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Fearing Certain Categories of People

If someone thought that, because he made a few mistakes in the past, he is probably dumb, then we can say that this person has labelled himself. A label is nothing more than a false description you've assign to yourself that resulted from previous bad experiences. But do people just stop at labelling themselves?

Actually they don't; some people label whole groups of people together and so end up fearing this whole category of people. For example, a person labelling rich people as arrogant would end up being unable to communicate with any rich person, thinking that he won't be treated well by him!!

How Are These Labels Created

Labelling all depends on your previous experiences: if you failed to deal with a certain group of people in the past who share some common characteristics or behaviour, you may end up labelling the whole category!!

For example, if you weren't among the so-called "players" during your early school days, and if those players treated you badly, you may end fearing all people who resemble players throughout your whole life!!

The same goes for the example of rich people: if you weren’t that rich and several of your rich friends were arrogant, you may end up thinking that all rich people are arrogant!

Other examples can be: all men are liars, all men cheat, all rich people are thieves …and so on.

The Consequences of Labelling Groups of People

As you may have already guessed, being mistreated by a small number of people could result in making you fear a whole category of people throughout your entire life!! You've just become a victim to your over-generalizing way of thinking; where you assumed that the behaviour of a few people applies to all of those who are similar to them!!

How to Get Over This?

Don’t worry, getting over this is not especially difficult; you just need to stop over-generalizing and you won't be able to do this unless you stop using it completely in all of your activities and not just in dealing with people.

The other thing is to start to think of people as individuals and not as groups. Just because the rich man you've seen is arrogant, doesn't mean that all rich people are the same. People are so different and can’t be categorized by simply labeling them.

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Did that help?

Not until you tell me more about overgeneralization.

Well, I fear approaching groups of people. What can I do?

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