One Apple A Day #113
Categories, genres, types, labels, buckets, boxes. Whatever you call them we love to put everything and everyone into something. It is the only way for our mind to manage the incredible amount of data and information that we gather in any moment. Our brain is notoriously lazy, so it doesn’t like to deal with the complexity of the world we live in. Using buckets or boxes is an easy and efficient way to manage this complexity. Once we get in touch with something — a piece of information, an object or a person — we immediately try to fit it into one of the buckets we have built in our mind. Everyone has his personal buckets and his own rules to put things into them. A lot of these buckets and rules come from the context in which we grew up. They are part of the cultural biases we develop in our life. They aren’t intrinsically good or bad. But it’s important to be aware of their existence. Being aware of our biases can help us in at least two ways. The first is to avoid the risk of transforming these buckets into cages. These categories exist only in our head and are meaningful only to ourselves. The reality is much more complex. If we are not aware of our biases, we may end up thinking that what we perceived is all there is to perceive. What a loss.
The second reason why is important to be aware of this boxing mechanism of our mind is to protect ourselves from marketing and media. Marketers and advertisers understand very well how our mind works and they are well aware of the existence of the buckets. Most of all, thanks to technology, they can easily identify our buckets and the rules we used to fill them, our biases. And then they use this knowledge in their favour building messages that will exploit our biases to put the information they want on the top of the buckets in our mind. If you are aware of your buckets and biases, you can protect yourself from this strategies because you will always be mindful of the fact that the world is more complex and abundant than what they are trying to sell you.