You've been labelled!

If we look at a scenery, all that our eyes deliver are colours and intensities. But what we consciously see are trees, bushes, fields, cars, and so on.
Our brain extracts features in real time from the eye's input and matches it with objects in its database. This matching process is amazingly fast and efficient. We recognize an object as tree even if we've never seen a tree with this exact structure before. The brain tries to match anything to something it knows.
This ability is vital for us. If we face a tiger in the jungle, we are dependent on the speed our brain recognizes the animal as "Tiger". "Animal" or "Cat" would not be enough for some people, as trying to feed it wouldn't go as expected.

So we can roughly say (many scientists and philosopher will hate me for that) that the eyes deliver a picture and the brain labels everything it can find. What reaches our consciousness, is a picture with a lot of post-it notes on.
But it doesn't stop there! These post-it notes not only tell us the name for this object, they also tell us everything we know about this object. So if we can see "Chair" with the property "brown" and "grained" attached to it, we might also find "hard", "able to hold average person", "not painted" and "uncomfortable". Our brain matched the picture with "wooden chair" and gave us all the information we can remember from past encounters. This works with everything. We see a glass and know it breaks easily, we see a keyboard and know we can type on it, we see a stranger and know he's an idiot .... ok, I'll come back to that later.

One interesting observation is that the more familiar the object is, the less we question these post-it notes. Or to be more precise, the better an object is defined in our brains, the more we trust the attributes. Is that a problem?
Just before World Cup 2006 in Germany, an artist placed footballs all over Berlin. The balls were chained to nearby walls and looked exactly like footballs. Except for the fact that they were made from concrete. People who passed by, got the note "football" with the attributes "round", "leather" and fatally "can be kicked".
The artist was arrested after countless broken feet.
This is just one example were this labelling goes wrong. By changing the attributes of a familiar object we can easily trick the process. The more familiar, the easier.
Just imagine a chair made out of foam but covered with paint to make it look like wood. Would you test the attribute "able to hold average person" before sitting down?

So we know we constantly get post-its that are generally correct but can contain wrong information. In everyday life (except you live together with a clown or a Youtube lover with a camera) this doesn't matter as we very rarely encounter foam chairs.
But we should keep in mind, that we have to reassess these attributes as things change constantly. So should our post-its.

Now let's come back to the special object mentioned above: Humans. Our labeling machine labels everything, also humans. What is on these labels? If it is a friend for example, this could include name, job, history, wife's name, connection to other friends and so on. This is ok, but think about the "closest match" process. If we see a stranger, this process also tries to find as many attributes as possible. And there, things go wrong. We immediately label people as soon as we see them. But you might add, if we get to know them, we change the labels and keep them up to date, don't we? Do we? Here the fact that we don't constantly test attributes traps us! And things do go wrong.

The process that is vital to us in so many situations, gets in our way. It is sometimes really difficult to change the image we have of somebody. They are labeled. And the fact that human-to-human contact is a mutual process reinforces our dilemma. If we react strangely because of an overhasty label, they label us differently in return.
Many of you just thought "Oh, I'm not that bad". Really? If you see somebody with a beard and a turban, do you thing "Ah, muslim" or "Hmm, perhaps muslim"?
If you see somebody with a suit, do you think "Could be a hippie on the way to work"?

We label all the time and this is good and often vital for us. But we have to learn to constantly reassess the attributes we gave to objects. Especially to humans. Attributes for people we just met is a good starting point for that. Apart from the attribute "holds gun" perhaps.