The Myth of Average

Find out why using statistical averages to understand individuals is a crappy strategy for healthcare and education. Robert and Julie also look at how playing to the average affects our everyday world.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert lamp and Julia Douglas. Julie, here's
here's a question for you, just to lead into today's episode.
Do we live in a user it's all world? Sure? Right?
I mean have you seen those universal symbols of men

(00:25):
and women on bathroom doors? And we all just kind
of look like that, Like I constantly have a skirt
on with my hands outstretched and yours are always by
your side, the pants on. Yeah, you go to a
you go to the restaurant, certainly in the States, do
you order your meal comes on a giant plate? Right,
that's the amount of food that feeds the the the

(00:46):
average person, and so you're supposed to eat it, all right,
everybody wants that giant plate of food. Actually, I was
at a restaurant not too long ago and there was
a British woman next to me, and she started just
talking about how terrible it is United Stay. It's like
the giant portions. And I had never really thought about
it because I'm so used to that restaurant dining, and
I thought she's right, Yeah, bring you out of a

(01:08):
bowl of something and it's it's it should be in
the middle of a table with a family of four
or five dining on it, but no, instead it's your
your personal trough of food. Yeah, it's United States one's
size fits all meal, just for you. And that's where
it gets into this idea of of um, this kind
of like what is average? This question is there really

(01:30):
an average? And this bell curve that we have all
been introduced to in primary school, elementary school and onward
tends to kind of rule our lives even after we've
left school, right, and we're gonna look at We're gonna
look into this idea today. This this myth of average. Yeah,
if you want to imagine the bell curve here, um,

(01:53):
And certainly we're gonna have varying degrees of familiarity with this,
but it's basically looks like a bell. It's it's a
it's a it's a line, and then the line is
going sort of flat, and then it curves up and
then it curves back down again. And the idea here
is that is that on a performance standpoint, as far
as the statistics of performance, the idea is that you

(02:15):
have a very small group that is underperforming, that's at
the very bottom. And then you have a small group
that is just really performing at a high level and
they're at the top. And then you have this larger
group in the middle and they that is the realm
of the average. Yes, bell curves are normal probability distributions,

(02:39):
and that's what I think it's interesting about this probability
because we take this kind of distribution and we use
them in real world scenarios, which we'll talk about in
a second. But what you just just described is this
idea that we have an equivalent number of people above
and below average, and that there's a very small number
of people who are two standard deviations above and below

(03:00):
the average. So if you're thinking about that plotted out
on that line, that Bell curve, then those those outliers
would be the people who are super high achievers and
people who are at the very low ends of achievement. Yeah.
So like from a from a corporate standpoint, most of
your company is going to be in the middle. That's
where most of your money and resources are going, just
because that's where the most people are. But that small

(03:22):
percentage of the top, those are the ones that are
that there, there's really a lot of potential for those
are the ones that are really bring innovative ideas and
high performance to the table. And then that the bottom,
the outliers, outliers at the very bottom. Uh, those are
the ones that you're going to want to cut uh
and and regularly cut those. That's the slack that you
want to get rid of to tighten up the rope. Yeah. Indeed,

(03:45):
and we use this again, this is just a probability
distribution in these real world scenarios to decide how well
children are learning, which dictates how and what they learned.
We use it to assess workplace performance and don't racist.
And that's where it becomes sort of like, let's let's
look at this model a little bit closer, because we

(04:05):
have now reverse engineered a budget based on the Bell curve,
and it could be that the Bell curve is quite off.
In fact, research conducted in two thousand and eleven and
two thousand and twelve by Ernest oh Boyle Jr. And
Herman Agwynas examined the performance of more than six hundred
and thirty thousand people involved in four areas of human performance.

