Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind

Sir Francis Galton was the first of many scholars who believed in assessing human kinds “by objective measurements and calculations” (46). Galton recorded correlations between individuals’ observable characteristics, such as forearm length and head size, then generalized from the correlations. Galton pioneered fingerprint analysis, questionnaires, and composite visual portraits to stereotype appearance and draw conclusions based on such appearance. He invented the phrase “nature versus nurture” and “believed heredity was the key to human behavior” (47). Galton’s scholarship erroneously allows rules to dictate data, instead of vice versa. For example, a facial blending of a group of 10 famous dictators will produce a blended face with the features of 10 dictators only because “dictator” is the rule from which the faces are chosen. Berreby explains, “Sort photos of people according to any rule you please—by birthdate, number of letters in their names, favorite color—and you can blend them into one face” (49).

This scholarship lead to “the bell curve, or ‘normal distribution’—a bedrock of modern statistics” (49). While beneficial in statistical analysis, bell curves cause dangerous stereotypes in measurements of people. Historically, people use bell curves to measure “normalcy” in various metrics, such as height and weight, with “normal” connoting “desired.