I think sometimes we are a little too eager to attach labels to people. There are a couple of problems with labels: 1. A label is a heuristic. It's a quick w

I think sometimes we are a little too eager to attach labels to people. There are a couple of problems with labels: 1. A label is a heuristic. It's a quick way of getting an approximate picture of a person. If somebody introduces you to Rick as "a former Republican senator from South Dakota" your mind is already filling in lots of blanks about Rick with categories like "male", "senator", "Republican" and "South Dakotan". Our mind gives us a head-start in knowing about Rick. The problem comes when we don't allow ourselves to revise this rough-draft picture of Rick. Perhaps we think all Republicans are like X, so Rick is like X. Therefore, we don't bother looking for information about whether Rick is like X, because we already know. Labels can get in the way of actually knowing somebody. 2. A label often carries the implicit assumption that the aspects of the person in question are immutable. In other words, people don't change. It's different to say someone is a "psychopath" instead of "going through a psychopathic phase". "In other words, psychopathy is being recognized as a more or less a different type of human." This quote really bothered me. This completely dehumanizes "psychopaths." They are officially "the other". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other