(04:29):
Academics writing so writing papers athletes at the professional and
collegiate levels, politicians, and entertainers. And they found that performance
and of these groups did not follow a normal distribution,
did not follow the Bell curve. Rather, those groups fell

(04:50):
into what is called a power law distribution. And according
to a Forbes magazine article the Myth of the Bell Curve,
this power law to attribution is also known as a
long tale because we're looking at a picture of it
right now. If you think about um a rectangle and
one side of that rectangle being a sort of tale,

(05:12):
that's more of the distribution. They say that is in
keeping with what is really going on, that's reflecting reality.
And they say that most people fall below the mean,
and roughly ten to of the population are above the
average and often far above the average, and a large
population are slightly below average, in a small group are

(05:33):
far below average. So they say that this idea of
average is actually pretty meaningless when you think about what's
happening in real time. Yeah, and I mean it's even
it's even worse than meaningless when you start looking at
the idea that, rather than describing how we perform and
and really being a telling model of human behavior and

(05:54):
human potential, the Bell curve might actually be constraining our performance.
They work creating that we're taking the statistical model of
human behavior and trying to shoehorn our actual behavior into it. Yeah,
I mean, because think about a company or a classroom,
and let's say that the company classrooms, Um, they're full
of hyper performers. Okay, Let's say nineteen out of the

(06:17):
twenty kids like they're performing at crazy rates. Okay, they
are still going to be graded on the Bell curve.
Let's say that nineteen of the twenty employees at a
workplace are hyper performers. They're still gonna their raises. Their
performance are still gonna be doled out based on the
Bell curve because again, that budget has been reverse engineered,
so there's only a certain amount of money and percentages

(06:41):
that are going to be distributed across that performance. So
a lot of people lose out in the scenarios. And
basically it's saying, here is a model for what performance
should look like. If you don't recognize that model in
the group that you're judging, then you must be making
a mistake. So even in that group of high performers
at a company, you in end up having to rate

(07:01):
some high performers as average, and and some average of
performers as as low performers. And you're and that's just
gonna end up hurting morale and and driving away talented individuals. Yeah,
which is not to say that the idea of universal design,
which is basically we're talking about here when we talk
about Bell curve model, isn't helpful, because it is right.

(07:22):
We can talk about universal design in the ways that
our streets are laid out right or even um like
catching utensils that are made for any size hand, not
just a giant hand or a small hand. Um. But
it's not so great when you actually talk about the
individual him or herself, and you have companies, institutions, education, um,

(07:45):
trying to mandate a sort of universal paradigm to place
over it. And so this brings us to a new idea,
to a new movement kind of revolutionary approach, and that
is to to ban the to to throw the idea
of the average out, to say, hey, this institutional model

(08:05):
should not is false and should not dictate how we
organize our lives and our industries and our educational system. Yeah.
And the biggest proponent of this idea, of this man.
The average is Todd Rose, who's a faculty member at
Harvard Graduate School of Education. He talked about how in
nineteen fifty two the U. S. Air Force had a problem.
They had really good pilots flying better planes, all this

(08:27):
money that they had sunk into better planes, but they
were getting worse results and they didn't know why. And
finally they figured out that it had to deal with
the design of the cockpit, which was designed based on
the average man. And they had an Air Force researcher
by the name of Gilbert Daniels who conducted a study
and found that none as zero of the four thousand

(08:50):
pilots were average on all of the ten dimensions of
size that he measured on them. We're talking about height, shoulders, chest,
waste its legs, uh, their reach, right torso, neck, and thighs.
And he proved that there was no such thing as
an average pilot, but that they have a jagged size profile,

(09:13):
so no one is the same one every single dimension.
And just because let's say you might be the average height,
it doesn't mean that you're the average weight or you
have the average torso length. And so the Air Force
took that information and they decided to ban the average
and they refused to buy fighter jets where the cockpit

(09:34):
was made for the average pilot, and instead they wanted
them to design to what they called the edges of
dimensions of size, so saying basically, hey, we're gonna have
tall pilots, we're gonna have short pilots. We need you
to design with these extremes in mind, instead of just saying, hey,
this is the average person. One size fits all, which

