Too fat to recruit: or, DePauw, the Sequel

[James]

If you collected a random group of people you would expect them to cluster around average traits.

Assuming that average is not overweight enough to be "fat," you would expect most groups of girls to not be fat as an aggregate.

Whenever you have a group that significantly deviates from the norm, there is something going on. The larger the deviation the more it makes you wonder. The larger the deviation the more consequences that there are, both good and bad.

If you have a group with a collective GPA of 4.0, you know that people have been selecting for GPA or else some odd social drift has occurred thats resulted in that configuration.

However, after a while that can become self selecting. People with a very high GPA may be attracted to that group out of comfort and people with a lower GPA might feel like the group would be a bad fit for them.

So even though a 4.0 GPA is considered desirable trait, it could actually limit the group's size, because it doesn't reflect the population enough.

The same thing is going to happen if the percentage of girls in the chapter that are overweight enough to be seen as overweight start be out of proportion to the population the chapter is attempting to recruit from.

People are drawn to similarity.

Thats just the way it is.

Originally Posted by AlphaGamUGAAlum

If the appearance of the current sisters is the only reason 70 won't join, it's hard to accept that the 70 would be more exceptional, I suspect.

We all want fun, social chapters (into which attractiveness figures; let's be honest), but we don't want a sisterhood based only on physical attractiveness.

[UGAalum94]

Originally Posted by James

If you collected a random group of people you would expect them to cluster around average traits.

Assuming that average is not overweight enough to be "fat," you would expect most groups of girls to not be fat as an aggregate.

Whenever you have a group that significantly deviates from the norm, there is something going on. The larger the deviation the more it makes you wonder. The larger the deviation the more consequences that there are, both good and bad.

If you have a group with a collective GPA of 4.0, you know that people have been selecting for GPA or else some odd social drift has occurred thats resulted in that configuration.

However, after a while that can become self selecting. People with a very high GPA may be attracted to that group out of comfort and people with a lower GPA might feel like the group would be a bad fit for them.

So even though a 4.0 GPA is considered desirable trait, it could actually limit the group's size, because it doesn't reflect the population enough.

The same thing is going to happen if the percentage of girls in the chapter that are overweight enough to be seen as overweight start be out of proportion to the population the chapter is attempting to recruit from.

People are drawn to similarity.

Thats just the way it is.

Uh, no.

What your example is missing is that the groups actively discriminate based on certain traits.

If we were talking about the PNMs self-selecting where they went, we might get your results over time for the reason of comfort in similarity, but not if there's active discrimination. And there is.

The fat girls end up in one group (if they do) not simply because people are drawn to similarity but because they are actively excluded other places.

[James]

Ack . . I must not have been clear in my post. I said that after you have built a population profile it become self selecting.

Active selection is discrimination by the group. However, once a group reflects a certain profile it will attract like members and welcome them.

Originally Posted by AlphaGamUGAAlum

Uh, no.

What your example is missing is that the groups actively discriminate based on certain traits.

If we were talking about the PNMs self-selecting where they went, we might get your results over time for the reason of comfort in similarity, but not if there's active discrimination. And there is.

The fat girls end up in one group (if they do) not simply because people are drawn to similarity but because they are actively excluded other places.

[UGAalum94]

Originally Posted by James

Ack . . I must not have been clear in my post. I said that after you have built a population profile it become self selecting.

Active selection is discrimination by the group. However, once a group reflects a certain profile it will attract like members and welcome them.

I don't think this is exactly it. It's not that authentic a process.

The groups all actually value the same traits in new members for the most part, but there are artificial pressures on the groups like quota and chapter total.