a) a survey, where everyone’s individual differences are rounded into a few given categories;
b) a collection of blog articles, where everyone describes themselves exactly as they desire; or
c) a kind of survey, where some participants send a blog article instead of data.
Both (a) and (b) are valid options, each of them serves a different purpose. I would prefer to avoid (c), because it tries to do both things at the same time, and accomplishes neither. An answer “other” sometimes means “no answer is even approximately correct”, but sometimes is just means “I prefer to send you a blog article instead of survey data”. The first objection is valid, and is IMHO equivalent to simply not answering that question. The second objection seems more like refusing the idea of statistics. Statistics does not mean that people who gave the same answer are all perfectly alike, but ignoring the minor differences allows us to see the forest instead of the trees.
I guess the “special snowflake bias” is officially called “narcissism of small differences”. The psychological foundation is that we have a need of identity, which is threatened by similar things, not different ones. So when something is similar to us, but not the same, we exaggerate the difference and downplay the similarity. From outside view we are probably less different than from inside view.
That last varies—sometimes people are exaggerating differences which are pretty meaningless. Sometimes the people setting up the classifications actually have an incomplete picture of the existing categories.
There are a number of types of snowflakes.
If you decide in advance that you aren’t going to listen to anyone who doesn’t fit your categories, you might be missing something.
You can have:
a) a survey, where everyone’s individual differences are rounded into a few given categories;
b) a collection of blog articles, where everyone describes themselves exactly as they desire; or
c) a kind of survey, where some participants send a blog article instead of data.
Both (a) and (b) are valid options, each of them serves a different purpose. I would prefer to avoid (c), because it tries to do both things at the same time, and accomplishes neither. An answer “other” sometimes means “no answer is even approximately correct”, but sometimes is just means “I prefer to send you a blog article instead of survey data”. The first objection is valid, and is IMHO equivalent to simply not answering that question. The second objection seems more like refusing the idea of statistics. Statistics does not mean that people who gave the same answer are all perfectly alike, but ignoring the minor differences allows us to see the forest instead of the trees.
I guess the “special snowflake bias” is officially called “narcissism of small differences”. The psychological foundation is that we have a need of identity, which is threatened by similar things, not different ones. So when something is similar to us, but not the same, we exaggerate the difference and downplay the similarity. From outside view we are probably less different than from inside view.
That last varies—sometimes people are exaggerating differences which are pretty meaningless. Sometimes the people setting up the classifications actually have an incomplete picture of the existing categories.