What is normal?

When I took some time to reflect on the idea of what it means to be “normal,” I found it was a more complex question than I realized.  It seems normal has technical definitions but is often just a matter of perspective.  I share a little of both here.

I recently finished reading “M Train” by Patti Smith.  I use a special book reading app that allows me to adjust the speed and tone of the reader’s voice.  The book was read by the author and I wanted to hear what she sounded like at her regular rate of speech.  As I adjusted the playback speed from 200% to 175%, 150%, 125%, I was surprised to find the next increment was identified as “Normal.”  Since my default reading speed is 200%, I didn’t naturally equate 100% as normal.  This inconsistency got stuck in my mind.

As this idea of the disconnect between what I thought of as normal and what the developers of the book reader thought of as normal rolled around in my brain I started to thinking of how I encounter the concept of “normal” in my day-to-day life.  My background is in business and information systems so I see much of the world through the lens of numbers.  In recent years I have focused on how the subject of leadership, learning, and service inform our perspective on the world.  The intersection of these perspectives makes this idea of “normal” both more interesting and more complex.

Statistical tools provide for many ways to determine how a group of things could be described and categorized as “normal.”  Among the simplest of these are the descriptive statistics mean, median, and mode.  Under a true normal distribution mean, median, and mode are all the same.  The mean is the average height, weight, cost, speed, etc. of a group of items.  If we measure the speed of race cars as they go around a race track, we can put the cars in order from fastest to slowest.  We can also look at the speeds of each car as a group.  The starting grid of Sunday’s Indianapolis 500 makes for an example of how mean, median and mode don’t seem to be all that different.  The average (mean) speed for the starting field is 227.6 MPH.  The Median (halfway between fastest and slowest) speed is 227.8 MPH.  The difference between the mean and median speed is 0.16 MPH.  Yeah, I don’t care either.  Mode refers to the most common occurrence among a group of numbers.  Rounding to the nearest MPH, most (7) cars qualified at 228 MPH.  Five cars each qualified at 226, and 227 MPH.  Seventeen cars qualified at speeds of 226 – 228 MPH.  So, while the mean, median, and mode all tell us a similar story, this is far from interesting.

Measures of statistical normalcy don’t get me much closer to understanding why the term “normal” is used in place of “100%” on my book reader.  The disconnect comes from the fact that when I use my book reader 200% is my default (normal) speed.  This leads me into looking at the concepts of mean, median, and mode from an experiential perspective. 

When I look around me I realize I very often look at the world as if I were at the center of the normal curve.  We think of ourselves as average in many ways.  Our income, politics, social contacts, etc seem to be similar to the average people in our demographic profile.  Similarly, I presume that about the same number of people rank higher than us as rank lower than us on most measures.  While this is likely to be true in many cases, we sometimes find ourselves surprised at how out of touch we are with the experiences of others.  As an example, I learned from an article in the May, 2016 Atlantic Magazine entitled “My Secret Shame,” that 47% of Americans would not be able to put their hands on $400 in the case of an emergency.  That’s just not within my realm of understanding even though our household income falls below the 2014 median income of $53,657. 

While I recognize the importance of understanding mean and median values, I often don’t use them as a primary reference point.  Most often I see what is around me and assume that what I’m seeing is “normal.”  That’s the case when I set the speed on my book reader.  While this is fine for my book reader, the principle cannot be generalized and is potentially dangerous when applied to other areas of my life.  For example, I don’t live in a very diverse neighborhood.  If I look around my neighborhood I could easily conclude that it’s normal for people to look like me.  After a recent theft in our neighborhood one of my neighbors seemed to take pride in posting to our neighborhood web portal that he’d turned a young African-American man away from a local gas station by letting him know he was armed with a hand gun.  I felt compelled to share that I am much more afraid of knowing my neighbors are willing to imply violence against someone for “walking while black” than I am of knowing there are people in my neighborhood who don’t look like me.  On the other hand, I encounter much more diversity in my professional life.  From my professional experience I assume the world is diverse and most people are well educated, interact with others who don’t look like them, and have incomes that closely fall around the median. 

• Segregation isn’t normal but it’s common.
• Diversity of culture, race, religion, disability, and sexual orientation in small groups of people isn’t common but is normal in the general population.
• Being afraid of people who are not like us is both normal and fairly common among adults – but not children.

Lessons learned:

As I try to figure out what this reflection has brought to me some of the following ideas come to mind:

• While I like to think I make informed decisions based on objective criteria, the fact is I am highly influenced by my most immediate surroundings.
• I recognize that there are two flavors of normal:  my own idea of normal reflects my habits and comfort zone; and the normal that is reflected in objective measures of people who I am similar to or aspire to be similar to.
• When I am at my best self, I recognize “normal” as the clearest, most accurate, reflection of the state of my immediate surroundings.  When this understanding of normal clashes with my values and conscience it is time for me to reflect on those discrepancies and to act to resolve them.

Applying the lessons:

• Now that I’ve had a chance to think about it, labeling the 100% speed on my book reader makes sense.  In this case normal is the true representation of the reader’s voice.
• I like the idea of characterizing unfiltered reality as “normal.
• There are times when my own practices are different from the majority of others and that’s OK.
• There are times when my own practices are different from others and I need to take those differences as a call to action.  I’m happy that I took the time to speak up about my neighbor’s racist behavior.
• We can take advantage of objective measures as points of comparison.  The fact that we could easily respond to a financial emergency sounds great but it might mean that we need to use our money more effectively.

References:

Kretschmer, Hugh.  May, 2016. 
The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans.  The Atlantic.  Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-secret-shame/476415/

U.S Census bureau. 9/16/2015.  Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the U.S.: 2014.  Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-157.html

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Copyright 2016, Dan Lococo.  All rights reserved.