Why do some people succeed when others fail? Outliers provide clues

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/success-fail-why-outliers-people-communities-nudges

By zeroing in on a few villages that have defied the odds and maintained healthy rangelands, an international team is asking if those rare successes might hold the secret to restoring rangelands elsewhere.

Answering this question requires turning traditional data processing on its head. Statistically speaking, success stories like those Somali villages with sustainable grazing are the outliers, says Basma Albanna, a development researcher at the University of Manchester in England. “The business as usual is that when you have outliers in data, you take them out.”

Yet those outliers can hold vital information, say Albanna and others who use the “positive deviance” approach. They sift through data to find signals in what many deem noise. The researchers search for “deviants” — outliers in big datasets — to uncover why some individuals or communities succeed when others facing near-identical circumstances fail. Then, armed with these insights, the researchers develop strategies that help those in the languishing majority attain positive results.

Big data offers several benefits, Albanna explains. The datasets already exist, so the process is initially less labor intensive than going door to door. Identifying outliers at the level of villages or neighborhoods instead of individuals reduces privacy concerns.

Plus the larger the dataset, the more positive deviants you would be able to identify, Albanna notes. “Positive deviants are very rare to find. We’re talking 2 to 10 percent of whatever sample you are investigating,” she says.

Besides giving researchers and policy makers the information they need to design new interventions, the positive deviance approach can also strengthen existing interventions, says behavioral science and public policy expert Kai Ruggeri of Columbia University.

“It’s such an easy adaptation that could potentially have major impact,” says Ruggeri, who wrote a commentary encouraging researchers to consider using the positive deviance approach in November 2021 in Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Such interventions have an added benefit: They empower communities to harness the wisdom of their own people, Sternin says. The solutions exist within the community and implementing those solutions, she notes, “is transformational.”