• Question: What does it mean to be "normal"?

    Asked by totaldestruction to Ben, James, Jen, Michael, Susanna on 13 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Jen Todd Jones

      Jen Todd Jones answered on 13 Mar 2013:

      If there is one thing science has taught us about ‘normal’ is that it pretty much doesn’t exist! Every measure psychologists have for people’s personalities, attitudes, activities, and the say they look have an average (or mean number) that represents a certain number of people and everyone else is either above or below this average (but that does not necessarily mean that they are better or worse remember!). Someone could be higher than average in impatience which wouldn’t be great, or lower in effort which also wouldn’t be ideal!

    • Photo: Michael Craig

      Michael Craig answered on 13 Mar 2013:

      As Jen says, there really isn’t such a thing as being “normal”. We tend to look at the average scores when recording how well people do in e.g. memory tests but some people will do badly and some will do very well, everyone is different so there really isnt such a thing as being normal.

      In data terms we often talk about having a “normal distribution”. This is sometimes called a bell shaped curve and it shows that some people do badly, some people do well, but the majority of people fall within the middle “average” section. Here’s an example. http://www.mathsisfun.com/data/standard-normal-distribution.html

    • Photo: Susanna Martin

      Susanna Martin answered on 13 Mar 2013:

      to be ‘normal’ can be considered two ways
      1) It can be about being in the majority and being like everybody else
      2) It can be what we expect it to be

      for example most people wear clothes, this is normal, and most people would call it ‘normal behaviour’ and if you weren’t wearing clothes you might be called abnormal, because you are different and it is unexpected. What is interesting is that while we expect people to wear clothes and people that dont might be considered abnormal, if you relocate the abnormal person to a nudist beach, then they are in the majority and it is acceptable to be naked. So here normality is decided by considering the behaviour in context.

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