Introduction to Individuality: The Norma Look-Alike Competition

A series explaining how and why you are singular within the eternal cosmos.

Introduction

This is adapted from the book End of Average, which I co-authored with Dr. Todd Rose.

While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. 
   .Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of Four

As a rule, science regards the individual as a mere bothersome accident.   
   .Gordon Allport, Personality

.1

In the early 1950s, the U.S. Air Force had a serious problem: its pilots couldn’t maintain control of their planes. Although this was the dawn of jet aviation and the planes were faster and more complicated to fly, the problems were so frequent and involved so many different types of aircraft that the Air Force realized it had a genuine life-or-death mystery on its hands.

“It was a difficult time to be flying,” one retired airman explained. “You never knew if you were going to end up in the dirt.”

At its worst, seventeen pilots crashed in a single day.

The two official government designations for these noncombat mishaps were incidents and accidents. They ranged from bungled landings to aircraft-obliterating fatalities. At first, the military brass pinned the blame squarely on the men in the cockpits, citing “pilot error” in crash reports.

This judgment seemed reasonable given the fact that the planes themselves rarely malfunctioned. Engineers confirmed this time and again, testing the mechanics and electronics of the planes and finding no defects. Pilots, meanwhile, vehemently denied responsibility. If it wasn’t mechanical error, and it wasn’t pilot error—what was it?

After an exhaustive inquiry that produced no answers, officials turned to the design of the cockpit itself.

Back in 1921, army scientists had measured the physical dimensions of hundreds of male pilots (the possibility of female pilots was never a serious consideration), and the data were used to standardize the dimensions of the cockpit and its controls. The size and shape of the seat, the distance to the pedals and stick, the height of the windshield, even the shape of the flight helmets were all built to comfortably accommodate these measurements.

There was nothing unusual about this approach to cockpit design. Ever since the Civil War, the American armed forces had followed the same guiding philosophy for all its equipment, including rifles, gas masks, life preservers, helmets, and tank vestibules.

Everything was standardized to fit the average soldier.

U.S. Air Force leadership came up with a new theory to explain the crashes: the dimensions of an average pilot must have grown BIGGER.

They authorized a study to obtain an updated and more comprehensive assessment of the average pilot’s body dimensions. In 1952, researchers at Wright Air Force Base in Ohio measured more than 4,000 pilots on 140 dimensions, including thumb length, crotch height, and the distance from a pilot’s eye to his ear. They then calculated the average measurement for each dimension. Everyone believed this revised set of pilot data would solve, at least partially, the problem of flight crashes.

Everyone, that is, except one young scientist in the group: Lieutenant Gilbert S. Daniels.

Daniels was a newly hired junior researcher at Wright Air Force Base in 1950. He was not the kind of person you’d associate with the testosterone-drenched culture of aerial combat. He was slender and wore glasses. He was not athletic. He liked flowers and landscaping and in high school was president of the Botanical Garden Club. When he joined the Aero Medical Laboratory at Wright Air Force Base, he had never even been in a plane. It didn’t matter. His earthbound job was to measure pilots’ limbs with a tape measure.

As an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1940s, Daniels majored in physical anthropology. During the first half of the twentieth century, this field focused heavily on classifying the personalities of a particular group of people according to their body shapes—what was known as “typing.” For physical anthropologists, a short and heavy body was indicative of a merry and fun-loving personality, while receding hairlines and fleshy lips reflected a “criminal type.” One of the leaders of the field, Harvard professor Earnest Hooton, proudly summed up physical anthropology’s guiding mantra as, “Your carcass is the clue to your character.”

Daniels’s musty 1948 undergraduate thesis can be found in the Harvard University archives, complete with faded black-and-white photographs glued to hand-typed pages. The research compares the shape of 250 male hands. The Harvard students Daniels examined were from similar ethnic and sociocultural backgrounds (namely, white and wealthy), but, unexpectedly, their hands were not similar at all.

Even more surprising, when Daniels averaged together all his data to create the Average Hand, this presumably normal hand did not resemble any individual’s measurements.

