THE CENTER AS THE END

If you are studying psychology, there is no way around statistics. One little part of statistic is the phenomenon of the “regression to the mean”.

Basically, after you get an extreme value in an observation the possibility that the next value won´t be that extreme is very high.

But there are also two main conditions for this phenomenon. The first one: there´s a chance for coincidence . The second one: the correlation between the two measurements isn´t 100%.

This phenomenon was first covered in relation to parents and their children and was called “regression toward mediocrity”. The statistic showed us the following:

If the parents of some children were higher than average, the children were shorter than their parents. However, if the parents were shorter than average, the outcome of the children’s height was exactly the opposite.

A main problem in this case is the overestimation that constantly accompanies human thinking. People think that one situation is enough to predict the upcoming situation, that the future will follow our irrational predictions.

Since this effect is not intuitively understandable, it leads to various errors in thinking and behaviour.

One example is the behaviour of teachers. It happens that some teachers made the experience that after they praised a student for a good grade, the next time the performance of a student would be worse. In the opposite, it could happen that the performance of a student was better after a bad grade if the teacher scolded him. But do the grades change because of the teachers behaviour or because of the regression towards mediocracy?

As statistics show us:

If you are very happy today, the chances are very high that you won´t be as happy tomorrow. Don´t blame it on yourself. Blame it on statistics.