There is a superficial article at The King’s Speakers (a Toastmasters Club in suburban St. Paul, Minnesota) on September 28, 2026 titled Fear of Public Speaking Statistics: What the Numbers Can and Cannot Tell Us.
They begin by correctly stating that:
“Public speaking fear statistics are only useful when you know what was measured. Feeling nervous before a presentation, naming speaking as a fear, and meeting diagnostic criteria for social anxiety disorder are not interchangeable outcomes.”
The best part is that they eventually ask:
What was the exact question?
Who answered?
What time period was measured?
When were the data collected?
Can you reach the original source?
The worst part is that earlier they quote percentages for social anxiety disorder from the National Comorbidity Survey-Replication (NCS-R) rather than any for fear of public speaking or (more broadly) stage fright. Back on August 12, 2015 I blogged about how There’s really no mystery about how common stage fright is and referred to numbers for adults from the National Comorbidity Survey-Replication. I had earlier blogged about that topic in another post on June 23, 2009 titled You are not alone: fear of public speaking affects one in five Americans. And I had discussed other results for adolescents (from the NCS-A) in a post on June 11, 2012 titled What social situations scare American adolescents, and what are their top 20 fears?
I blogged about more recent results for adults in a post on October 23, 2025 titled In the eleventh Chapman Survey of American Fears for 2025, public speaking was only ranked #46 of 67 fears at 33.7%. In that post I also discussed Fear Scores, which answer how much people feared (just Slightly Afraid) rather than how many in percent.
And on March 3, 2026 I blogged about Botched statistics on fear of public speaking from an article in the March 2026 Toastmaster magazine. In that post I described results in percent from all eleven Chapman Surveys from 2014 to 2025.
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