Daniels experienced a revelation.

There was no such thing as an average hand.

“When I left Harvard, it was clear to me that if you wanted to design something for an individual human being, the average was completely useless,” Daniels recounted. Consequently, when the Air Force put him to work measuring pilots, he harbored a private conviction concerning averages that rejected almost a century of military design philosophy. As Daniels sat in the Aero Medical Laboratory measuring hands, legs, waists, and foreheads, he kept asking himself the same question in his head:

How many individual pilots resemble the average pilot?

Using the measurement data of 4,063 pilots, Daniels calculated the average of ten physical dimensions believed to be most relevant for cockpit design, including height, chest circumference, and sleeve length. These formed the dimensions of the “average pilot,” which Daniels generously defined as someone whose measurements were within the middle 30 percent of the range of values for each dimension.

So, for example, since the average male height was five foot nine (according to Daniel’s data), he defined “average height” as ranging from 5’7” to 5’11”. Next, he compared each individual pilot, one by one, to the average.

Before he crunched his numbers, the consensus among his fellow Air Force researchers was that the vast majority of pilots would be within the average range on most dimensions. After all, these pilots had already been preselected because they appeared to be average sized. (If you were, say, six foot seven, you would not be recruited to fly jets.) The scientists also presumed that a sizable number of pilots would be within the average range on all ten dimensions—after all, that was the whole philosophical basis for the military standardizing its equipment to fit the average soldier.

Even Daniels was stunned when he tabulated the actual number.

Zero.

Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the +/–30 percent range on all ten dimensions.

One pilot might have higher-than-average arm length, but lower-than-average leg length.

Another pilot might have a big chest but small hips.

Even more astonishing, Daniels discovered that if you picked just three dimensions of size—say, neck circumference, thigh circumference, and wrist circumference—less than 4 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, you’ve designed it to fit no one.

.2

Five years before Gilbert completed his investigation into the average man, the Cleveland Plain Dealer announced on its front page a contest for women. This competition was cosponsored by the Cleveland Health Museum, the Academy of Medicine of Cleveland, the School of Medicine, and the Cleveland Board of Education. Winners of the contest would receive $100, $50, and $25 war bonds, and ten additional lucky women would get $10 worth of war stamps.

The contest? To submit body dimensions that most closely match the average woman, “Norma,” as represented by a statue on display at the Cleveland Health Museum.

Norma, the Perfectly Average Woman

Norma was the creation of a well-known gynecologist, Dr. Robert L. Dickinson, who sculpted the Norma figure based on data Dickinson had collected from more than fifteen thousand young adult women. Dickinson had measured the size of their hips, waist, bust, and thighs—even ankle and foot length.

Like many scientists of his day, Dickinson believed the essential truth of a class of things could be determined by collecting data on a large population of individual examples and then calculating and contemplating the mean. “Norma” represented exactly such an essential truth. For Dickinson, the thousands of data points he had collected and averaged revealed insight into what Nature intended as the ideal physique for Woman—that is, someone who could scientifically and medically be justified as normal.

In addition to displaying the life-size sculpture of Norma, the Cleveland Museum of Art also began selling miniature reproductions of Norma as the “Ideal Girl.” Pediatricians, parents, and physical education instructors used these reproductions as models for how ideal young women should look and to encourage them to gain or lose weight to match Norma’s proportions.

On November 23, 1945, the Plain Dealer announced its winner, a slim brunette theater cashier named Martha Skidmore. The newspaper reported that Skidmore liked to swim, dance, and bowl—in other words, her tastes were as pleasingly normal as her figure, which was held up as the paragon of the female form.

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 surprising reality: not a single woman came anywhere near to matching the measurements of Norma, not even the winner, Ms. Skidmore.

Instead, less than 40 out of the 3,864 contestants were average sized on just five of the nine dimensions (just one percent!) and none of the contestants—not even Martha Skidmore—was close on all nine dimensions.

