Is Public Speaking Really More Feared Than Death? What Dwyer and Davidson (2012) Found
By Noam Shemla · The Studies
TL;DR Only half true. In a re-run of the survey behind “people fear public speaking more than death”, 815 students picked public speaking as a fear more often than anything else, death included. Asked for their single top fear, they picked death most often. The line holds for which fears people have, and reverses for which is worst.
- Paper: Dwyer, K. K., & Davidson, M. M. (2012). Is public speaking really more feared than death? Communication Research Reports, 29(2), 99–107.
- Sample: 815 students in a multi-section communication course, surveyed in the first week of class.
- Measures: Choosing fears from a list; ranking their top fears; the six public speaking items from the 24-item Personal Report of Communication Apprehension.
- Access: Behind a paywall. This summary rests on the published abstract, so it prints no percentage that the abstract does not give.
You have probably heard it: more people are afraid of speaking in public than of dying. It turns up in talks, in training slides and in textbooks, usually with no source attached. Two communication researchers decided to find out where it came from and whether it still held.1
Where the line comes from
The claim traces back to a 1973 survey of American fears by R. H. Bruskin Associates, which appeared in the London Sunday Times. Communication textbooks picked it up and went on reporting it for decades. Dwyer and Davidson set out to investigate how that survey came about and to repeat it with the very readers the textbooks were written for: college students taking a communication course.
What they did
The students filled in the survey in the first week of the course, before the class had taught them anything about speaking. They did three things. They picked the fears that applied to them from a list of fears. They ranked their top fears. And they answered the six items about public speaking from the PRCA-24, a standard questionnaire on communication apprehension.
The two middle steps are the ones that matter. Picking fears from a list and ranking them are different questions, and they turn out to have different answers.
What they found
The same students, two questions
| The question | What students selected most |
|---|---|
| Which of these are fears of yours? (pick from a list) | Public speaking, ahead of every other fear on the list, death included |
| What is your top fear? (rank them) | Death |
The authors describe their results as confirming the 1973 finding as it was actually worded: public speaking is picked as a common fear more than any other. What the survey does not support is the line as it is usually quoted, that people fear speaking more than they fear death.
Why both can be true
This reading is ours, not the paper's. Ticking a fear on a list measures how widespread it is. Ranking measures which one outweighs the others for each person. A fear can be the most common and still not be the worst: many people can be uneasy about speaking while, for almost every one of them, death weighs more.
How it fits with other evidence
The finding that speaking fear is common sits comfortably beside a large US survey of the general population, in which one adult in five had felt this fear strongly enough to count. We cover it in Ruscio and colleagues’ survey of social fears.
What this study cannot tell you
- How people feel about death. A fear of death on a survey list is a tick in a box. It is not a measure of what anyone feels about dying.
- How many adults share the result. The sample is students in a communication course, taken in their first week, not a cross-section of adults.
- How large the gap is. We could read only the abstract, so we cannot say what share chose each fear.
- Whether the 1973 figures were right for 1973. This is a new sample, not an audit of the old one.
What a speaker can take from it
If you are nervous about speaking, you are in the largest group in the survey, which is a more accurate version of the famous line than the one that makes speaking sound like a rival to death. The fear is common, not a defect in you.
It also responds to practice. A study that put speech students through repeated short talks found that the fear fell across the talks, as we show in Calmer Each Time. A small, low-stakes way to start is the free impromptu speaking tool: it gives you a topic, a short moment to think, and up to two minutes with the microphone open.
This article summarises a subscription-only paper from its published abstract. The abstract reports no percentages, so none appear here. The description of the 1973 survey is the abstract’s own.
Measured
- Which fears students selected from a list
- Which fear they ranked first
- Their answers to six public speaking items from the PRCA-24
Inferred, not measured
- That the two results differ because selecting a fear and ranking fears measure different things: our reading, not the paper’s
References
- Dwyer, K. K., & Davidson, M. M. (2012). Is public speaking really more feared than death?. Communication Research Reports, 29(2), 99–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/08824096.2012.667772