collectors edition

“In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”

- Bertrand Russell

Quick note: This post is heavily inspired by Todd Rose’s book, “The End of Average”, and this video. In powerful redirections of social perception, they challenge ideas that we unknowingly fall victim to daily. I highly encourage everyone to read and watch.

Take, for example, this set of numbers:

1, 13, 9, 21, 20, 3, 10, 40

If that were somehow too many values to handle, and we needed to generalize them, it would be sensible and efficient to group them together and find a single number that could represent the entire group. So, instinctively, we’ll average them out. If the numbers represented a player’s points in their first eight basketball games, we’d quickly say they’re averaging 14.6 points per game. No problems there; when dealing with PPG, the average is a pretty reliable measure of a player’s scoring ability. There is something about applying this reasoning to humans, however, that is unreliable and deeply detrimental.

If you’re a mathematically inclined person, you may be a bit ahead of me in noticing that the value we’ve used to represent the set as a whole has quite an interesting relationship to each of the individual values; it doesn’t match any of them. So, let’s imagine for a second that each number represented a person; we take these eight very different people and we average them out (whatever that means) and we find our average person– our average Joe. Joe then becomes our spokesperson, as he is to represent everyone, and our benchmark, as we will compare all of our people to him. The only problem is that Joe isn’t actually part of the group, moreover, Joe isn’t real.

When we apply this concept of average to human beings, we are actively removing value from those with whom we’re dealing. In other words, we’re omitting the significance of the things that make us human in the first place, and trivializing our individuality. This is yielding tremendously damaging and inaccurate results.

This concept is explored in much more detailed, scientific, and credible (just all around better) ways in “The End of Average”, so, rather than attempting to rewrite Rose’s book, I’ll sum up my thoughts as follows, and use that summary as a segway into my second thought.

In countless ways, we spend the better part of our lives exhausting our time, energy, money, and happiness, subconsciously establishing a relationship with the average. We are to be better than average students (within arbitrarily agreed-upon parameters), we are to be better than average employees (based on how much money the average employee makes for the company), and God forbid we be part of the dreaded “below average”. Yet the fact remains, this average ISN’T REAL.

The prevalence of these kinds of deeply rooted misconceptions feeds on our increasingly mindless lifestyles. But, it’s far from the only illusory experience that isn’t just woven, but pristinely welded into the foundation of our culture. In fact, they’re so ordinary that there’s an area of sociological study devoted to them: The study of collective illusion. Todd Rose, a former professor and director of the Laboratory for the Science of Individuality at Harvard, and best-selling author states, “Collective illusions are situations where most people in a group go along with a view they don’t agree with because they incorrectly believe that most people agree with it. It’s not that we’re misreading a few people, it’s that the majority thinks the majority believes something that they don’t.”

One of the most commonly understood truths about people is that we’re untrustworthy; greed, egocentrism, and a lack of empathy seem to guide people’s actions far too often. However, as it may seem that way, the research shows that the general public is in fact quite the opposite; “[In] One of my favorite studies… here’s what they did, they literally just randomly called people and said there was a contest going on, and all they needed to do was flip a coin themselves. If it landed on tails, they got a gift certificate, if it landed on heads, they got nothing… nobody knows how the coin lands except for the person on the phone”, explains Rose. At the very least, we’d assume most people would say tails regardless of how the coin landed (if they flipped one at all). In reality, the results were roughly 50/50, actually, they were slightly more in favor of heads, suggesting that if not only a few, nobody lied.

Just as we’re wrong about how people can be average, we’re wrong about the trustworthiness of other people. I’ve highlighted two unfortunate collective illusions in this post, but there are countless more that are to be addressed and dismantled. Find them. In today’s politically charged atmosphere (that may actually be a bit illusory), it’s important to challenge groupthink with the intention of cultivating peace through understanding and diversity of thought.

We’ve not the time to find common ground; we must create it.