Feeding My Ignorance

What a bizarre headline for an article was my first thought, but then - is this how most people think? Then again - bizarre headlines are not exactly unusual - they appear everywhere and are mainly designed to pull in the unsuspecting reader.

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The actual headline was "do men prefer average women"?

The content of the article is actually largely irrelevant as is the fact that it was dealing with the 'preferences' that men exhibit when choosing a potential partner.  The thinking (wrong thinking, in my view) was equally applicable to anyone - male or female - when making any type of decision.  What is happening here is confusing two completely different things - firstly there is the individual who is doing the choosing and secondly there is a perception of the likely choice by society at large.

If I were to go out and buy a ladder that enabled me to reach the roof of my garden shed then there is no way I would buy the shortest ladder in the shop.  Equally, the longest ladder that they had would almost certainly be an unnecessary expense.  So - was I buying an 'average' ladder -well no, because I was buying the one that was closest to my desired length of ladder - even though it was of 'average' length.  Equally it would probably be neither the cheapest nor the most expensive ladder around.  By many measures it may well be an average ladder - but for me it would be close to perfect.

That deals with the first problem - the second one is more difficult.  With length and cost of the ladder it is easy to compare like with like - a ladder six metres long is clearly longer than a ladder that is three metres longer.  Is a ladder that is painted white 'better' than one which is painted black?

Back comes that ubiquitous answer "it depends".  There is no definitive answer to that question.  What is more if I try to guess whether white is better than black for you then I will be in severe danger of mapping my own preferences on to you and choosing "as if" for myself.  This still remains a not very difficult problem - however many decisions - like who to vote for in an election; which car to buy; where to take your next vacation; and yes, who to choose for a partner - are made by an individual based on a (probably) long list of more or less conscious criteria.

Therefore IF, and its a very big if, men really do prefer the 'average' woman (or car, or coffee machine, or holiday destination, or whatever) then there is a very good case for saying that whatever characteristics ensure that preference should be weighted very highly when deciding what is 'average' and the 'average' woman (or car.....) would cease to be 'average' very quickly!!

This idea is - I guess - rather linked to the way in which we are only too happy to rank ourselves as better than average when it comes to a lot of our skills.  Regardless of the truth, or otherwise, of those rankings it illuminates a very 'naif' view of what average actually means and - of course - how we relate to it.  This isn't the place for a deep analysis of the way in which people misread statistics so I have no intention of going into the realms of statistical distributions and probability theory.  (thank goodness says the reader!)

What I do want to comment on is the slightly 'perverse' result of this type of misinterpretation of reality.  If we accept that there is some merit to the way in which the article defines the 'average' woman (and yes this could equally be applied the other way round to the 'average' man) then Mademoiselle A Verage looking in the mirror will (almost certainly) feel very down about being 'only' average - despite the fact that, by all accounts, that is precisely the place she needs to be in order to attract a whole posse of admirers desperate to win her affections!

Thank goodness that in reality there is no 'absolute' when dealing with these sort of preferences.  We do not all like the same things - not when choosing a partner, not when listing our favourite music, not when choosing where to take our next vacation.  Otherwise the world would be a much duller (or more locally crowded) place.  'Average' is often relative to a very specific set of criteria and has no meaning unless it is qualified by what measurement - over what scale  - and in what data population.

I guess you could (reasonably accurately) say that the 'average' man prefers the 'average' woman.  Its just not a very useful thing to say.