My wife and I have this ongoing discussion about generalisation or "labelling people" as she puts it. She contends that this is a bad thing, whilst I just see it as the way we classify our world.
So for example, you see a chair, you know it is a chair because it has four legs, a flat surface for sitting on, a back, etc. It might not be for sitting on - as children often discover in art museums when they mistakenly take some million dollar piece of art for a chair because they look the same - but that's our first take on things.
We couldn't function otherwise. When I see a chair, I know I can sit on it, because it looks like many other chairs I've sat on. I don't go and say, oh its bad to generalise and lets take a good look at this thing that looks like a chair before I sit down.
People CAN be classified, and psychological profiling tests like Myers-Briggs rely precisely on this fact. I tend to be an ISTJ and am scarily similar to other ISTJs I have met. Such generalisations can be very useful in relationships of any sort as it helps us to understand and accept each other.
But there are other sorts of generalisations which are based not on statistical sampling but inter-group hatred. People tend to gather into groups according to criteria such as location, race, beliefs etc., and this results in a natural wariness and often even enmity between people of different groupings. These are the ones to watch out for.
We have this vague definition of what is normal and fear anything that does not fit this mould. Yet normal is the dreary average - is that really what we want to be? I'd much rather be a funky upper percentile, wouldn't you?
But I digress. My mum says that men with rings on their little finger are vain, and I reckon she's right. :)
