Average and unique

I thought this was an interesting NPR interview regarding what it really means to be average (is anyone really?) or unique (is anyone not?). Most of it is with regards to education, but the points made about statistics would seem to apply to general categorizations we make of people (e.g. introvert/extrovert), but also -- to the extent that all psychological criterion take into account the culture of those they are being applied to (pedophilia is not going to mean the same in a culture in which the average marriage age is 13, sadness doesn't necessarily mean your depressed if you are just expressing a culturally appropriate amount of grieving, criminality in one culture is entrepreneurship in another, etc.)  -- to the world of psychology.

Rose talked with us about his new book: The End Of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness.

The opening example you use in the book is that in the 1940s, when the Air Force designed cockpits based on the average measurements of the pilots, there were an unacceptable number of crashes. But when they went back and measured thousands of pilots, across 10 body dimensions, they found that zero of them even came close to the "average" on all 10. So they concluded that they had to redesign the seats and so forth to be adjustable to each person.

Body size is a very concrete example of what I call jaggedness. There is no average pilot. No medium-sized people. When you think of someone's size you think of large, medium, small. Our mass-produced approach to clothing reinforces that. But if that were true you wouldn't need dressing rooms.

So dimensions like height and weight and arm length and waist circumference ...

Yes, they're not nearly as correlated as you would think. Height is one-dimensional, but size isn't. People are jagged in size, in intelligence, everything we measure shows the same thing.

I'm going to quote a line from the book, said to psychologist Paul Molenaar, who is arguing for a greater focus on individual difference: "What you are proposing is anarchy!" How do you make decisions about people if you can't use statistics and cutoff scores and compare them to averages?

People feel like if you focus on individuality, everyone's a snowflake, and you can't build a science on snowflakes. But the opposite has been true.

It's not that you can't use statistics, it's just that you don't use group statistics. If I want to know something about my daily spending habits, one straightforward way would be to collect records of what I spend every day. To take an average for myself would be perfectly fine.

So you can generalize across time, but not across people?

We've got to let go of putting a group into a study and taking an average and thinking that's going to be close enough to universal insight.

Now we have something better. We have a natural science of individuality that gives us a surer foundation. We've gotten breakthrough insights in a whole range of research, from cancer to child development.

Quote: Excuses

“The concept of disease is fast replacing the concept of responsibility. With increasing zeal Americans use and interpret the assertion "I am sick" as equivalent to the assertion "I am not responsible": Smokers say they are not responsible for smoking, drinkers that they are not responsible for drinking, gamblers that they are not responsible for gambling, and mothers who murder their infants that they are not responsible for killing. To prove their point — and to capitalize on their self-destructive and destructive behavior — smokers, drinkers, gamblers, and insanity acquitees are suing tobacco companies, liquor companies, gambling casinos, and physicians.”

― Thomas Szasz

Ethics

I was talking to a sociology professor acquaintance of mine, who also has been diagnosed with Asperger's (interesting combination). She was discussing the process of getting an experiment approved by her institution. I am always interested to hear different iterations of ethical codes, so I started asking her about the sociological approach to ethics, which is apparently very different from the psychological approach and is abhorrent to anthropologists. She told me that sociologists have a bad reputation from studies like Tuskegee syphilis experiment (arguably not even a sociological experiment) and the Milgram experiment.

To me the Milgram experiment is just good science. Get some ordinary person via a classified ad, put them in a room, instruct them to torture a third person, and see how far they are willing to go, based solely on the "authority" of the person conducting the experiment.

The sociologist acquaintance of mine thought that the Milgram experiment is harmful to test subjects because people want to believe that they are a good person, not someone who is capable of doing horrific things, and the test deprives them of that belief. I told her that the experiment did society a favor by forcing at least some of its members to face hard facts, i.e. almost anyone is capable of the world's worst horrors, if only put in the right situation. My argument was that if we fail to understand our capabilities for evil as well as for good, than we are doomed to repeat the atrocities of yesteryear. We agreed to disagree about this point.

Later in the conversation, however, she began talking about how she uses her charisma and the structure of the class to get her students to realize that they are racist, that they have knee-jerk reactions unsupported by any evidence, and that the logical conclusions of their positions would be tenets that they would be unwilling to acknowledge as their own, despite being the root of their misinformed views. Of course I support her manipulating her students to the point of shaking the very foundations of their beliefs, but I did mention to her that I thought it was a little hypocritical that on the one hand she thought it was "unethical" to expose experiment subjects to the realization that they too could be torturers given the right circumstances, but she was willing to basically tell her students that their belief systems were completely flawed. People in her classes cry when they realize how small-minded they have been. How is this any different than the Milgram experiment, I asked? Because if it is different, it seems to only be a matter of degree of harm, not type.

When I finally got her to realize my point, she gave me a look as if she were going to cry too and started asking me if I believe in the "soul" and why would I be asking all of these questions. I felt bad for having let the mask slip (apparently, although I thought we were just having a reasonable discussion). I tried unsuccessfully to backtrack saying things like your students arguably impliedly consent to this treatment by signing up for your class (no they don't, the class is required, she is the only one who teaches it), or for going to university in the first place (can you really be said to consent to being the mental plaything of your professors by going to university?). I woke up the next day to a very long email (Asperger's) going into aspie detail with sentences like this "When we assess the consequences of policies or laws or teaching philosophies that are driven by normative and evaluative ideological considerations, the assessment can be shifted from 'right' or 'wrong' to 'functional' or 'dysfunctional'" and "And of course, one could argue that by making assessments on the basis of what is functional/dysfunctional for society (vs. individuals), we are also saying, as a normative/evaluative issue, that the well-being of society is more important than giving effect to the norms and values of sub-groups in society. This is especially (ethically) problematic in that what is functional for society may actually serve to further marginalize vulnerable minority groups (antithetical to certain democratic values), but if the society is not healthy, then the rest becomes moot (maybe)." And then she basically went on to say that society values critical thinking skills, so jacking with her student's minds is fine, ethically speaking.

I think this is illustrative of the true point of systems of ethics, which is -- let's agree on some random value system that we'll call "common" or "normal" and either enforce it past the point of bearing any resemblance to what it was meant to accomplish in the first place or ignore it whenever it is convenient. If the end is always going to justify the means, what is the point of even discussing the ethics of the process?