Results from the 2025 Chapman Survey of American Fears were first 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. Detailed results are in a 101-page methods report pdf file. They really discussed what most people fear rather than the completely different question of what people fear most.
They surveyed a random sample of 1,015 adults for a margin of error of 3.6%. The survey was done by SSRS between March 24 and April 8, 2025. For each of 67 fears, people were asked about four levels: Very Afraid, Afraid, Slightly Afraid, or Not Afraid. For 27 fears there also was a negligibly small Web Blank (Don’t know), at 0.1% for 22 of them, 0.2% for 4 of them, and 0.3% for one of them.
And there is a two-page article titled The Chapman Survey of American Fears, Wave 11: The Complete List of Fears 2025. As usual, they ranked fears via the sum of the percentages for Very Afraid and Afraid. The top five were Corrupt Government Officials at 69.1%, People I love Becoming Seriously Ill at 58.9%, Economic/Financial Collapse at 58.2%, Cyber-Terrorism at 55.9% and a tie between People I Love Dying and the U.S. Becoming Involved in Another World War at 55.3%. Public speaking was only ranked #46 at 33.7% - slightly more than a third.
When I compared the Complete List of Fears with the methods report, I was surprised to find four fears that had yet another survey answer listed – Does not apply to me. Percentages for that one are shown above in a table. Note that in one case (Question 10B ranked #31 - Not Being Able to Pay Off College Debt of Myself or a Family Member) more than half (51.5%) gave that answer. In the table I listed how the answers for those four fears had been rescaled (fiddled with) to ignore ‘does not apply to me’ – and for that extreme case the fear went up from 19.4% to 43.1%. I was appalled to find rescaling had been done without any mention in the articles. But the first 25 fears on the list were not affected by the rescaling.
Another way to discuss fears is to put them on a scale from 1 to 4 where 1 = Not Afraid, 2 = Slightly Afraid, 3 = Afraid, and 4 = Very Afraid. The Fear Score for Corrupt Government Officials is 2.989 or almost exactly Afraid, while for Public Speaking it is 2.175 (a bit more than Slightly Afraid). On November 9, 2024 I blogged about Overblown claims about fears from investigators for the 2024 Chapman Survey of American Fears, and showed all the previous Fear Scores for Public Speaking, which are:
2014 1.920
2015 1.956
2016 1.933
2017 1.909
2018 1.947
2019 2.081
2020/1 2.023
2022 2.172
2023 2.041
2024 2.067
2025 2.175
My cartoon was adapted from this one at OpenClipArt.
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