On a scale of 1-10, what's a 5?

While I was in grad school, I participated one of those medical experiment things for money at the suggestion of a friend who worked at the National Institute of Health. I don’t really remember what the research was looking at, but it involved me being in an MRI, looking at some patterns on a screen and receiving slight shocks on the inside of my wrist. In order for the doctors to figure out what level they should set the shocker-thing at (as you can see, I’m definitely not a scientist), they asked me to rate different shocks on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being not painful at all, and 10 being as painful as I could imagine. They never got near the 10 range – not even to the 5 – but I thought the whole scale thing was ridiculous.

As far as pain goes, what’s a 10? If it’s the worst pain imaginable – well, I can imagine a lot of really painful things. Things to graphic to put in a blog. And there’s no way that a shock they would use in an out-patient experiment open to the public would come anywhere close to that pain. And if a 10 is the most painful I can imagine, what’s a 5? Half of the most painful thing? Maybe a rating of 5 is something like having my knee bent backward or dislocating my shoulder. The problem is, I have no idea – the most painful thing that’s ever happened to me is a kidney stone, and it hurt pretty bad, but I can imagine a lot worse. So is that a 7? A 3? There has to have been a better way for them to measure that, but I don’t know what it was.

And that’s not the only problem I have with rating scales. It doesn’t have any affect on my life or anything, but it annoys me that for me, the logical “average” of a 1-10 rating scale is 5 or 6 (5.5 to be more accurate), but other people think it’s a 7. Maybe people assume that scale of 1-10 is the same thing as giving grades – 9 or 10 is an A, 8 is a B, 7 is a C (or average), 6 is a D and 5 and below are failing.

Here’s an example: It’s a common thing for people to discuss other people and rate their looks, but again, what’s a 5 in this situation? The way I think of it, on a scale of 1-10, 5.5 is right in the middle, so 5.5 should be average. 10 would be pretty much perfect – someone like Brad Pitt or Halle Berry in perfect lighting with perfect makeup and just the right outfit (not that those two necessarily need it). So if I were rating guys, even very good-looking ones, I might give out 8s and 9s, and definitely some 5s, 6s and 7s, but probably not many 9.5s or 10s, because perfection’s hard to achieve. But those same people could possibly be insulted by a 6, even though for me that means above average. For people who use rating scales like grades, they could give a high 7 or an 8 to someone I might rate at a 6, which skews the “scores.”

Like I said, doesn’t really have much to do with my life, but it’s just one of those little things that occasionally sticks in my brain.

* If you’ve ever seen the ads for one of those “Rate my Picture” sites on the Internet*, maybe you get what I’m saying… one such site: www.ratingmylooks.com