The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness

by Todd Rose

There was no such thing as an average pilot. If you’ve designed a cockpit to fit the average pilot, you’ve actually designed it to fit no one.10

I wonder where else in society we fit things for "average people."

Rather than suggesting that people should strive harder to conform to an artificial ideal of normality, Daniels’s analysis led him to a counterintuitive conclusion that serves as the cornerstone of this book: Any system designed around the average person is doomed to fail.

There is so much variability among users and their characteristic preferences that compromisimg through the oversimplification of averaging quantitative qualities is unlikely to work effectively.

From the cradle to the grave, you are measured against the ever-present yardstick of the average, judged according to how closely you approximate it or how far you are able to exceed it.

Most of us know intuitively that a score on a personality test, a rank on a standardized assessment, a grade point average, or a rating on a performance review doesn’t reflect your, or your child’s, or your students’, or your employees’ abilities. Yet the concept of average as a yardstick for measuring individuals has been so thoroughly ingrained in our minds that we rarely question it seriously.

In this book, you will learn that just as there is no such thing as average body size, there is no such thing as average talent, average intelligence, or average character. Nor are there average students or average employees—or average brains, for that matter. Every one of these familiar notions is a figment of a misguided scientific imagination. Our modern conception of the average person is not a mathematical truth but a human invention, created a century and a half ago by two European scientists to solve the social problems of their era. Their notion of the “Average Man” did indeed solve many of their challenges and even facilitated and shaped the Industrial Age—but we no longer live in the Industrial Age. Today we face very different problems—and we possess science and math far better than what was available in the nineteenth century.

We are on the brink of a new way of seeing the world, a change driven by one big idea: individuality matters.

Today we have the ability to understand individuals and their talents on a level that was not possible before.

But do we have systems and/or infrastructure in place to help us maximize individual talents?

It’s unacceptable that in an age when we can map the human genome and tweak genetic coding to improve our health, we haven’t been able to accurately map human potential.

We just need the tools to understand each person as an individual, not as a data point on a bell curve.

Eventually, I decided to stop trying to conform to the system and instead focused on figuring out how to make the system fit to me.

The hardest part of learning something new is not embracing new ideas, but letting go of old ones.

if you build a theory about thought, perception, or personality based on the Average Brain, then you have likely built a theory that applies to no one.

There is no such thing as an Average Brain.

“They’re trying to make inferences they can use in a court of law about people’s psychiatric condition and mental states. They want to use brain scans to decide if someone should go to jail or not, so it most definitely matters if there’s a systematic difference between the individual brain and the ‘average’ brain.”

Astronomers believed that every individual measurement of a celestial object (such as one scientist’s measurement of the speed of Saturn) always contained some amount of error, yet the total amount of aggregate error across a group of individual measurements (such as many different scientists’ measurements of the speed of Saturn, or many different measurements by a single scientist) could be minimized by using the average measurement.20 In fact, a celebrated proof by the famous mathematician Carl Gauss appeared to demonstrate that an average measurement was as close to a measurement’s true value (such as the true speed of Saturn) as you could ever hope to get.21 Quetelet applied the same thinking to his interpretation of human averages: he declared that the individual person was synonymous with error, while the average person represented the true human being.22

Today, of course, we often consider someone described as “average” to be inferior or lacking—as mediocre. But for Quetelet, the Average Man was perfection itself, an ideal that Nature aspired to, free from Error with a capital “E.”

“Everything differing from the Average Man’s proportions and condition, would constitute deformity and disease,” Quetelet asserted.

Governments adopted Quetelet’s social physics as a basis for understanding their citizens and crafting social policy. His ideas helped focus political attention on the middle class, since they were perceived to be closest to a nation’s average citizen and, according to Queteletian reasoning, the truest type of Belgian, Frenchman, Englishman, Dutchman, or Prussian. In 1846, Quetelet organized the first census for the Belgian government, which became the gold standard for all modern censuses; Quetelet even consulted with James A. Garfield, then a member of the U.S. Congress, about ways to improve the American census.

Scholars and thinkers in every field hailed Quetelet as a genius for uncovering the hidden laws governing society. Florence Nightingale adopted his ideas in nursing, declaring that the Average Man was “God’s Will.” Karl Marx adopted Quetelet’s ideas to develop his economic theory of Communism, announcing that the Average Man proved the existence of historical determinism. The physicist James Maxwell was inspired by Quetelet’s mathematics to formulate the classical theory of gas mechanics. The physician John Snow used Quetelet’s ideas to fight cholera in London, marking the start of the field of public health. Wilhelm Wundt, the father of experimental psychology, read Quetelet and proclaimed, “It can be stated without exaggeration that more psychology can be learned from statistical averages than from all philosophers, except Aristotle.”33

When averages became normal… a new age of average was founded by this man.

Quetelet’s invention of the Average Man marked the beginning of the Age of Average. It represented the moment when the average became normal, the individual became error, and stereotypes were validated with the imprint of science.

Quetelet might say that it did not really matter whether you were 50 percent faster than the average person or 50 percent slower—in either case, you were an equal deviation from the average, embodying equal error and equal distance from perfection. Galton would have disagreed. He said that a person who was 50 percent faster than average was clearly superior to someone 50 percent slower. They were not equal: the faster person represented an individual of higher rank.

The Age of Average—a cultural era stretching from Quetelet’s invention of social physics in the 1840s until today—can be characterized by two assumptions unconsciously shared by almost every member of society: Quetelet’s idea of the average man and Galton’s idea of rank.

Typing and ranking both rely on a comparison of the individual to a group average. Thus, both Quetelet and Galton claimed, explicitly and ardently, that any particular person could only be understood by comparison to the group, and therefore, from the perspective of the new social sciences, the individual was almost entirely irrelevant. “In speaking of the individual it must be understood that we are not attempting to speak of this or that man in particular; we must turn to the general impression that remains after having considered a great number of people,” Quetelet wrote in 1835. “Removing his individuality we will eliminate all that is accidental.”

This took people away from even considering the importance of individuality as a concept. And it revolutionized how we percieved many disciplines during the mid to late 1800s... But we don't live in that day and age anymore.

today we reflexively judge every individual we meet in comparison to the average—including ourselves.

Typing and ranking have come to seem so elementary, natural, and right that we are no longer conscious of the fact that every such judgment always erases the individuality of the person being judged. A century and a half after Quetelet—exactly as the poets and physicians of the nineteenth century feared—we have all become averagarians.