What Does the Public think of Stuttering?

In the week after my Dragon’s Den broadcast, three people recognised me. The first time was in Home Sense, a discount furniture store. At the cash register the attendant tilted her head to one side, before announcing “I know you!”. I demurred politely, but she insisted, “I do!”. This was followed triumphantly by, “From the telly!”. At that point, I had to confess. She didn’t recollect any detail of my appearance. No mention of stuttering.

A few days later in the Marble Arch Brewery, a tattoo artist recognised me. He was with his girlfriend. Both wanted to know what the Dragons were like. They also asked why I wasn’t stuttering when I talked to them. I explained why and how that could happen, but they didn’t want me to go into too much detail. They preferred to talk about the Dragons.

The final time was at a PhD welcome event. I was already chatting to a new starter when he mentioned Dragon’s Den. He wasn’t particularly interested though, just making conversation. Even telling him my PhD topic was stuttering didn’t spark an interest. It’s not that he thought badly about Dragon’s Den or stuttering. He was at the event for the free food and drink, and was looking to make contact with other molecular biologists.

It might seem astonishing, but my experience has been that most people care far less about stuttering than we think. They don’t judge stuttering negatively. Other than wanting to know if there are particular allowances they should make, they’ll move onto other topics fairly quickly.

That might have been the end of Dragon’s Den feedback were it not that after a year or so, the BBC uploads episodes to YouTube. My appearance has 780,493 views at the time of writing. There are 1,366 comments. These comments have the trappings of a natural experiment. What happens when a load of stuttering appears on prime time TV? Are viewers impressed? Indifferent? Do they make cruel comments?

Click here to see a summary of comments (or go here for source data). Of the top 30, only 5 are about stuttering. However, this includes two of the top three comments. Both of these admire the courage of appearing on Dragon’s Den with a stutter. They have 3,000 and 2,400 likes respectively. No highly-rated comments refer negatively to my stuttering. However, several expressed dislike of my suit (it was from Boglioli). Many viewers did not mention stuttering at all, and instead likened me to motion picture characters such as John Wick, Edward Scissorhands or Severus Snape from the Harry Potter films. The funniest and most popular of these compared me and my Dad to a cut price Keanu Reeves and Robert DeNiro.

Some people did make negative comments about stuttering. These are the online equivalent of people pointing and laughing. Look closely though – there few such comments, they have zero likes, and they are frequently downvoted. YouTube’s interface does not display downvotes, implementing them instead through positioning. So, clicking on the “thumb down” button moves a selected comment nearer to the bottom of the scrolling list. To see what has been downvoted you must scroll towards the bottom of the 1,366 comments. YouTube does this to deliberately hide (but not censor) unpopular comments. If you want to see some downvoted comments really quickly, sort the comments by most recent rather than most popular. But don’t get worked up about the handful of negative comments – they get no likes. And they are overwhelmed by positive comments which have over 6,000 likes.

The positive comments are much more interesting: “Many people go in there with normal speech and fall apart and their speech pattern is a thousand times worse – he did damned well.”; “i want to look at people with a stammers brain. as with those who say um frequently, its super interesting to me that the brain does this.”; “I also have a stammer lol. got to say the comment section is really nice to see”; ”Max did very well. He wasn’t phased by his stutter. I have Cerebral Palsy, and know how Max feels!”; “it makes me smile because they have what Musa [Moses had] may Allah’s blessings be upon him”; “Business doesn’t care whether you stammer or not. It’s always been like that. Anyone from any background can do business if they’ve got the skills.”.

Neutral comments are interesting too: “man that takes me BACK I used to stutter when I was like ten and then I just got over it, I’m not sure how but it does take me back because I have changed a million ways since then”; “as a person who used to live with a stutter, I’ll admit getting a haircut is a lot harder then it might seems, the thought of a barber speaking to you and the fear of stuttering just gets to you, and the more nerves you build up the more likely you are to stutter”.

And my favourite criticism? “The stuttering is fine. One cannot help that, for certain, and it requires courage to not let that stop you. However, he should have really dressed better, have a proper haircut, and have a better posture. He looks like a hobo who has been put a suit on against his will.”

Looks like it has been my dress sense, rather than my stuttering, which has held me back all along 🤷🏽‍♂️.