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What Do Americans Fear Most? Team Of Researchers Provide Some Insight

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Chapman’s Survey of American Fears has been tracking the nation’s most common fears since 2014. It has since captured the attention of both academic researchers and the national imagination. Dozens of peer-reviewed articles have cited the study’s data, and it has been featured in print, broadcast and online media, including the New York Times, The Huffington Post, CBS This Morning, Yahoo News, NPR, Good Housekeeping, the Washington Post, USA Today, Rolling Stone and TIME.

Ten years ago, the Chapman investigators started to question long-held assumptions about what people were really afraid of. Their curiosity was piqued by an increase in fear-based political messaging in the media, including political ads that preyed upon fears to sway voters. Prior to the study, it was popularly believed that Americans’ greatest fear was public speaking.

“When we released our first list, we got a lot of blowback from people saying, ‘no, public speaking is what people are most afraid of,’” says Ed Day, associate professor of sociology. But public speaking only comes in at 29% on this year’s list, just a few percentage points below a fear of sharks.

Other scholars had written about the subject of fear, but those articles were usually based on data from a single survey. Chapman’s Team Fear wanted to do what no one had done before: track how America’s fears were changing over time.

Now, with 10 years of data to draw on, sociologists can identify patterns that reveal how fear influences—and is influenced by—current events, cultural clashes and propaganda.

 

See the list and accompanying graphs here.

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