a Stranger and (somewhat lower) Murder by Someone You Know. I show those results above in a table. Her Murder result also does not match the average for by a Stranger and by Someone You Know.
The second graphic is a pie chart by Emma Boyd titled OPINIONS OF HOMELESSNESS POLICY and has a caption claiming it presents results for % Strongly Agree or Agree. But, as is shown above via a table, none of those percentages are correct. They instead were rescaled to add up to a hundred percent.
The fourth graphic, by Gabriella Bartsch, is a bar chart titled CONSPIRACY BELIEFS IN AMERICA which claims to show percentages for seven items at the level Strongly Agree or Agree. But, as is shown above in my replot, all of her numbers are smaller by an average of 3.6% than those in the detailed results (and curiously are shown with two decimal places rather than one).
Chapman University obviously stumbled when preparing this article. No one bothered to carefully edit these graphics and remove the errors.
The cartoon was adapted from one at OpenClipArt.
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