Labels Stick to People Too.

“As she grew older, Maddy discovered that she had disappointed almost everyone. An awkward girl with a sullen mouth, a curtain of hair, and a tendency to slouch, she had neither Mae's sweet nature nor sweet face. Her eyes were rather beautiful, but few people ever noticed this, and it was widely believed Maddy was ugly, a troublemaker, too clever for her own good, too stubborn - or too slack - to change.

(Joanne Harris, “Runemarks”)

We seem to love labels don’t we? It’s as though the whole world falls into categories – countries can be described as first, second or third world. All manner of objects like clothing, shoes, cars, sunglasses and endless numbers of other items that all fall into categories of some sort or another that we label and lust after, or irreverently dismiss out of hand. We have our ‘favourites’ and our ‘not so favourites’.

We often mentally assign some ‘meritorious’ range to each category – elite, prestigious, ordinary, inferior or substandard. No one is suggesting that labelling and categorising is not useful, in fact in many cases it can be very helpful. However, labelling things in this way can often influence what we believe we see.

What happens when we label people though? Does this affect how we perceive people, or make judgments about people, do we treat them differently – favouring one and not another? According to researchers and psychologists who have conducted many tests on how we label people, there is considerable weight of evidence to suggest that, yes, we do treat them differently and have different expectations.

University professor, Adam Alter cites a number of cases where this happens. According to researchers, the words we use to describe what we see aren’t idle placeholders - they actually determine what we see. Labels can change how we perceive more complex matters.

Psychologist Boroditsk, asked English and Russian speakers to distinguish between two very similar but different shades of blue. In English we have one single word for the colour blue, but Russians divide the spectrum of blue into lighter blues (“goluboy”) and darker blues (“siniy”) When questioned, the Russian students, who have two words to choose from, were much quicker to distinguish between differing shades of blue than the English speakers.

John Darley and Paget Gross, (“A hypothesis-confirming bias in labelling effects”) showed similar effects when they varied whether a young girl, Hannah, seemed poor or wealthy. The respondents in this exercise rated Hannah’s answers to certain questions; some difficult questions she answered correctly, while answering some simple questions incorrectly. Those respondents who were told that Hannah was from a wealthy background, assessed her to be of Year 5 standard, while those respondents who were told she was from a poor background, assessed her to be at a Year 4 standard.

Professor Alter believes that the long term consequences of labelling a child like Hannah “smart” or “slow” are profound. He shares the experiment, (“Pygmalion in the classroom”, 1992) conducted by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, where the teachers at an elementary school are told that some of the students have performed in the top 20% of a test designed to identify ‘academic bloomers’. The teachers were told that these students would enter into an intensive intellectual development phase over the coming year, when in reality, these students had not performed significantly better than other students in the class and were not ‘bloomers’.

One year later, when the researchers returned, they found to their astonishment that in fact the ‘bloomers’ now outperformed their peers by 10-15 IQ points. The teachers over the year had in fact cultivated the intellectual ability of the ‘bloomers’ and in so doing had brought about a ‘self-fulfilling’ prophecy for that group of students.

It’s in our DNA to use labels that allow us to simplify the world and help us process countless pieces of information that go through our lives every day. The danger might be though, that in using labels such as “white”, “rich”, “poor”, “smart”, “slow” or “pretty,” they may in fact seem whiter, richer, poorer, smarter, slower or prettier simply because we’ve labelled them so. Eckhart Tolle, suggests another potential problem where we objectify a person by placing a label on them:

“The moment you put a mental label on another human being, you can never truly relate to that person.”

Labelling people such as ‘mentally disabled’, ‘struggling’, ‘dyslexic’, ‘ADHD’, ‘autistic’, or ‘OCD’ is very commonplace these days. John Hattie, author of “Visible Learning” and “Visible Learning for Teachers”, argues that we should “know the kids and forget the labels”. His point is that, while these conditions are real, some people label students, as if they are saying, “We can’t teach them” or, “They can’t learn”. In fact the lesson for parents and teachers is to have high expectations for all children regardless of the labels and to constantly seek evidence to check and enhance these expectations. The aim of this School is to help all students to exceed their potential.

Hattie’s research demonstrated that students met teacher expectations, whether high or low. According to Hattie, teachers need to stop overemphasising ability, and start emphasising increased effort and progress. “Be prepared to be surprised” needs to be the mantra to use to avoid negative expectations. It’s so important to ensure that all students achieve to the very best of their ability and to set themselves high expectations too.

Hattie claims that the problem for some students is that they “are doing just enough’, or what he calls the “minimax’ principle – that is, the maximum grade return for minimal extra effort. Our role as parents and teachers is to find out what students can do, and make them exceed their potential and needs. Our role is to create new horizons of success and help students attain them.

Even within families, notes Jeffrey Kluger, author of “Playing Favorites” adapted from his book: “The Sibling Effect”, parents usually favour one child over another and may use harsh or flattering words that in effect give one child the impression that they are being labelled – be it ‘silly’, ‘lazy’, ‘funny’, ‘careless’ or ‘clever’. This can have an extremely detrimental effect both in the short term and long term. Favoured children can gain over confidence, even arrogance and a misguided sense of entitlement, while less favoured children can have a higher risk of suffering from anxiety, low self-esteem or depression later in life. Kluger makes the point, that while we may in fact favour one child over another we can address this. He suggests that even if your children know you have a favourite, the effort it takes to pretend it’s not so, can itself be an act of love. Food for thought and as Emily Lazar says;

“Don't get caught up in labelling people. Each of us is so much more than one word can describe.”

As parents and teachers we have to be very careful not to assign labels to our children and focus more on expectations and the hopes, dreams and aspirations of our daughters and sons for the future.

Karon Graham