A recent article by Ernest O’Boyle and Herman Aguinus (2012) challenges the ubiquity of the bell-shaped curve as a description of human performance. These researchers looked at a large variety ...

Human performance, by this account, does not often fit the bell curve or what scientists call a normal distribution. Rather, it is more likely to fit what scientists call a power distribution.

Life is lived on a bell curve. Many attributes of a population — height, for example — are distributed on a bell-shaped curve, with the average at the centre and then decreasing numbers of ...

It's a long-held assumption that human performance fits a normal (or Gaussian) distribution — a bell curve in which only a very small number of people are outliers. Consequently human resource ...

I can only recognize the occurrence of the normal curve … as a very abnormal phenomenon. — Karl Pearson (1901) Widely believed and rarely questioned is the notion that human characteristics ...