Sunday, May 11, 2014
Labeling
Labeling is a kind of jumping to conclusions in which we apply a negative term to a
complex person or event. It often also entails overgeneralization because we tend to label
all the members of a group with the characteristics we may have seen in some. Often its
most damaging form is self-labeling. We all do it. If someone who has just met you asks
you who you are or what you do, you are likely to respond by labeling yourself: "I'm
a student," or "I'm an electrician," or "I'm a history major."
Such labels always leave out much more than they include. But if we take them with a grain
of salt they probably don't do much harm. What does a lot of harm is an evaluative label
we apply based on past experience. A lot of students have told me, "I'm a poor
English student," or "English is my worst subject." But as far as I can
tell, good students are as likely to label themselves in this way as poor ones. So I
conclude that these students have labeled themselves on the basis of weak evidence. When I
question such students I usually find that the fact behind a label such as "I'm a
poor English student" is something like "I got a D in the grammar portion of
10th grade English" or "I didn't like the books we read in high school
literature classes."
A student once told me at the very beginning of the semester that he was a lousy
writer. I asked him what he'd written. He said that he'd never written anything longer
than a paragraph in high school. I asked him how he could possibly know he was lousy at
something he'd never really attempted seriously. He said that he "just knew." He
had labeled himself for no very good reason. But once a negative label becomes an
automatic thought it can easily act as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nobody likes to spend
time doing what he or she is not good at. So if you've labeled yourself as
"dumb" or a "bad student" or "no good at
English/math/history/geography/biology" you will expect to do poorly in it, and you
probably will.
Labeling others can be as damaging as labeling ourselves. Labeling reinforces
stereotypes about groups of people and, in general, encourages us to say and do stupid
things. I am amazed at the speed with which many students label a book "boring"
and then proceed as if that single vague label were all that could be said about the text
in question.
The negative labels we apply to ourselves and others in our automatic thoughts are
almost always vague and ambiguous because they are automatic. If you try to write an essay
from your automatic thoughts--you may think of them as your "opinions"--you will
find that it consists of nothing more than a string of labels. If you are going to write
well about your opinions, you will have to bring them beyond the stage of automatic
thoughts and give reasons for those opinions that make sense to other people. In order to
do that, you'll have to define the labels you're using. If you can define your terms
clearly and give evidence for your beliefs, then you have gone beyond automatic labeling
and begun to engage in reasoned argument.
One form of labeling is so widespread in this business that it deserves brief mention
on its own. It's called grading. Grades may or may not be necessary, but they can
unquestionably do a great deal of damage if we take them too seriously. Letter grades are
horribly vague and imprecise. If you doubt that, you can easily disprove it: Stop right
now and write down a clear, precise, and universally applicable definition of an
"A" that will allow us to tell whether a piece of work is worthy of an
"A" without knowing who the teacher is or who the student is. Can't do it.
That's because letter grades mean vastly different things to different people. At best,
letter grades are a very rough code for a very general evaluation of a student's
performance. They never answer the most important questions a student needs to ask: What
did I do well? Where could I improve? Have I achieved my own goals in this course? How can
I build on what I've learned? What can I do now that I couldn't do before? How can I be a
more effective learner? A student who receives an "F" and knows the answers to
some of these questions is better off than one who gets an "A" and never asks
them. The label is an abstraction. It is never as important as the more complex reality it
stands for. If we allow the label to become all important, so that we ignore the reality
it is supposed to stand for, then we have yielded to this cognitive distortion in a way
that seems to me to resemble the thinking of people who are seriously mentally ill. G. K.
Chesterton, writing many years before the development of cognitive therapy, said that
"madness is a preference for the symbol over that which it represents"(11).
Disqualifying the Positive
This is an extreme form of all-or-nothing thinking in which we filter out all the
positive evidence about our performance, and only attend to the negative. It is
all-or-nothing thinking, without the "all"! This cognitive distortion will
produce automatic thoughts that reinforce negative feelings and explain away positive
ones. If you've ever tried to argue someone out of a bad mood, you've probably seen this
cognitive distortion from the outside. If you've ever been in a bad mood yourself, you may
have seen it from the inside. Usually people who are caught up in this cognitive
distortion are genuinely depressed about something, but it may be something that has no
obvious connection with the topic at hand. I was going over an essay with a student who
had gotten responses from three other students to a working draft of his essay. Our
conversation went something like this:
STUDENT: I think I should just throw this out and start over. It's trash. Look at what Cheri said about it.
ME: Well, yes, she did beat up on it pretty well. But Bob, who also read it, seemed to like it.
