Saturday 5 May 2012

Barcode distribution

I suspect that there are numerous perception-driven variables that produce distributions that resemble a barcode i.e. a graph with multiple peaks.

A couple the come to mind:
  • wealth (x-axis) vs happiness (y-axis)
  • intelligence (x-axis) vs perception that human potential for intelligence roughly equivalent been people
This is as a result of subjective experience of the independent variable, to do with society's tendency to group people according to the independent variable, which affects group that the individual interacts with and compares him/herself with.

1 comment:

adreama said...

The Dunning–Kruger effect is an example of this, with the more general case being that perception of ability fluctuates up and down as ability increases.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect