Categorization

Throughout many of the texts this semester, categorization of people is present throughout. Categorizing others, according to Donna Haraway, is “domination of ‘race’, ‘gender’, ‘sexuality’, and ‘class’” (Haraway 2003: 321). While for organizations sake, categories and labels seem to be very helpful, authors Donna Haraway and Philip K. Dick challenge this norm. They contest that such practices of categorization are archaic and harmful to the victims, and we need to break past these traditions. To prove this, I will first argue that humankind naturally falls into habits of labeling others and forming preconceived ideas of their characters. I will further argue that we are confused and afraid of entities that exist beyond categorization. This…

Bruner (1957) suggested four stages of how we categorize new stimuli into already learned categories. Primitive categorization being the first stage. Whereby we perceptually isolate an event or persons characteristic qualities with focus on the analysis of features. Secondly we search for cue in already existing categories that contain similar features, if there is a match then there is a ‘feature overlap’. Inferences are made if there is enough of a feature overlap. Comparable to reaching a…

The summary of this knowledge is abstracted across different experiences. Exemplars will form if you have plenty of exposure to a category. There are also items that fit into a category better than others. We refer to these kind of items as typical, and the items that do not fit as well in a category are referred to as atypical (Murphy, 2017). According to Brooks et al, similarity to an exemplar can influence categorization. That is to say, items that share more similarities with an exemplar are…

I have mixed feelings about becoming a professional in a system that categorizes and labels individuals. On one hand, I feel that this is an extremely helpful and logical way of approaching how to help individuals who have some sort of pathology. I like that this profession has a set manual for diagnosing people with pathologies and that this manual has very specific instructions on how to diagnose individuals. Also, I feel that putting people into a category also for all professionals in…

Humans have the propensity to categorize friends, peers, and strangers. We naturally label people, classifying them through social groupings—class, gender, age, and race. This action, often thought to be an automatic cognitive process, attributes to people’s interpretation of the individuals around them (Stangor). With race at the forefront of political debates and social movements, racial categorization of individuals has become an influential topic in today’s society. Recently, the rise of the…

with, in a pre-genocide period, Rwandans as Homo-Fabers misunderstood life as a process of fabrication which contributed to the stimulation of genocide. As a result, categorization of the sexes was formed due to the differences perceived. The pre-genocide Rwandan society as an institution established the social interactions and constructs that determine the individual behaviour of the Rwandan males and females. Therefore, this impacted the manner in which Rwandan’s as Homo-Fabers created…

Self-categorization theory has three components, one is the human identity (superordinate level category of human being), the second is the personal identity (subordinate level of personal self-categorization) to the group and the third is the social identity (intermediate level of self as a member of a social group) (Oakes et al., 1994; Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher & Wetherell, 1987). Social identity depersonalizes individual behaviour, thus the group members are considered less of a unique…

Douglas Massey uses the conceptual “language of categorization” in his discussion of inequality. When he says “language of categorization”, he talks about stratification and layers. He suggests that categorization comes in a stratigraphical form. Massey subscribes to the stereotype content model. This model states that the population can be arranged on “independent axes of warmth and competence” (Massey, 11). This separation into groups suggests that only one type of group is good: the esteemed…

Nichole Gonzalez March 7, 2018 Eng 116 Griffing Social categorization Ever since ancient times, the idea of categorizing and labeling has been present in human history. Whether it be categorizing the fittest of early dawn of the human era to the current social labels, the notion of categorization has been ingrained in humans; and it has brought humanity to its peaks of inhumanity. Much in the sense of stereotypes, grouping people and labeling them a certain label is used to validate ourselves.…

Introduction There has been much evidence to support the theory that the usage of schematic categorization has been correlated to greater memory recall and has been linked to the levels of processing theory. The study being replicated is Mandler and Pearlstone (1966). This study was chosen as investigates schematic processing, and the role it plays on subsequent recall. A schema is the mental representation of an object, person, events or actions developed from our past knowledge of the world;…