Just as the Air Force’s investigation revealed there was no such thing as an average man, the Norma Look-Alike contest demonstrated there was no such thing as an average woman.¹

But while Daniels and the contest organizers obtained the same data, they came to different conclusions about the data’s meaning. The doctors and scientists of the era didn’t interpret the results of the Look-Alike contest as evidence that Norma was a misguided ideal. The opposite: many concluded that American women as a group were unhealthy and out of shape. That’s why they didn’t match the norm!

One of those physicians was Bruno Gebhard, head of the Cleveland Health Museum, who lamented that postwar women were largely unfit for service, declaring that “the unfit are both bad producers and bad consumers.” His solution for this undesirable and unhealthy drift away from the norm was to put greater emphasis on physical fitness for ladies.

Lieutenant Gilbert Daniels’ conclusion was different.

“The tendency to think in terms of the ‘average man’ is a pitfall into which many persons blunder,” Daniels wrote in 1952, in the first evidenced-based critique of the widespread use of the average in the social sciences that I’ve been able to find. “It is virtually impossible to find an average airman not because of any unique traits in this group but because of the great variability of bodily dimensions which is characteristic of all men.”

Rather than suggesting that people should strive harder to conform to an ideal derived from an average measurement, as many scientists and physicians suggested after the Norma contest, Daniels’s analysis led him to a very counterintuitive argument that serves as a thematic cornerstone of the Dark Gift:

Any human-interacting system designed around the average is doomed to fail.

Daniels published his findings and provocative conclusion in one of my favorite scientific papers, a 1952 Air Force Technical Note entitled The “Average Man”? In it, he concludes that if the military wanted to improve the performance of its soldiers, including its pilots, it needed to change the design of the environments in which soldiers performed so that they fit the individual soldier rather than the average soldier.

Amazingly—and to their lasting credit—the United States Air Force embraced Daniels’s very much against-tradition findings. “The old air force designs were all based on finding pilots who were similar to the average pilot,” Daniels explained to me. “But once we showed them the average pilot was a useless concept, they were able to focus on fitting the cockpit to the individual pilot. That’s when things started getting better.”

The Air Force attained a quantum leap in design, centered on a new guiding principle of individual fit.

.3

Rather than fitting the individual to the system—the standard method since the Civil War—the military began fitting the system to the individual. By the late 1950s, the air force ordered that all future cockpits needed to fit pilots whose size measurements fell within the 5 percent to 95 percent range on each dimension. This was a staggering and unexpected mandate. The airplane manufacturers balked, insisting it would take years to solve the engineering problems and be prohibitively expensive. But the military refused to budge.

Eventually, the engineers came up with solutions that were cheap and easy.

They designed adjustable seats, a technology now standard in all automobiles. They created adjustable foot pedals. They developed adjustable helmet straps and flight suits. They created wraparound windshields.

Once these and other new cockpit design features were put into place, pilot performance soared, and the U.S. Air Force quickly became the most dominant on the planet. Soon, every branch of the American military published guides decreeing that equipment should be customizable to fit a wide range of body sizes, instead of standardized around the average.

The changes signified such a breakthrough in military design that the U.S. government kept Daniels’s research classified for years.

Personally, I find it fascinating to think that a young scientist doing classified work for the Air Force discovered what I will argue is one of the greatest fallacies handicapping mindscience: the misguided, unscientific belief in the power of the average and norm to explain human bodies and human behavior.

You are an individual in every way. Your brain is one of a kind. Your body is one of a kind. Your sexuality is one of a kind. Your experiences are one of a kind. The way your memory works, your perception works, your consciousness works—all of these have a unique physical and dynamic instantiation in your brain.

By design. For this is how purpose adapts: by throwing endless variants out into the Commonality to see which ones might work here and now in this new mess.

Here on the Dark Gift, we will dispose of all Norms and Normas, and demonstrate how you, pilgrim, have never existed anywhere before, and will never exist anywhere again, anywhere in eternity, exactly as you are here.

---

1. As it happens, Daniels ran the same study on women in the Air Force (WAFs) and also found that there was no average female body.