STUDENT: Yeah, but he was just trying to be nice.
ME: How do you know that?
STUDENT: Oh, you know, people try to say nice things, even if it's really just junk, because they don't want to hurt your feelings.
ME: Well, that obviously isn't true of Cheri. But, OK, if you want to start over, do you have another topic in mind?
STUDENT: No. Well, I did, sort of, but it's no good either. They'd trash it just like this one. I could never get enough evidence to convince her.
Someone who is disqualifying the positive can't discuss a subject rationally because he
is using a double standard. Negative evidence, no matter how weak or irrelevant, counts.
Positive evidence, no matter how strong or persuasive, can be explained away. As it turned
out, the student in the above conversation had just broken up with his girlfriend and was
feeling very low. But this sort of automatic thought doesn't make any more sense when
you're sad than it does when you're happy. The "logic" behind it goes something
like this: Things are bad, so why not make them worse?
All-or-Nothing Thinking
We engage in all-or-nothing thinking when we accept automatic thoughts which describe
events in black-and-white categories, with no shades of gray. It is a more extreme form of
magnification and minimization in which we minimize to the point that many positive
aspects of life completely disappear from sight. Such automatic thoughts lead to a kind of
perfectionism that defines everything short of 100% success as a failure. To a point, such
perfectionism can lead us to try harder; but in the long run, inevitably, it tends to
discourage us from trying at all. Since we encounter very little black or white in the
real world, this kind of thinking squeezes much of the brightness out of our view of the
world: all the shades of gray come to look as black as night.
A few years ago I was teaching a class in which several standardized tests were
required. One semester, a woman took the class who got the highest total score on the
standardized tests that I've ever recorded in that class. Out of a possible 200 points on
the four tests, she missed five. But when this woman got her first essay back, she found
several criticisms and suggestions for improvement. (The essay was not graded.) She seemed
depressed and irritable in class for several days after getting the essay back. Finally, I
persuaded her to come in and talk to me about it, and I asked her what she was so
concerned about.
"Well," she said hopelessly, "I guess I'm just going to get an 'F' in
this class." From her point of view, her essay wasn't perfect, so it was worthless.
Her automatic thoughts on receiving the essay back were probably something like this:
"There are flaws in this essay, even after I worked hard on it, so I wasted my time.
I produced nothing of value." That's all-or-nothing thinking.
This cognitive distortion can be devastating when you are trying to learn a new skill
or improve your performance in an old one. A sculptor who thinks in terms of
all-or-nothing will never finish a statue because the first stages of the work will always
be rough. A writer who sees her rough draft as either finished or failed will never really
finish an essay. You must accept your first draft as potentially good, but unfinished, in
order to improve it. Many students fail to produce good essays not because they produce
bad ones, but because they never finish the good ones they start.
Magnification and Minimization
This cognitive distortion consists of seeing the positive results of your actions as
smaller than they really are and the negative results of your actions as bigger than they
really are. It is sometimes called "catastrophizing" or, more informally,
"making a mountain out of a molehill." Like all-or-nothing thinking, it is a
favorite cognitive distortion of perfectionists. It seldom fails that early on in the
semester a student who has produced an excellent essay will come up to me and sheepishly
apologize for handing in such unadulterated trash. Often such students will give lengthy
and sorrowful explanations for why their elementary education was a failure or why they
were horrible students in high school or why work or childbearing had driven everything
they once knew about English right out of their heads. Surprisingly, these declarations
often come after I've told the student that he or she produced a good essay. I've had
several students actually drop the course after doing nothing but good work. People who
apologize for good work are almost always magnifying and minimizing. They see six comma
splices as more important than five pages of clear argument and sound evidence. They look
at their errors through binoculars, but when they look at their virtues, they turn the
binoculars around and look through the big end.
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Don’t take my word for it though, experiment for yourself. Notice how different you feel wearing blue or orange or even red undies or any item of clothing.
Years ago after listening to a color therapist a group of my girlfriends all switched to green wallets. Green represents growth, abundance and prosperity. It is the color most often associated with money. In Feng Shui green relates to the wood energy which is associated with wealth. You might also like to read the Tao of a full happy wallet if you are keen to boost your money vibes.
Research has shown that blue is the most likely color to suppress your appetite. A blue light in your fridge may be just the trick you need. Blue is not a color you think of when you imagine food. Nature does not offer many blue foods except for a few such as blueberries. Red will stimulate your appetite and encourage fast eating. Notice how many take-aways have red signs or decor.