(09:55):
is not the kind of mandate that that that anyone
wants to hear in the manu factoring industry, because one
size fits all is a good system if you are
making a screw driver, if you're making you know, to
your point, you know, just some sort of ikea part
or or or standard furniture product to go in your
house exactly. I mean, that's the whole manufacturing business is

(10:18):
based on that. But here you have like this really
expensive equipment. You want it to be interacted with in
the correct way, and then all has to do with dimensions. Yeah,
I mean, yeah, you have high performers who need to
use a high performance aircraft and you need to you
need these two need to meet. It reminds me a
lot of our relationship with computers, and not just computers,

(10:41):
like even just like desk equipment in general, but everything
everything that surrounds computing. The idea that that the computing
experience should be made as human as possible, so that
humans can use the machine, can use the software, can
use the chair and the table, everything involved in the
office environment. That they should be able to use it
without wearing themselves to the level of the machine. The

(11:02):
machine should meet that the human user, not the other
way around. And so here we see the same idea
with with with with institutions, with with with design in general. Yeah,
and that's what Todd Rose says. He says that just
like size, each student, every single one of them, has
a jagged learning profile, meaning they have strengths through average

(11:24):
at some things, and they have weaknesses. He says, we
all do, even geniuses have weaknesses. And he says, if
you design those learning environments on average, odds are you've
designed them for nobody. He says, so, no, wonder we
have a problem. We've created learning environments that, because they
are designed on average, cannot possibly do what we expected
them to do, which is nurture individual potential. And he

(11:45):
talks about how we are in a very unique situation
right now technologically because we can serve the individual We
can serve the individual student and the way that they
learn and follow those jagged profiles by giving them an iPad,
in giving them different programs to bolster learning in the
areas that they're a week or if they were really

(12:07):
really high performers been challenging them with supplementation also provided
by technology. And he's spot on about this, I think,
because what he's saying is that schools, they spent an
enormous amount of money on iPads. I think he said
that they're like the second largest customer of um or

(12:28):
consumer of iPads, and at least in the United States.
So if you have the technology at your disposal, if
you are spending the money, why not begin to work
with the possibilities of what those programs can offer on
an individual level. Because we had talked about in our
podcast about Finland and why they're turning out such incredibly

(12:49):
well rounded, smart kids who only have one test, one
mandatory test at age of sixteen. It's because they're serving
those kids at the individual level, and they're spending less
than the United States is on education per child to
do that. You know, I can't help but think back
to the wire when we're talking about this, mainly because

(13:12):
creator David Simon has often stated that that that in
that show, you essentially have a Greek tragedy, but instead
of gods, you have institutions, because institutions are the gods
of modern society. And so in in this topic, we
we kind of have to ask the question what kind
of god suits, uh, the denizen of the modern world better.

(13:34):
One is the personal god that is is involved in
your life and uh and and wants to mold you.
And the other is this abstract, distant god. And to
reach that god, you have to change yourself. You have
to jump through the hoops of of religious ritual to
possibly interact with it. Oh my gosh. And as we

(13:55):
always say, it goes back to the Platonic ideal and
Plato and this idea that we're all just, you know,
these cheap copies of perfection. But you know, we've decided
that we're cheap copies on the on the bell curve
instead of you know, on the jagged edge of dimensions.
And this even relates to healthcare. If you think about

(14:15):
health insurance, which sanctions, treatments, and the myth of average
can really put people at a disadvantage. Here Rose says
that if you look at the area of cancer, you
see an exponential increase in effective research and treatment when
the individual with all of his or her genetic predispositions,
diet and environment is considered as opposed to just hey,

(14:38):
here's this, here's how we approach cancer, this in this
very universal way. And he said that's it's really only
when you get down to the individual level that you're
making progress. And if you think about it, um even
a drug therapies, and this is from the case for
Impersonalized Medicine the third edition. It says many patients do
not benefit from the first drug they are offered in treatment.

