Should we really be using the same terminology to describe a man locked up without trial for 13 years and an actor playing a fictitious spy?
A few weeks ago, the mass media reported that Shaker Aamer, the last British resident to be released from Guantanamo Bay, was suffering from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
Today, the Mail Online reported that actor Ralph Fiennes is claiming that fellow actor Daniel Craig is suffering from PTSD from playing James Bond in four films.
Now while I pretty much dismiss anything reported in the Mail, these stories highlight a major bugbear of mine – the media and communication industry’s obsession with labels.
‘Hard-working families’
In our headline-driven world, it feels as if everything and everyone has to be neatly labelled. Under-performing children must be suffering from dyslexia or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). House-proud adults are accused of being ‘obsessive compulsives’. Political parties are labelled ‘extremist’, ‘far left’, ‘far right’ and ‘radical’. And don’t start me on ‘hard-working families’ or the ‘undeserving poor’.
Originally referring to the severe traumas of war, PTSD is now banded around so often that many people claim to be suffering from it after tripping over a loose paving slab, being burgled or having their iPhone snatched.
Let me say here and now that I am not trivialising these events. They’re unpleasant, possibly even scary (I was burgled myself about a year ago) but they can hardly be compared to spending 13 years in Guantanamo Bay, putting human body parts in plastic bags or being gang-raped repeatedly at the age of 11.
When we overuse popular words and expressions, we not only trivialise the original usage, we fail to give any credit to the truth.
In the Guardian’s Secret Teacher column We are too quick to label children who aren’t perfect one teacher writes, “The range of options available to the discerning child-labeller is growing: social issue, learning difficulty, behavioural need, obsessive tendency, food intolerance or – my all-time favourite – being ‘on the spectrum’.
The Secret Teacher goes on to say, “I find this immensely frustrating for a number of reasons. First, the diagnosis is often performed by someone with no skills, qualifications or expertise – a well-meaning colleague, an over-concerned parent, a kindly friend. The only requisite is that they have access to the internet or have seen a TV programme about the condition in question. Second, it is upsetting and insulting to people who battle with genuine problems that others casually assign themselves and – most of all – because we as teachers are increasingly forced to pander to them.”
Sound bites and propaganda
I’m generally pretty proud of what I do for a living. I get a kick out of writing and it’s a fantastic feeling helping others improve their communication skills. But every now and then, I’m ashamed to be part of an industry that creates sound bites and perpetuates corporate propaganda.
As a copywriter, I play with words to influence target audiences and turn complex issues into neat little messages and straplines that everyone can remember but rarely understand.
In his article Reclaiming Hard Work: The Danger of Labels (Even Positive Ones), educational engineer Jacob Cornerstone explains why we fall back on labels so easily.
“Labels give us an easier way to file something away in our mental libraries,” he reports. “We come to faster conclusions, incorporate information sooner, and retain it better… We hold onto our labels and cast aside the explanation because someone else has done the heavy mental lifting for us. All we have to know is that X and Y are connected, not how or why they are.”
Okay. Labelling is easy. But is it, as my title suggests, actually dangerous?
Adam Alter, author and assistant professor of marketing at New York University Stern School of Business, certainly thinks so.
In his Psychology Today, article Why It’s Dangerous to Label People, he says, “Categorical labeling is a tool that humans use to resolve the impossible complexity of the environments we grapple to perceive. Like so many human faculties, it’s adaptive and miraculous, but it also contributes to some of the deepest problems that face our species.”
He goes on to cite the work of Stanford social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt. In one experiment, she showed white college students pictures of a man who was racially ambiguous. He could have fallen into the ‘white’ or ‘black’ category. Half the students were told the face belonged to a white man while the other half were told it belonged to a black man. The students were then asked to draw the face on the screen. Although all the students were looking at the same face, those who believed race is an entrenched human characteristic drew faces that matched racial stereotypes. (See sample of drawings.)
“The racial labels,” said Alter, “formed a lens through which the students saw the man, and they were incapable of perceiving him independently of that label.”
Alter is far from alone in this view. In his international bestseller Blink, respected journalist, author and speaker Malcolm Gladwell says that 80% of people who take the Race Implicit Association Test (IAT) have pro-white associations. “Meaning,” says Gladwell, “that it takes them measurably longer to complete answers when they are required to put good words into the ‘black’ category than when they are required to link bad things with black people.”
What is particularly worrying is that of the fifty thousand African Americans who have taken the Race IAT, half have stronger associations with whites than with blacks, surrounded as they are every day with cultural messages linking white with good.
Living with labels
As Adam Alter concludes, “Labelling isn’t always a cause for concern, and it’s often very useful. It would be impossible to catalogue the information we process during our lives without the aid of labels.”
But as communicators, copywriters, bloggers, marketers and journalists, it wouldn’t do any harm to at least stop and consider our words before we pigeonhole someone into a convenient category. The more we label people ‘rich’, ‘poor’, ‘black’, ‘white’, ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’, the more we make them so.
Photo by Cole Patrick on Unsplash
