Filters and Labels

Our daily interractions usualy happen so fast that we seldom have time to think about the other party. For me, thnking about the other party means that we need to take time and detail the character of the other person. I consider television to be a bad influence as almost all characters have only a single trait; the good guys, the bad guys, the helpers, the beautiful girl, the helpful stranger, the mean shopkeeper, etc... This makes it easier for us to follow the plot as we don't have to deal with various facades of every single cast. However, as we take this approach to our real life we start to loose a very important part of the communication process; the other person as a whole.

We seem to be predisposed to categorize others based on as little information as possible, maybe as part of our fight or flight response or maybe due to the number of interactions we have daily. You can think of all salesmen as pushy or you can be intimidated by every policeman or you can admire firemen, no matter what your categories and the labels you gave them are they are not enough as far as effective communication and body language reading are concerned. You can have a "nurse" category, with the "good", "helpful" and "nice" labels attached to it and you can classify every nurse you meet under it. However, this is not enough to understand what she really means when asked about a patient when she says "you'll really have to talk to the doctor about that". Is it just because she believes that the doctor will be able to give a better description of the patient's situation or does she want the doctor to tell you that your patient just died?
On a similar way, you can not expect to approach every nurse in every situation in the same way and be able to convince them to let you see someone after visiting hours.

Labels and filters can be very useful for anyone that wants to have effective communication as they will halp the other party to put you in a category or in this case in the category you want them to put you in. Do you want to be perceived as trustworthy, do you want to be seen as someone nobody would like to mess with? Usually labels are the same within the same culture at any given time. For example even the following words can be enough to create a specific image in your head: leather jackets, tattoos, long hair and beard. Or we can try: Suit, laptop case, glasses, Rolex watch. No matter where you livei these are some labels that trigger a specific response.

As members of the same society or cultural group we already should be familiar when labels and the categories they trigger, this should give us enough leverage to give our message across. However, as we want to be able to communicate effectively we should be aware of these labels and try to avoid them as much as we can. We should concentrate on the situation at hand not on genrealities. Back to our nurse example; her age, the length of her shift, the time of the day, if she's married, how happy or bored she looks, the way she wears her hair, etc... all these will give us indications on how to approach this specific nurse and how to communicate with her.