"Outline and evaluate two definitions of abnormality: statistical infrequency and deviation from social norms."

Authors Avatar

Michelle Lockwood

Abnormality

“Outline and evaluate two definitions of abnormality: statistical infrequency and deviation from social norms.”

The term “abnormality” is defined as ‘deviation from a norm or standard’ and in psychology, it is essential to look at what abnormality is.  Several ideas have developed for its definition, none of which are entirely apposite since the best way to define abnormality may be a combination of the varying ideas.  Two definitions of abnormality that are probably most obvious and most often used are ‘statistical infrequency’ and ‘deviation from social norms’.  These define that abnormality is rare, i.e. the majority of the population are not abnormal and that a small minority are, and also that a person who is abnormal deviates from social norms, meaning that the person differs from or does not conform to what is socially accepted.

Statistical infrequency is based on the idea that particular behaviours are statistically rare since if few people show a certain kind of thinking or behaviour, it is deemed as abnormal.  When any aspect of human behaviour is measured, e.g. height and intelligence, it usually prevails that people with varying degrees of behaviour are usually distributed around the mean.  For instance, when measuring intelligence, the vast majority of the individuals are grouped round the mean and the further away you deviate from this, the fewer people there are.  However, there are usually equivalent numbers of people showing extremes of the behaviour, entailing that there would be just as many people with very low intelligence quotients as there would with very high IQs.  Also, there would be an equal amount of individuals with an IQ below the mean as there would be people with an IQ above the mean.  

Join now!

With nature producing this normal distribution curve, an immediate problem arises: where do you draw the line as to what is normal and what is abnormal?  I.e. why should being in the bottom 2.145% make a person abnormal yet being in the bottom 5% makes another person normal?  And who or what is to distinguish between these two behaviours?  Statistical definitions of abnormality entirely depend upon cut-off points which are often determined by standard deviations, a measure of the amount by which something deviates from the mean.  However, this would perceptibly vary from population to population since cut-off points set ...

This is a preview of the whole essay