(15:00):
For example, of depression patients, arthritis patients, asthma patients, and
of diabetic patients will not respond to initial treatment. And
we know initial treatment is something that is offered because
based on the average that they have, that is the
thing that they think will work the best. Right, and

(15:21):
it sounds good on paper, right, treat the average patient
and then adjust accordingly based on the feedback. Yeah, except
as as it seems as mounting evidence would seem to
show us this average is indeed a myth. All right,
we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back,
we're going to talk a little more about this topic
and even read a few listener mails. Hey we're back,

(15:48):
and we're of course talking about the myth of average.
We're talking about what happens when you have these have
an institutional model of human performance, and then you start
trying to live your life and and have the whole
culture work around those models, and the and the the
growing revelation that this average person that everything is centered

(16:09):
around doesn't really exist. Yeah. And the thing too is
that this system is just completely permeated culture. Right, it's systemic.
There is there to stay it with. Seems so Todd
Rose one of one of the things that he really
wants to do is to try to take this apart
a bit and look more towards the individual talent method.
And he has something called the Variability Project, and his

(16:31):
idea is that you have this, you know, this system
in place for a hundred and fifty years based on
averages trying to understand individuals, and you have to now
take this information about the myth of average and try
to rework it. And so he says, there are three
broad challenges data, models, and the nature of science to

(16:54):
address the science of the individual reaching its full potential
in all different fields. So what he's doing may seem
a little bit pine in the sky right now because
it's it's UH. I say that only because again it's
very systemaic. This this UM, this average idea and Bell
curve that's in place. So that's there's so many different

(17:15):
fields that he has to try to get into and influence.
That being said, he and his organization are starting to
provide papers on the topic and really trying to educate people, UM,
why why this is sort of erroneous thinking, and how
you can get to students, to workers, UM, to health

(17:36):
care treatments in a much more effective way, you know.
And just just to go back to A. Gwynas for
a second. One of the authors on that two thousand
and twelve study UM he described the Bell curve as
as possibly being accurate in describing human performance in the
presence of an external constraint UH, such as an assembly line.

(17:59):
You have simply line their parts moving by, and you
have skilled workers doing their bit to UH to contribute
to the finished air conditioning unit at the end of
the line, right, but you're gonna have talented individuals on
there who are not who could work faster if not
held back by the pace of the line, by the

(18:22):
the the outside constraint that is applied to them by
the institution. Yeah, and it's really the institution is key here.
And it's interesting to think about this because you're thinking, Okay,
this is about manufacturing, right, could this possibly apply to
sort of like the Krendl crem of higher education? Could
IVY Leagues be a kind of assembly line. Well, there's

(18:45):
an excellent article on this by David Brooks that published
online in The Atlantic. Of course it's The Atlantic, so
it's it's really long but very thorough breakdown of the
state of higher education, especially as as it relates to
IVY Lee For instance. He argues that, uh, that that
right now, we kind of have the convergence of two models.

(19:05):
There's the older model where to get into an IVY
League school you had to be somebody a very you know,
class based model and to have the clout to get in.
And then you have the newer model to to get
into an IVY League school. To get into it, to
be a high achiever in society. You had to be
an overachiever. You had to just work and work and
work the right person, Yeah, you had to be the
right person as opposed to the being from the right class.

(19:29):
So they end up in this environment where they're just
they're just performing at a high level all the time.
They're expected and expecting themselves to just knock get out
of the park, assignment after assignment, project after project. Uh,
just domino after domino. Right. And as as as Brooks
says in the PC says quote, learning is supposed to
be about falling down and getting up again until you

(19:51):
do it right. But in an academic culture that demands
constant achievement, failures seem so perilous that the best and
brightest often spend their young years in terrariums of excellence. Uh.
And this is what author William Dershowitz, who's a former
professor of English at Yale, terms a violent aversion to risk.

