A survey of "normal" reports diverse findings

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Maybe we aren't so not normal as we tend to think! There is no one "normal"....

http://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/quizze ... rvey-0214/

I wonder how "truthful" these statistics are.

Everybody I know, regardless of neurology, has "something wrong" with them.

At the very least, everybody I know "claims" that they have something wrong with them.

It's a sample of 1032 male readers of Esquire all from the US, so probably truthful but not very useful.

People's perception of what's "normal" is most definitely not of a universal nature.

People usually stand on common ground on such things as assaulting somebody in the street, or having a rock concert in your apartment at 3AM.

The perceptions depend on many factors: culture, upbringing, life experience being salient examples. Many times, one person's normal is somebody else's "absolutely insane."

I know someone who believes someone is abnormal if he/she can't distinguish the salad and meat forks. Most people don't share that opinion.

Different is not necessarily wrong. I often wish that this simple fact were more widely recognized and acknowledged in discussions about humans. A genius IQ, for example, is anomalous (i.e. not 'normal) but isn't usually thought of as something "wrong" about the person.

Also, a person's "wrong" behaviour as judged by one group might be totally acceptable or even expected in a different setting. "Normal" behaviour appropriate to one's age, gender, social standing, and physical appearance is actually an implicitly learned skill that must necessarily vary from one culture to the next (and within subcultures, families, etc), some people who appear to have something "wrong" with them in one culture, might fit right in to another one.

I'd LIKE somebody having a rock concert in his/her apartment at 3 a.m.!

Only 27% thought it was important to be "perceived as normal", which is much lower than I would have thought.
I wonder what the percentage would be for that question on a survey of similar size here. I would hazard a guess that the result would be very different, maybe 90% would vote for extremely important, 5% would think it was not important, and 5% not very important. I would be amongst the five percenters..

A good example of this is Japanese vs. American culture. A relatively high percentage of Japanese would be considered aspie by American standards, while in America aspies are considered rare. Aspie is just a genetic variation, not a 'disorder'.. there is no 'aspie' label in Japan because aspie behaviors aren't really out of the norm there.

That's a very interesting observation.

Tonight I have been thinking about normative perceptions and how they reflect different values cross culturally. There seems to be a cultural belief which is widespread in USA culture that smart=rich, reflected in the sardonic sneering put down: "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" That would mean that George W Bush and Donald Trump are smarter than Stephen Hawking is, or Einstein was.. and ignores the fact that inherited wealth doesn't add up to cleverness.

"What's normal? If normal meant not having any problems, then there wouldn't be any normal people in the world"-my mother.


I think it depends on what we mean by normal and what we mean by problem and how we define the term normal. Even NTs will wonder if they are normal or not or what they do is normal so when I was a kid and I was talking about how different I am and how abnormal I am, I can see why my parents trivialized it. They just assumed I was having normal kids problems and I was just being tender hearted again because I had always been very sensitive so therefore I was taking it all too personal how other kids were treating me and that I was just dealing with personality traits. It was what my brother said that made them realize when he told them how often kids pick on me and also I said it happened to me all the time. This just shows how different your child can be in school than they are at home and how different things can be in school than at home. But if I had given up and started to keep my mouth shut, I would have never gone to a psychologist and then to a psychiatrist and gotten diagnosed.

Interesting topic given the forum it's posted on. I think it's easy for aspies to assume that "normal" people are an homogenous mass of socially competent drones.

Lots of people who wouldn't meet the criteria for an ASD have traits. Social awkwardness, obsessive interests, sensory sensitivities are not always pathological.

One of my problems with modern psychiatry is the imposition of artificial demarcations between those with a disorder (whether autistic, anxiety, mood, thought) and those who don't have a disorder. The idea of a spectrum of behaviour is much less stigmatising and isolating than a binary division between disordered and normal. I find the whole concept of mental illness a bit unnecessary. I don't doubt that people suffer but I'm sceptical about the analogy with physical illness. It's easy to put people into categories and treat them as if they were the same. I see it here all the time from a different angle.

Good point. And yet, cleverness often does contribute to the development of wealth, even when it doesn't always make the individual clever person rich.

I am not male, nor am I American. And why would I want to be normal anyway? Normal is incredibly boring.

Normal is a setting on a washing machine, and no sane person wants to be part of a washing machine!

I was just going to say that.