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Labeling is a topic that comes up pretty regularily around ED, but I figure I'd throw it out here for a group a little more philosophically inclined, who will say more than "Labelz suck" and the like.

For the purposes of this discussion, the term labels will pertain exclusively to adjectives and words used to describe people.

So, to my fellow philosophers, how do labels originate and why? What are their benefits and drawbacks, both on the person doing the labeling and the labeled?

When you say lable, I'm just gonna assume that you mean somthign like "all black people steal".

Labeling is caused by human nature. If we touch fire and we get burned, we might do it again, but we are not doing it a third.

When you here hundreds of times that black people >insert crime<, than its only instinct that you would think that the next black person you see is the same. And especially when you might lose somthing because you are being more careful. And that works with other things to. Some kid has huge glasses he must be a nerd right? Because the last 10 people I met were nerds and they wore 'em to right?

Personaly I think this is wrong for many reasons. You can hurt peoples feelings blah blah blah...

But their is one type of thing that is going around that pisses me off more than anything. Possers. I know that term is used loosely these days. But what I'm tying to say is that people who think they are somthing just because the look a certain way. That is just lying to every one and being a complete farse( That word is hysterical). This also contributes to labeling and tends to make people think that all goths are losers or what ever.

As for origin, its been around for quite awhile.

Get it right? How can you ever know if you've gotten it right? Sit down with a piece of paper for a second and try to describe yourself in a single word. Tough? Try it again with five words. Still doesn't describe you right? How about fifteen? Yup... I didn't think that would work either.

A person cannot be summed up in words, no matter how well you do or do not know them. But labels are required. Labels are language. Without language, well... we all know 'civilization' as we know it wouldn't exist. Labels, perhaps, are not meant to be precisely defined boxy categories like our dictonaries define them? Language is ever evolving, and so are labels. Between all of us here, how many different definitions for "introvert" would we get? Probably a different one for each person. What about "outgoing" or perhaps "depressed"?

Welcome to one of the most problematic dilemas of personality trait theories. Trait theorists rely on labels if they use nomothetic methods. Ever taken a personality test? That's nomothetic. Uses group data, group averages, instead of considering you as an individual. Individuals, in the end, are pretty impossle to peg with traits and labels. Labels are just the first layer. What about the person's habits? Behaviors? Their personal history? The core of how they define themselves?

One of the problem with labels is that they are opressive. They place upon a person certain expectations of behavior and cognition. Expectations, that, the person may or may not truly fall into. Often times, a person labels themselves, and through a sort of weird self-fulliflling prophecy defined by the restrictions of their own labeling, becomes those labels.

You've probably done it at some point in your life. Most of us when we went through high school tried on many different masks. We picked a label from the shelf and put it on. And we became it.

What for, in the end? That question, I'll leave open for now. whee

Part of the problem too, is that people have a construct about labels that is heavly restrictive and negative, and it doesn't have to be that way. People see labels in this light, instead of seeing them as flexible categories, which they can also easily be if you choose to construct your view of them in that light. I know that when I use such labels (albeit I do so extremely infrequently) I mean it as a far more broad and flexible category than most people. Some people have narrowly defined, concrete and rigid constructs, and others have more permeable and broad ones when it comes to certain labels.

My opinion stands that labels are a sort of protection. A person looks at someone and labels them according to their attitude, not just their appearance, finding those people whose aura, if you will, pleases them.
A label can be an identifying mark; a way of catagorizing and organizing people in your mind. I don't think that stereotypes are neccessarily bad. If you avoid and belittle all "goths" to use a common high school example, strictly because of the way "gothic" people are supposed to act, that is not good. However, someone with an eyebrow ring, long black hair, black clothes, white makeup and a terminally pathetic expression I am not as likely to approach, because that's not my thing.
Someone with glasses, a distinct lack of heavy makeup, holding a book, etc., I am automatically attracted towards, and am more likely to make friends with.
About 85% of the time, my labels are correct. So I may be missing out on a friend because I avoid someone who dresses, walks and sounds like a gangster. But it's not all that likely.

This topic is just reminding me more and more of George Kelly's personality theory of personal constructs. We develop boxes and categories; constructs by which we see the world by, and labels are one of those. Constructs enable us to make predictions about the world around us so we can navigate life more easily. So we label the kid wearing all black as goth to help us navigate around them. At some point, that assumption put forth by the construct will be challenged, since not all people who wear black are goth. Usually after a number of failures of a particular construct, people change them.

So why don't people change their failing constructs with these generalizing labels? Or do they? I bet there is a study in psychology about this somewhere, and if not, it sure would make a good graduate thesis. whee

As a matter of course, all people label others by their first impressions, it's whether those people stand firm by the labels they have placed on others or allow them to be changed by their experiences with that person that determines if labels are good or not.

Labels are essentually a way of referencing to a particular group of people, usually with a steriotype attached. Often this steriotype can be wrong for example: I support National Socialism but that does not mean I go around attacking people not of my nationality or Jews in particular. One of my best friends is a Jew but I don't judge him on that.

Personally I believe labels are bad because of the large amount of differences between individuals that make these steriotypes incorrect. Often, the steriotypes attached to the labels cannot change as fast as society does and the steriotypes are not even correct the majority of the time, sometimes they are completely obsolete.

Factual labels are fine but even these can carry strong steriotypes that people may act on and believe that certain people actually fit the steriotypes attached to them.

On their own there is nothing wrong with labels, it's the steriotypes that are almost always attached that cause the problems and mean that labels often cause people to make assumptions about other people they don't know.

I'd have to disagree. You can *vaguely* label most people sucessfully. But every individual has their own unique differences and deviations from whatever label you could possibly put them under. And that's why people object to labels, in part. They fail to capture the uniqueness beyond the labels.