(20:13):
So you can imagine where you were an institution like
this would produce an individual that could go on to
achieve great things within a similar institution, you know, the
right kind of uh, financial firm, etcetera, where there again,
are are these dominoes to knock down one after the other.
But that kind of individual, of that kind of thinking

(20:34):
that's been in a sense institutionalized by the the Ivy
League system is not going to perform well in other
areas of society. Yeah, Derschwitz, he has a book called
Excellent Sheep, and he says that the Ivy League is
churning out students who are super people, alien species. I
think that one's fair. Uh, and bionic hamsters. I mean this,

(20:57):
this is rough stuff here, But again I think bion
a canster matches up with some people I've met that
would fit that moment camps up. It's kind of awesome
in a way. Yeah, I'm gonna put that on my resume.
I'm not there. You go, and he says, as you said,
that system manufactured students who are smart and talented and driven,
but they're also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual

(21:20):
curiosity and stunted sense of purpose, trapped in a bubble
of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction. Great at
what they're doing, but no idea why they're doing it.
And so I think it kind of goes back down
to that whole individual versus universal level, because at the
individual level, as Brooks has said, there is failure. You
must fail, you must fail and get up and do

(21:41):
it again in order to learn and find purpose. But
at the universal level and at the university level, there
is only success. That is what the big push is right,
just to succeed and not to individualize the content that
you are are taking in. So you could even say

(22:04):
that it's just all about regurgitation as opposed to percolating
on something, permeating your worldview and figuring it out for yourself.
What doesn't matter to you as a person. So again
I can't help but come back to that to David
Simon's about institutions as God's and this, uh, this idea
that we don't want that distant God that requires us

(22:26):
to jump through hoops and jump through ritual We we
want this institutional God that that sees us as an individual. Yeah,
And I find actually a lot of comfort in this
idea of the myth of the average, because you know,
too often I think we we hear the statistic of
you fall into this category in that category, and we're

(22:47):
so completely categorized and labeled that we don't necessarily follow
the individual path for ourselves. And I think this is
a very subconscious thing. In fact, I think all of us,
if you, if you thought yourself for a moment, do
I subconsciously seed myself to a kind of average out
there or an idea of what is average? Um? I

(23:09):
think all of us would probably say, yeah, there's a
certain sort of standard. But I hold myself to and
the you know, I guess the idea is that that
standard is built of myths, right, So it's very interesting
to look at it that way. And I even think
about some of the science reporting that we do sometimes,
because you know, we're creating these narratives and these stories
about what's happening and how we move through the world

(23:32):
and why we do what we do. But you can't
even just take one study or you know, one certain
aspect of it and say that this is a universal truth.
It's just sort of coloring the perception of of a
greater narrative of what's going on. And I think sometimes
it's just it's so easy for us to want to

(23:53):
take that easy, simple structure that Bell curve and apply
it to our life and get that answer. Now. Indeed, indeed,
there's a certain comfort in that I mean, whoot. Have
you ever met someone who said, I would like to
be a statistic, I would like to be representative of
a statistic. I feel like I have heard people make
that that plea, uh, when it's beneficial to be a statistic.

(24:18):
That is true, Yeah, that is true. But you know,
most of us don't want to be treated like a
statistic right now. Like I said, I think most people
want that that. They don't want the impersonal institutional God,
they want the personal one. And that ultimately is the
model that makes the most sense in terms of meeting
the individual, in terms of getting the most out of

(24:38):
the individual, you know, as far as performance goes, and
just how we work as human beings. Indeed, and especially
when you look at it these in larger constructs like
education or healthcare or corporations, it really does begin to
matter to again the individual. Alright. Well, on that note,
I'm going to call over the robot here and we're
gonna gonna do a couple of quick list their mails.

