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

by Todd Rose

The scientists also expected that a sizable number of pilots would be within the average range on all ten dimensions. But even Daniels was stunned when he tabulated the actual number. Zero. Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all ten dimensions. One pilot might have a longer-than-average arm length, but a shorter-than-average leg length. Another pilot might have a big chest but small hips. Even more astonishing, Daniels discovered that if you picked out just three of the ten dimensions of size—say, neck circumference, thigh circumference, and wrist circumference—less than 3.5 percent of pilots would be average sized on all three dimensions. Daniels’s findings were clear and incontrovertible. 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

Before the competition, the judges assumed most entrants’ measurements would be pretty close to the average, and that the contest would come down to a question of millimeters. The reality turned out to be nothing of the sort. Less than 40 of the 3,864 contestants were average-size on just five of the nine dimensions and none of the contestants—not even Martha Skidmore—came close on all nine dimensions.19 Just as Daniels’s study revealed there was no such thing as an average-size pilot, the Norma Look-Alike contest demonstrated that average-size women did not exist either.

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.

The recommended change was radical: the environments needed to fit the individual rather than the average.

It is not that the average is never useful. Averages have their place. If you’re comparing two different groups of people, like comparing the performance of Chilean pilots with French pilots—as opposed to comparing two individuals from each of those groups—then the average can be useful. But the moment you need a pilot, or a plumber, or a doctor, the moment you need to teach this child or decide whether to hire that employee—the moment you need to make a decision about any individual—the average is useless. Worse than useless, in fact, because it creates the illusion of knowledge, when in fact the average disguises what is most important about an individual.

In the chapters that follow, I’ll share with you three principles of individuality—the jaggedness principle, the context principle, and the pathways principle.

Human potential is nowhere near as limited as the systems we have put in place assume. We just need the tools to understand each person as an individual, not as a data point on a bell curve.

The hardest part of learning something new is not embracing new ideas, but letting go of old ones. The goal of this book is to liberate you, once and for all, from the tyranny of the average.

Ever since Quetelet introduced the idea of the Average Man, scientists have delineated the characteristics of a seemingly endless number of types, such as “Type-A personalities,” “neurotic types,” “micro-managers,” and “leader types,” arguing that you could make useful predictions about any given individual member of a group simply by knowing the traits of the average member—the group’s type.

Galton was so confident that the Eminent represented a separate category of human being that he claimed a person’s rank was consistent across all qualities and dimensions—mental, physical, and moral.

To our twenty-first-century minds, it has come to seem so natural and obvious that talented people are “above average” while incompetent folks are “below average” that it seems simplistic to attribute the origins of this idea to one person. And yet, it was Galton who almost single-handedly supplanted Quetelet’s conviction that human worth could be measured by how close a person was to the average with the notion that worth was better measured by how far a person was from the average. Just as Quetelet’s ideas about types took the intellectual world by storm in the 1840s, so did Galton’s idea about rank in the 1890s, and by the early 1900s, the notion that people could be sorted into distinct bins of ability from low to high had infiltrated virtually all the social and behavioral sciences. 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 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.

How, precisely, did averagarianism go from an abstract ivory tower conjecture to the pre-eminent organizational doctrine of businesses and schools across the world? The answer to this question largely centers on a single man named Frederick Winslow Taylor. One economist has written that Taylor “probably had a greater effect on the private and public lives of the men and women of the twentieth century than any other single individual.”

“An organization composed of individuals of mediocre ability, working in accordance with policies, plans, and procedures discovered by analysis of the fundamental facts of their situation, will in the long run prove more successful and stable than an organization of geniuses each led by inspiration,” affirmed Taylor.8

According to Taylor, there was always “one best way” to accomplish any given process—and only one way, the standardized way.12 For Taylor, there was nothing worse than a worker trying to do things his own way.

Taylor laid out his ideas of standardization and management in his 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management.19 The book became a national and international business bestseller and was translated into a dozen languages.20 Almost immediately after the book’s publication, scientific management—often simply called “Taylorism”—swept across the world’s industries.

