When it comes to being normal, you have those that try to stay in line, those that want to stand out, and everyone else in between. Wait, what’s normality anyway? It’s been a while, but let’s open the Cambridge Dictionary again:

normality - the state of being normal.

Ok, now I remember why I stopped doing this… Fine, let’s check normal then:

normal - ordinary or usual; the same as would be expected.

This seems right, normal is about the ordinary, the expected… but why? Where does it come from? We’ll try to answer that today.

I know this will make most of you close this tab faster than causality’s speed, but it can’t be helped. Before we continue, I need to do a teeny tiny…

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Noooo come back!

A math lesson:

You’re going to learn about the normal distribution because they’re commonly found in life, and they might be a big part of why normal is what it is… I mean, it’s in the name. Isn’t it ironic that a potential cause of normality is something ordinary itself?

Anyway, a normal distribution is a type of probability distribution for random variables… If you didn’t understand any of that, chances are you’re the ones that didn’t know the normal distribution already. So let’s forget the math lingo and focus on its curve, the bell curve:

Err... I suppose mathematicians have really weird bells

You can stop and admire its beauty if you want, but here what’s noteworthy about it:

• It’s perfectly symmetrical.
• It’s concentrated at a central peak value.
• Both extremities have a very low probability of happening as the three colored central sections combine ~99.7% probability.

Of course, they come in all sorts of shape:

Courtesy of Wikipedia

It’s been a bit too theoretical until now, so let’s take a real-world example: the distribution of Intelligence Quotient scores in the population¹.

Thanks again to our sponsor Wikipedia

You can clearly see that neat bell curve on the outline of the histogram. Also, congrats to fellow non-readers in the above 145/below 55 gang, we’re part of the very exclusive 0.3% of the population club 😎².

Now, you might wonder why normal distribution shows up here, or anywhere else. There are two answers to that:

• Basically, when something has its origin in the small contributions of many (somewhat) independent factors, it tends towards a normal distribution³. For example, IQ is influenced by our genes, nutrition, conditions we grew up in… Since none of these have an outsize influence, they will average to a normal distribution.
• It actually doesn’t, not really. Normal distribution is but a model, a tool we use to better understand things, not a fundamental truth of the universe: Many phenomenons don’t follow it while others only loosely, because we want them too. It is still very common, though.

The takeaway here is the concept of values lumping together around a central value. Also, you shouldn’t take anything written here too strongly, it’s only about that intuition on normality that I have. Speaking of…

Back to normality:

What exactly makes normality is our next question. I theorize it results from the interaction between the tendency of things to lump around a central value as we saw earlier, and our brain inner workings.

More specifically, there’s this concept⁴ that, if you can easily recall something, then it’s more important than things you can’t recall as easily. It isn’t widely accepted, yet it can help explain, among other things, the skewed perception of some people hooked to 24/24 TV news.

You see, those poor souls are bombarded by an endless stream of crimes, accidents, corruption and other catastrophes. It makes them wildly overestimate the risks of getting mugged or involved in a plane accident.

As hypothesized by the mean world syndrome, this is because they have many more recollections of such events compared to someone who doesn’t watch TV. In reality, you’re unlikely to be constantly attacked by criminal-dolphins-forest-fire, or something.

It gets dreadfully ironic when you realize the media reports those events so much because they are rare in the first place. By definition, something ordinary, normal, is not news after all… But enough with this tangent.

All of this to say there’s a mechanism, in our heads, that somewhat links frequency of occurrence with familiarity. Just like the more you listen to a music, the more familiar it gets, for better or for worse…

Combine this with the bell curve pattern, and you obtain an expectation towards the central value: the normal value. Maybe sprinkle some social pressure to conform with the normality/majority on top to get that perfect experience of normality.

Whether you like it or not, it’s unavoidable. The game of probabilities guarantees you’re normal on many (if not most) critera, and since they’re so many of them, at least a few of them will be abnormal.

Picture yourself as “normal clothing style”, “normal ethnicity”, “normal hobby”, “normal shoe size”… Chances are, you’re painfully aware whenever you’re outside the norm.

That’s annoying when it’s something you control, but at least you can choose to either conform or make a statement. However, it can get tragic if it’s something outside your control, like your sexual orientation or gender identity. Thus, social pressure needs to be reined in, especially during the teenage years, I don’t think I need to explain why.

Obviously, we must fight against harassment, bigotry and open intolerance, but it can stem from inconspicuous things like a weird look or a remark on Bob’s new pink shoes, so try to keep those in mind.

Back to our subject, what’s normal isn’t (necessarily) universal, and someone regular can suddenly become the ugly duckling by simply switching environments. If you were to send a world-average height person to a pygmy population, they would stand out… a lot.

It just shows that our world is vast and varied, and it’d be interesting to see how that normality evolves. For that, what better divide to study, but the most infamous of all.

Sex differences:

How are men and women different? In a completely separate manner? Are they unable to understand each other? If psychological studies are a bit shaky, physiological differences are well documented and can help us grasp the shape of that difference. Let’s look at the height distribution:

From our world in data, this time

The first thing you might notice is the significant gap in central values, on average women are quite shorter than men, this isn’t surprising, yet it doesn’t translate to “women are shorter than men”.

If you need convincing, focus your attention towards the overlapping region I filled with yellow⁵, it clearly shows that a sizable chunk of the population won’t fit that narrative. “Tall” girls and “Short” boys exist, they’re just rarer than their opposite sex counterpart.

There are other differences that are more or less pronounced although, correct me if I’m wrong, height is on the stronger difference side of the spectrum⁶. In any case, even if psychological differences had that much of a gap, which they seemingly don’t, the overlapping region would remain.

Our brain takes it easy by assimilating the average, the “normal” as the default, the sole value that matters, but it’s wrong. It severely reduces our ability to appreciate our diversity, and it participates in the pesky social pressure. I feel a bit dumb pointing it out, but we are not probabilities, we’re people.

As anecdotal evidence goes, I always found these differences barely noticeable as I interact on an individual to individual basis, and not with large cohorts of people. Sure, some characteristics were more frequent in girls than boys (or vice versa) but I could always find psychotypes that were almost identical across sexes.

This observation is also valid for other factors than sex, like ethnicity, age, country of origin, culture… Everything is possible, normality just means it’s less likely the further you get from the mean.

Conclusion:

Normality seems to result from our brain biases colliding with the omnipresence of values clumping, as illustrated by bell curves. After all, if you mostly encounter a handful of values, why bother considering the rarer cases?

Sadly, it can cause social pressure, generate stereotypes and restrict our vision of diversity, all of which I believe are detrimental to society.

In the end, you shouldn’t impose normality on yourself, be whatever you want… unless it’s a serial killer, please don’t.

Sources