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).
© 1996 John Tagg
To Mind Reading
To Cognitive Distortions List