To organize and teach children to become workers who could perform industrial tasks in “a perfect way,” the Taylorists set out to remake the architecture of the entire educational system to conform to the central tenet of scientific management: standardize everything around the average. Schools around the country adopted the “Gary Plan,” named after the industrialized Indiana city where it originated: students were divided into groups by age (not by performance, interest, or aptitude) and these groups of students rotated through different classes, each lasting a standardized period of time. School bells were introduced to emulate factory bells, in order to mentally prepare children for their future careers.

Thorndike was one of the most prolific and influential psychologists of all time.32 He published more than four hundred articles, and sold millions of textbooks.33 His mentor at Harvard, William James, described Thorndike as a “freak of nature” for his workaholic productivity.

Thorndike’s ideas gave birth to the notion of gifted students, honors students, special needs students, and educational tracks. He supported the use of grades as a convenient metric for ranking students’ overall talent and believed that colleges should admit those students with the best GPAs and highest standardized test scores since (according to Galton’s idea of rank) he believed they were not only the most likely to succeed in college, but most likely to succeed in whatever profession they chose.

Our twenty-first-century educational system operates exactly as Thorndike intended: from our earliest grades, we are sorted according to how we perform on a standardized educational curriculum designed for the average student, with rewards and opportunities doled out to those who exceed the average, and constraints and condescension heaped upon those who lag behind. Contemporary pundits, politicians, and activists continually suggest that our educational system is broken, when in reality the opposite is true. Over the past century, we have perfected our educational system so that it runs like a well-oiled Taylorist machine, squeezing out every possible drop of efficiency in the service of the goal its architecture was originally designed to fulfill: efficiently ranking students in order to assign them to their proper place in society.

We want to live in a society where we can truly be ourselves—where we can learn, develop, and pursue opportunities on our own terms according to our own nature, instead of needing to conform ourselves to an artificial norm.42 This desire prompts the billion-dollar question that drives this book: How can a society predicated on the conviction that individuals can only be evaluated in reference to the average ever create the conditions for understanding and harnessing individuality?

To prepare for his stint as a substitute teacher, Molenaar opened his copy of Lord and Novick. That’s when he experienced what he calls his aha-erlebnis, the German word for “epiphany.”

The strange assumption that a group’s distribution of measurements could safely be substituted for an individual’s distribution of measurements was implicitly accepted by almost every scientist who studied individuals, though most of the time they were hardly conscious of it. But after a lifetime of mathematical psychology, when Molenaar unexpectedly saw this unjustifiable assumption spelled out in black and white, he knew exactly what he was looking at: an irrefutable error at the very heart of averagarianism.

Molenaar recognized that the fatal flaw of averagarianism was its paradoxical assumption that you could understand individuals by ignoring their individuality.

They wanted to know if they could use the average behavior of a group of gas molecules to predict the average behavior of a single gas molecule. To answer this question, physicists worked out a set of mathematical principles known as ergodic theory that specified exactly when you could use information about a group to draw conclusions about individual members of the group.9 The rules are fairly straightforward. According to ergodic theory, you are allowed to use a group average to make predictions about individuals if two conditions are true: (1) every member of the group is identical, and (2) every member of the group will remain the same in the future.10 If a particular group of entities fulfills these two conditions, the group is considered to be “ergodic,” in which case it is fine to use the average behavior of the group to make predictions about an individual. Unfortunately for nineteenth-century physicists, it turned out that the majority of gas molecules, despite their apparent simplicity, are not actually ergodic.11

This was why Molenaar called this assumption the ergodic switch: it takes something nonergodic and pretends it is ergodic. We might think of the ergodic switch as a kind of intellectual “bait and switch” where the lure of averagarianism dupes scientists, educators, business leaders, hiring managers, and physicians into believing that they are learning something meaningful about an individual by comparing her to an average, when they are really ignoring everything important about her.

In 2004, Peter Molenaar spelled out the consequences of the ergodic switch for the study of individuals in a paper entitled, “A Manifesto on Psychology as Idiographic Science: Bringing the Person Back into Scientific Psychology, This Time Forever.”14 After a scientific career devoted to averagarian thinking, his manifesto now declared that averagarianism was irredeemably wrong.

