KLOVE, I don’t love you when…
I listen to KLOVE. It’s a Christian radio station that sometimes has talk show hosts…well…talk. They are theologically inept. I digress. More than once I have heard them talk about people who live with their parents. They throw stats around all the time, so for the sake of the post, let’s say they used a stat. When speaking of those who live with their parents, they seem to imply that these individuals are lazy buffoons. It really feels demeaning to someone who lives with his parents when s/he hears the hosts talk this way. When they give said stat and then demean everyone in that category, it is not right. To avoid resentment when giving stats, one should always qualify the stat with people who may be listed in the stat but may not be the stereotypical person that the stat seems to refer to. I am going to school and have been most of my adult life. I live with my parents to avoid debt and save for school. I don’t fit the lazy buffoonish types the KLOVE hosts seem to reference when they speak of the stat about those living with their parents.
A great way to avoid alienating people when you use stats is to tell stories of the exceptions in the stats. In my example above, when speaking negatively about people living with their parents, make sure to say there are some who do this out of necessity and not simply to be lazy. There are outliers in every statistic. Sometimes these stories will blow us away. Aggregation doesn’t account for these personal narratives that may stomp on the insensitivity of a sum so broad sweeping. Not everyone on welfare is lazy. Not every wealthy person got there by working hard. Narratives are so crucial in order to assault the broad brush of aggregation, a sum that does a poor job at showing the whole reality it represents.