(25:03):
All right. This one comes to us from Peter Kron,
who is a long time listener to the show. UH
and UH runs the Elecord record label King de Luxe. UH.
So he has some stuff here to add in about happiness. Uh.
And I mentioned the record labl stuff because it kind
of plays into what he's talking about here. He says,
I just listened to the Happiness podcast, uh, the Mathematics
of happiness uh, and couldn't stop thinking about this dichotomy

(25:25):
between short term and long term happy. So now I
thought i'd come in a bit. What you were saying
about luring expectations and yet shooting for the moon both
makes sense, but they're at odds with each other. I
think you guys nailed it on the head with being
realistic about things, although maybe there's two layers, one super
super ambitious layer of expectations in another base level. I

(25:45):
think though they tie together. What long term satisfaction is
often based upon. With for example, big art projects is
peer review. You can try to create something truly grand
and in the back or front of your mind, expect
people the wow over it the second it's released to
the public, but then in execution it gets watered down
over and over until it barely resembles what one set

(26:08):
out to make, or it just evolved. You no longer
expect the same reaction. In fact, sometimes artists end up
hating it at the point of release, in part because
of overexposure, but also because they felt like they swung
and missed. But then the reaction far surpasses the new
expectations and the artist starts feeling great about their work
and build warm memories about the overall experience. In other words,

(26:30):
it's complicated. Well, and it just reminded me of of
when we've talked about memory and the role of memory
and taking that memory out and reframing that memory. And
so when you talk about the long term, you are
talking about long term memory and that sort of hindsight.
So happiness becomes even more complicated in that sense. Indeed, Yeah,

(26:51):
I mean as we as we we really you know,
try to drive home in that that episode and in
other episodes we've talked about happiness and finding, you know,
some level of nmity in your life. It's it's difficult
because it's our life is not one constant state. It's
one state after the other. It's this up and down.
That's our t shirt happiness period. It's difficulty, Alright. This

(27:12):
one comes to us from Brian Brian Writeson and says, hey,
I just listen to your podcast over breakfast as is
my custom. When I was thinking about adult lullabies and
how we seem to prefer ones that feature morbidity, I
was instantly reminded of the podcast Welcome to night Vale,
in which the silky voice Cecil Southey explains the bizarre
and often horrifying news that occurs in the fictional town

(27:33):
of night Vale. While I myself don't listen to it
while following asleep for fear of missing anything in the story,
I know that a great many of my friends do.
They claim it helps them greatly. Anyway, if you're not
familiar with Welcome to night Vale, I highly suggest you
check it out. I suspect Robert in particular it would
be fond of it. Keep up the great work. I
love that because that analogy is perfect to lullabies because

(27:53):
the night Vale they really, I mean he Cecil is
talking about these horrific events, which again are told in
this just lullaby hushing voice, and it really sort of
ramps up the creepiness. But also there you go. I mean,
that's the same thing that lullabies are doing when we
sing this into a little infant's ears right about, you know,
their their cradle rocking over in them spilling out. Yeah,

(28:15):
I have I have checked out night Vale before. It
is it isn't a very interesting and unique podcast. Um,
I haven't had the chance to really dive into it,
but I had a solo drive several months back, and
I loaded up on podcasts and I ended up spending
a long period driving through the dark, through the cold
rain and listening to like the first four episodes, and

(28:38):
I was, I was, I was really impressed. It's one
of those works that I feel like, Oh man, I
wish I had come up with that. I wish I could.
It's such a it's such a great concept and great execution. Yeah.
So indeed, you know, listen to us in the morning
over breakfast as Brian does, and then at the night
at night, maybe consider listening to night Vale. All right,
So there you have it. Um, Hey, you want to

(28:58):
check out more episodes, You want to check out that
the cergical wings thing we just mentioned here, Head on
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(29:21):
to our social media accounts there as well as videos
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check us out on YouTube where we are mind Stuff Show.
And on the topic of myth of averages, do you
feel like any of that rings true to you in
terms of the classroom or at work or any other
institution that you've been involved with? UM? Is that kind

(29:42):
of one of those things that, once you become aware of,
you begin to see your experience filtered through this kind
of mythical average. Let us know your thoughts on that,
and you can do that by sending us an email
at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit

(30:03):
hastaff works dot com.