Warning - Labels! How Labels Help Us And Hurt Us
What’s in a word? As psychological research marches on, it looks like more than we might otherwise imagine. Words, specifically how they shape our perceptions, shape our realities. What might we do to improve the way we use words? We’ll explore a little bit of this vast area in today’s podcast, all with the intention of improving our self-mastery and, thus, our agency—our ability to get things done.
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Warning - Labels! How Labels Help Us And Hurt Us
The power of our minds is truly remarkable. Continual discoveries about our brain and physiology and contributions to our understanding of human psychology sharpen our picture of the extent how which our perceptions shape our reality. Our perceptions are largely functions of language. To manifest more potential power, we must be very judicious about the words, the labels we place upon our attributes, the threats, and the opportunities that we encounter as we navigate life. Labels give and labels take, they are useful in building our understanding. They identify everything in the world, both tangible and conceptual. They take away from our cognitive power. When we fall into a nearly inevitable trap, we give things a sense of permanence and completeness they rarely deserve.
The world is more dynamic and nuanced than our language easily describes. Our power is maximized when we use labels with a light grip, always subject to revision. The problem is that this takes attention and energy. It requires a certain maturity, a presence of mind that frees us from emotional impulses. Achieving this is the work of more than a lifetime, but the effort is the price we must pay to maximize our power.
The effect of labels words is perhaps most dramatic when it comes to the world of health. Our view of ourselves and others is a function of the labels we use to understand what's going on. Those choices, mold and shape, resulting in thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and thus, outcomes. The thing is, many of the words we use are conventions. They are socially constructed and imprecise.
Our view of ourselves and others is a function of the labels we use to understand what's going on.
We gain power by examining those conventions and building skills with how we use labels. Such skill gives us the ability to select labels that lead to better outcomes. We are not talking about denial and Pollyannaism. Delusion is not where we gain power. Quite the opposite. Often, we accept convention as the immutable reality. Most of the time it isn't.
The best success strategy I have ever been exposed to is the ability to remain within the question habits such as going one level deeper and asking one more probing or penetrating question. The beginning conversations with questions on our minds like, “What does this person know that I don't? What if what I previously perceived about this situation was wrong or incomplete?” All help us cling less to current labels and even change and upgrade some of them.
I will show you what with a few examples. The Mother of Positive Psychology, Dr. Ellen Langer's career centered around the kinds of experiments I'm talking about. Along with Judith Rodin, she conducted the famous 1970s Arden House experiment. That was a case where residents in an assisted care facility were separated into control and experimental groups and studied over a significant period.
In a control group, life remained close to what it had always been in the facility. The staff provided round-the-clock management of the functions of life. The subtext of that arrangement screamed, “You are infirm. You need care.” In the experimental group, the residents were given more choice and control. Among other things, they were given a plant to care for.
Residents in this experimental group decided where to place their plants and how to care for them. The subtext of this situation said something very different than the control group. This was something more like you are responsible and capable. You can make your own decisions. Outcomes between the two groups surprised the researchers, the participants self-reported increased health and happiness.
A year and a half after the experiments ended, Langer and Rodin returned to find twice as many of the control group had died compared to the experimental group. These remarkable results made the study famous and the notion that there was power in our environment and self-image became more accepted among psychologists.
Langer had been inspired to conduct the Arden House experiment, at least in part from her earlier experience. When she was an intern at Yale, she and Robert Abelson wanted to test the effect of labeling. They recorded an ordinary man in an interview with one group of clinicians. They labeled the man a patient.
For a group of clinicians, they labeled him a job applicant. The clinicians themselves were divided into two groups. One of which was Freudian in their approach to therapy. The Freudians who watched the job applicant viewed him as a well-adjusted person. Those who were shown the same video simply relabeled it as an interview with a patient who saw him as poorly adjusted and in need of therapy.
