Friday, 16 March 2012

Labeling Effects

Looking Glass Self: We see ourselves through the eyes of other people, even to the extent of incorporating their views of us into our own self-concept.

Labeling is something we all do for other people, and for ourselves. It's related to stereotypes, confirmation bias, self fulfilling prophecy, and all other theories involved with the concept of identity.

Many of us know the harmful effects of it, and the good effects of it. While I do not believe that it is good to admonish all these, one should never use it to cloud our judgement on other people. Like how in the case of 911, anyone viewed as "dark skinned" are terrorists regardless of country of origin etc.

In self-fulfilling prophecy, it states that if you believe that you are so and so, you eventually do become so and so. This can go negatively and positively; If you believe you are going to ace a test, there is a higher chance you will. Think you are going to be late, and you'll be late.

I think that one of the situations that causes a high potential "harm" of negative labeling would be when (related) adults label children, like family members and relatives. Every person started out as a young kid under the protection of their family. Their family members are their first taste of human interaction, communication, and their mini "society". I think you can see what I am getting at.

There has been a common trend of calling people either introverts or extroverts. Society seems to depict introverts as shy, quiet awkward antisocial people, while extroverts are like social butterflies ready to try everything under the sun. I feel that a lot of people underlying believed that extroverts are more favourable in most situations, and we should get rid of that notion because introverts are not a "negative" trait.

According to this article, a more accurate way of seeing the difference between an introvert and an extrovert is to see "how these children react to stimuli".

"When these children are at four months, if you pop a balloon over their heads, they holler and pump their arms more than other babies do. At age 2, they proceed carefully when they see a radio-controlled toy robot for the first time. When they’re school age, they play matching games with more deliberation than their peers, considering all the alternatives at length and even using more eye movements to compare choices. Notice that none of these things — popping balloons, toy robots, matching games — has anything to do with people. In other words, these kids are not antisocial. They’re simply sensitive to their environments."

Again, I stress the importance of labeling such kids as introverts with a "negative" connotation as anti-social. If one believes that their kid is shy and has difficulty forming friendships with kids more, if affects the way one treats the child, and through a combination effect of the looking glass self and the self-fulfilling prophecy, the kid really might grow to become an antisocial kid.


Also, on an unrelated note, I thought this study is quite interesting...

If you believe that a medication would work on making you feel better, science proves that you actually can get better. A study showed that by using the correct colour associated to cure (blue colour), regardless of all these placebo medication, there is a higher percentage of people who said their symptoms of pain were gone. The research even went deeper to prove that indeed, there was a higher trend of people who really were cured.

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