Wired This Way
Why is public speaking so terrifying? What the slides didn’t have room for: how the lab test worked, the exam scores, and where the oldest advice came from.
The lab test. Scientists who study stress use a standard setup: a short speech, then mental arithmetic, in front of evaluators. In the version Sally Dickerson’s team used, 89 students got ten minutes to prepare and five minutes to speak on why they would be a good job applicant. Each student was randomly given one setup: told they would speak alone, told a two-person panel would be there to evaluate them, or told nothing about an audience, while a research assistant simply worked at a computer. The panel group rated how judged they felt at about 5 on a scale of 1 to 7. The group speaking alone rated it under 3. Only the panel group showed a clear rise in cortisol, and inside that group, the more self-conscious a student felt, the bigger the rise.
The size of the effect. Dickerson and Margaret Kemeny gathered 208 experiments and compared cortisol over the hour after each task began. A hard task alone barely moved it. A task people could not control raised it a little, and a task where others could judge how you did raised it a little. A task with both raised it more than ten times as much.
The exam. Jeremy Jamieson’s students were told, before a practice Graduate Record Examination, that arousal does not hurt performance on these tests and can even help, and to remind themselves of that if they felt anxious. On practice math they scored about 739 against about 684 for students who were not told, on a scale of 200 to 800. One to three months later, on the real exam, it was about 770 against about 706.
The math test. Alison Wood Brooks tried the same idea on math. 188 people got difficult problems after reading either “try to get excited” or “try to remain calm.” The excited group scored about 8% higher than the calm group, and higher than a group that read nothing.
The oldest advice. About 2,400 years ago in Athens, Demosthenes was hissed out of the assembly, then practiced at the shore, speaking over the roar of the waves. About 1,900 years ago, the Roman teacher Quintilian wrote a twelve-book manual for speakers and said the stir a speaker feels should come from the size of the task, not from fear. And Marcus Aurelius, in a private notebook, noticed that we care more about other people’s opinion of us than about our own.
What lowered the fear. Rachel Reeves and colleagues combined 11 experiments with 508 people on exposure therapy for the fear of public speaking: giving speeches step by step, before a real audience or a virtual one in a headset. Compared with no treatment, fear fell by a large margin with either.
When did your heart pound hardest before you had to speak?
Sources: Dickerson & Kemeny, 2004 (Psychological Bulletin); Dickerson, Mycek & Zaldivar, 2008 (Health Psychology); Gilovich, Medvec & Savitsky, 2000 (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology); Savitsky & Gilovich, 2003 (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology); Brooks, 2014 (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General); Jamieson et al., 2010 (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology) and 2012 (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General); Reeves et al., 2022 (Behavior Modification); Lang & Stein, 2001 (Journal of Clinical Psychiatry); Dwyer & Davidson, 2012 (Communication Research Reports); Lives of the Ten Orators, attributed to Plutarch; Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, book 12; Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, book 12.
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