There wasn't something wrong with these clinicians. We are all subject to similar biases. We embrace labels in so many ways. Labels describe everything around us. They form the picture we have of our environment. Some of them are in the roles we adopt in life, and some of those roles come along with uniforms. Such conventions create the context that affects the perceptions of people in that orbit.
Psychologists Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji refer to these cues as primes, as in priming a pump. Primes orient our thoughts. We take necessary shortcuts because we must. We are beings of limited perceptive powers. A doctor or nurse traditionally wore white so that blood or other stains were more readily recognized.
Labels: We take the necessary shortcuts because we must. We are beings with limited perceptive powers.
Their uniforms came to be expected and developed into a standard. So much so, that it would be surprising to experience a doctor or nurse come into our hospital room wearing everyday outfits. These kinds of primes focus us in on the meaning and context of our interactions. The potential downsides happen via depersonalization. The nurse or doctor sees themselves as a nurse or doctor and the patient as the patient, and the patient sees things the same way. All of this, rather than seeing the individual persons as people, fallible, emotional, unique, irreplaceable, these distortions often have serious consequences.
In the example we are discussing, experiments have shown that when the uniforms were set to the side, patients became less demanding and practitioners more attentive. You have likely experienced the opposite. If you have ever felt like you were a number in a sequence when you received care of some kind. It happens far too often, especially given what we know about a positive correlation between the human care we receive and better health outcomes.
Primes can take surprising forms. If we pay what we consider a lot for something, we associate it with quality or rarity. Primes can be ironically harmful when we mean well. This happens when somebody helps us do something they believe we can't do ourselves. Examples of this are a parent, teacher, or peer, underestimating what a child is capable of, a supervisor being intolerant, or potential mistakes of people on their team or out of empathy, overcorrecting for people we consider disabled through the inability to see, hear, speak, or easily move.
Even someone older who we believe is frail or infirm. Though the help is well intended. It undermines the self-confidence and independence of others via the primes we unwittingly create. These socially constructed primes comprise much of the professional functions of modern life. Again, the advantages are clear. We give authority to those who have earned it via at least some measure of experience and achievement, but we are well advised never to forget that we are all fallible. We don't know what we don't know, and what we don't know dwarfs what we do always.
We don't know what we don't know, and what we don't know dwarfs what we do always. To avoid the trap of labels, we need the humility to recognize and respect this element of the human condition.
To avoid the trap of labels, we need the humility to recognize and respect this element of the human condition. On the other hand, we must take stock of ourselves as the primary driving force in our outcomes. This tension creates a balancing act of sorts between self-confidence and a readiness to learn and adapt. Our ability to strike this balance applies dramatically to managing our health, both physically and mentally. It also fuels our relationships. We take what people share with the respect of due consideration, but we don't abdicate responsibility for our mental models of the world. We constantly update them and we make the best decisions we can based on our best understanding.
We will wrap this episode with some of the insights Langer shared as she summed up her insights over the decades of research that marked her career. She said she learned that certainty is a cool mindset. That's what we are talking about. It feels good to be certain, but we can't forget it hardens our minds against possibility and closes us off from much of the reality of the world. Langer was concerned with three beliefs or perceptions that degrade our health outcomes.
First, we think we are either healthy or ill. This false dichotomy leads us to take our health for granted when we aren't feeling disruptive symptoms. A more developed view is that we are continual works in progress. Our well-being is something we tend to do every day. The second one was the medical world knows best. Doctors do know more about medicine than we do, but nobody knows more about ourselves than we do. We are best advised to assume responsibility in our healthcare and seek expert consultation in our decision-making.
The third one that Langer shared was health is a medical phenomenon. The modern world is over-medicalized and over-diagnosed. We too readily resort to labels. We aren't sad, we are depressed. We aren't working through problems overnight. We are insomniacs. We are not working through conflicting priorities. We are procrastinators. These are cases where our labels rob us of our power, but we are not doing that anymore. With the Eye of Power community, we are learning to let go of labels, build mental agility, take responsibility, and become more valuable to ourselves and everyone we encounter. Let's go.