Recall that the two defining assumptions of the Age of Average are Quetelet’s conviction that the average is the ideal, and the individual is error, and Galton’s conviction that if someone is Eminent at one thing they are likely Eminent at most things. In contrast, the main assumption of the science of the individual is that individuality matters19—the individual is not error, and on the human qualities that matter most (like talent, intelligence, personality, and character) individuals cannot be reduced to a single score.

An individual is a high-dimensional system evolving over place and time. —PETER MOLENAAR, PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY

Despite Google’s continued growth and profitability, by the mid–2000s there were signs that something was wrong with the way it was selecting talent. Many of its hires were not performing the way management had imagined, and there was a growing sense within Google that company recruiters and managers were ignoring many candidates whose talent was not getting captured by the familiar metrics used by most companies, such as grades, test scores, and diplomas.11 As Todd Carlisle, the human resources director for product quality operations at Google, explained to me, “We began to spend a lot of time and money analyzing the ‘missed talent’ that we felt we should have hired, but didn’t.”

While stack ranking was in effect, the article reports, the company had “mutated into something bloated and bureaucracy-laden, with an internal culture that unintentionally rewards managers who strangle innovative ideas that might threaten the established order of things.”15 In late 2013, Microsoft abruptly jettisoned stack ranking.

A quality is jagged if it meets two criteria. First, it must consist of multiple dimensions. Second, these dimensions must be weakly related to one another.

These one-dimensional Knicks teams were so bad that only two teams had a worse record during the same stretch. The jaggedness principle makes it easy to see why they failed so badly: because basketball talent is multidimensional. One mathematical analysis of basketball performance suggests that at least five dimensions have a clear effect on the outcome of a game: scoring, rebounds, steals, assists, and blocks.24 And most of these five dimensions are not strongly related to one another—players who are great at steals, for instance, are usually not so great at blocking. Indeed, it is exceptionally rare to find a true “five-tool player.” Out of the tens of thousands of players who have come through the NBA since 1950 only five players have ever led their team on all five dimensions.

For a human trait like size or talent to be considered jagged, however, it’s not enough to be multidimensional. Each of the dimensions also must be relatively independent. The mathematical way to express this independence is weak correlations.

It turned out that SAT scores and the prestige of a candidate’s alma mater were not predictive at all. Neither was winning programming competitions. Grades mattered a little, but only for the first three years after you graduated. “But the real surprise for me and for a lot of people at Google,” Carlisle told me, “was that when we analyzed the data we couldn’t find a single variable that mattered for even most of the jobs at Google. Not one.”

He sat down and proceeded to show me a way to convert each problem into a kind of visual table that allowed me to draw the precise relationships between Jerry and Jenny and Julie in a clear and reliable fashion. At first, I was completely skeptical that this technique, which was indeed very easy for me, could possibly work. But I tried it out on problem after problem, and each time it gave me the right answer. I couldn’t believe it. Two weeks later I took the GRE and I got my highest score on the analytical reasoning section. My GRE instructor had figured out a way to solve problems that suited his jagged mental abilities—but not necessarily mine. Fortunately, my father had a clearer sense of my jaggedness. He helped me see that my problem was not that I had weak analytical skills—the one-dimensional view I had settled on after failing practice test after practice test using my instructor’s method—but rather that I was relying on one of my weakest mental abilities, working memory, to solve the problems. Once my father helped me identify a strategy that played to my strengths, I could finally answer the test questions correctly and demonstrate my true talent.

We tend to believe that, deep down in the bedrock of a person’s soul, someone is essentially wired to be friendly or unfriendly, lazy or industrious, introverted or extroverted, and that these defining characteristics will shine through no matter what the circumstances or task. This belief is known as essentialist thinking.10

But here’s the problem: when it comes to predicting the behavior of individuals—as opposed to predicting the average behavior of a group of people—traits actually do a poor job. In fact, correlations between personality traits and behaviors that should be related—such as aggression and getting into fights, or extroversion and going to parties—are rarely stronger than 0.30.12 Just how weak is that? According to the mathematics of correlation, it means that your personality traits explain 9 percent of your behavior. Nine percent!

The reason trait theory, and the essentialist thinking that supports it, does such a poor job explaining human behavior is because it completely ignores the second principle of individuality: the context principle.

