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# One of These Things
- URL: https://www.itsthespark.com/one-of-these-things/
- Published: 2026-09-22T05:07:01.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-22T05:07:01.000Z
- Description: We’re trained from Sesame Street onward to always spot the outlier. This difference detection is what keeps our planes safe and our writing clean. This also affects how we treat one another, making us mistake the effort of fitting in for the grace of belonging.
- Author: James Ungureanu
- Tags: #active, Volume 4, Issue 1: Fitting In, Cultural Criticism

When we view our lives as pieces of an enormous puzzle, we assume that a weird-fitting piece is a defect of the piece. The games we play train us to look for differences instead of the whole picture; we search for where we “fit in” without realizing we're often the ones drawing the boundaries in the first place. 

We are taught this logic almost before we can speak: [One of these things is not like the others.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkUfVxQ0OLE&ref=itsthespark.com)

The skill of detecting differences that this Sesame Street song trains is necessary. It is necessary for TSA airport screeners scanning with blue-and-orange X-ray monitors for several additional milliliters of dangerously explosive and plane-grounding liquids in my water bottle. It is necessary for [radiologists](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3043948/?ref=itsthespark.com) looking for lurking shadows on a scan, and for proofreaders, tasked with finding a wretched comma splice inexorably overlooked. We would not board planes screened by agents who had skipped that Sesame Street segment teaching discernment. 

Difference detection is the skill we reward most consistently from the earliest age. Who hasn’t played I Spy? We praise the genius toddler who shoves the star through the star-hole and rejects the uncooperating edge. We praise the child who Guesses Who by systematically eliminating panels based on single isolated traits.

 But difference detection is also easy to misapply. A detector, once trained, does not switch its red pen off. The tragedy is not that we learned to sort; it’s that we learned it so well, in such specific contexts, that we forgot it was contextual and that we could unlearn it.

Unchecked, the detector keeps sorting even after the differences run dry. In 2018, [David Levari](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aap8731?ref=itsthespark.com) and his colleagues at Harvard asked participants to sort faces as threatening or neutral. As researchers secretly reduced how many threatening faces appeared, participants instead expanded their boundaries and began flagging neutral, seemingly neutral faces as threats. Starved of real differences, the brain began to make its own.

And once the detector isolates an anomaly, it inflates it. [Psychologists](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1980-00994-001?ref=itsthespark.com) Shelley Taylor and Susan Fiske placed one woman in a room of men. Observers watched her more closely, remembered more of what she did, and credited her with disproportionate influence over the conversation regardless of what she said. They named this focus “solo status.” 

Here is what sorting costs us. In his TED Talk “[Who are you, really?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYvXk%5FbqlBk&ref=itsthespark.com),” personality psychologist Brian Little observes that every person is, in certain ways, like all other people, like some other people, and like no other person. 

Difference detection is categorical thinking, and categories lie only in the middle layer (some people). The game of spotting the outlier ignores the universal (like all other people) and deeply personal (like no other person) aspects. It isolates only the middle layer of “category,” and asks if this person matches “some” others. This isolation transforms fitting in into an endless test for the individual, demanding constant effort to adapt to a set. 

The culture that rewards difference detection runs too deep. We often perceive fitting in and one’s sense of belonging as synonymous. But the very act of fitting in implies moving pieces around to help oneself conform to what they believe is socially acceptable; who they believe they need to be. Fitting in requires someone to change themselves to conform. Belonging, on the other hand, is an act of grace. In order to make someone feel like they belong, someone else must first make space. A weird-fitting puzzle piece is never a defect; it just needs to be placed in the right context.

Can we change how we approach fitting in by changing the psychological biases our culture installs? Maybe not. But can we change the conditions of belonging, making it just a little easier to grant? Mayhaps…