Article ID: CBB333634470

Adolphe Quetelet and the legacy of the “average man” in psychology (2022)

unapi

Adolphe Quetelet was a Belgian polymath who aimed to advance aggregate-level statistical tools as a unifying framework for all scientific disciplines. In doing so, Quetelet adopted the astronomer’s Law of Error (i.e., the normal distribution curve) and applied it to the study of moral and social phenomena in developing his notion of physique sociale (social physics). Quetelet further focused his attention on l’homme moyen (the average man) and, as such, argued that the average value of a distribution should be of primary concern in the study of human attributes. In the present article, I examine the influences that these ideas had on the methodological practices of late 19th- and early 20th- century psychologists. I illustrate how the dominant methodological approach implemented by psychologists in the early 20th century was deeply rooted in the demography of Quetelet’s social statistics. In particular, I argue that psychologists’ adoption of the Neo-Galtonian model of research was successful because it embraced Quetelet’s determinism, emphasis on average values, and grouping of distributions based on type. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

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Authors & Contributors
Staum, Martin S.
Jessica Pykett
Sposini, Filippo Maria
Sukhoterina, Lyubov
Daniel R. Huebner
Leonardo Ciacci
Concepts
Statistics
Social sciences
Sociology
Psychology
Science and society
Science and government
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
Enlightenment
21st century
Places
United States
France
Belgium
Great Britain
Ukraine
North America
Institutions
Advisory Committee on Personality and Culture
World's Columbian Exposition
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