University of Washington professor Yuichi Shoda is one of the top researchers in child development, and one of my favorite scientists in all psychology.

At the end of the summer, Shoda painstakingly sifted through this massive bundle of data by first analyzing each individual child’s behavior, and then looking for collective patterns. The results were plain and unmistakable—and a direct blow to essentialist thinking: each child exhibited different personalities in different situations.19

Trait-based personality tests assume that we can be either extroverts or introverts . . . but not both. Yet, Shoda discovered that every child really was both.20

However, Shoda’s results also repudiated situation theory, since his data demonstrated that any given situation affected each person differently.

But Shoda wasn’t undermining the concept of personality—rather, by placing the person and context together, he was giving it life. Shoda demonstrated that, in fact, there is something consistent about our identity—it just wasn’t the kind of consistency anyone expected: we are consistent within a given context. According to Shoda’s results (as well as a great deal of subsequent research), if you are conscientious and neurotic while driving today, it’s a pretty safe bet you will be conscientious and neurotic while driving tomorrow. At the same time, what makes you uniquely you is that you may not be conscientious and neurotic when you are playing Beatles cover songs with your band in the context of your local pub. Shoda’s research embodies the second principle of individuality, the context principle, which asserts that individual behavior cannot be explained or predicted apart from a particular situation, and the influence of a situation cannot be specified without reference to the individual experiencing it.21 In other words, behavior is not determined by traits or the situation, but emerges out of the unique interaction between the two. If you want to understand a person, descriptions of their average tendencies or “essential nature” are sure to lead you astray. Instead, you need a new way of thinking that focuses on a person’s context-specific behavioral signatures.

When the public learned of Hartshorne’s results, there was widespread shock and outrage. “There has been no more disconcerting theory for parents and teachers generally than the doctrine that moral behavior is specific and conditioned to a large degree by the external situation,” Hartshorne declared in response. “If Johnny is honest at home and you should remark that he cheats in his school examinations, his mother is more apt to be incredulous. However repugnant to popular opinion, the doctrine of specificity would seem to be well established . . . honesty, charity, cooperation, inhibition, and persistence are particular habits rather than general traits.”

Before switching to a career in recruiting, Adler designed missiles and guidance systems for an aerospace manufacturer. As a result, he approached the practice of finding and selecting employees with the mindset of an engineer. “One day it just hit me: Once you see how performance depends on context, and how recruiting should be focused on matching individuals to optimal contexts, it just seems like common sense,” Adler explained to me. “But it turned out to be really hard to get companies to implement common sense.”44 Inspired by his context-focused vision for the workplace, Adler developed a new way to recruit and hire employees that he calls “performance-based hiring.” Instead of describing the person they want, Alder tells employers to first describe the job they want done.

Breaking free from essentialist thinking, and becoming aware of contextual if-then signatures, can give us an incredible advantage in our personal and professional lives. On a personal level, it helps us more easily recognize the situations where we shine, which allows us to make better decisions.

If we could see that “difficult” coworker in all her contexts, we might find her to be a devoted friend outside the office, a caring sister, a loving aunt to her nieces. It’s then harder to judge that coworker, to reduce her to a singular unflattering personality trait and in the process strip her of what makes her human—her complexity. Remembering that there is more to that person than the context that finds both of us together in that moment opens up the door for us to treat others with a deeper understanding and respect than essentialist thinking ever allows us to. And that understanding and respect are the foundation of the positive relationships that are most likely to lead to our success and happiness.

The act of walking is so universal and so deeply human that it seems almost self-evident that it must develop through a well-defined set of fixed stages—a normal pathway. For almost sixty years, leading researchers and medical institutions agreed, insisting that children crawl, stand, and walk according to a normal developmental timetable. These authorities endorsed a sequence of age-specific milestones that a “typical” child was expected to progress through, based on average ages obtained from large samples of children.4 The presumption that there must be a normal pathway to walking seemed so intuitive and obvious it was almost never challenged. But one person who did was a scientist named Karen Adolph.5

Adolph discovered there is no such thing as a normal pathway to crawling. Instead, she found no less than twenty-five different pathways infants followed, each with its own unique movement patterns, and all of them eventually led to walking.6