Sway Focus Questions

Growing up in life I have always faced the consequences of labels. One could say I grew up with friends that were in the richer and popular labels but that wasn’t me. I grew up in a very small town and that meant everyone knew exactly where you were, who you were with, and what you were doing. When I read the part about how people put labels on other people to discredit them and give them a sense of clarity, it truly made me think of back home. I know in the story political labels are used but I feel like the same concept is used in weather you are being labeled as popular and unpopular.

Social constraints get tighter, and people begin getting labeled. These labels may be good or bad, such as how in the book it discusses how when a parent says that their child is academically gifted even if they are the same as most other kids, the child will start believing it, and will do better intellectually. As the child moves into junior high and high school they begin to find who they are, they join groups. They began to be labeled in groups such as “cowboy”, “jock”, or “nerd”. People start describing a person as this, and when people hear the label enough times, they begin to believe what they are told. The podcast discussed how William Gladstone studied the works of Homer and discovered that him, and other Greeks never used the word “blue” to describe things in their works. From this he concluded that all Greeks were colorblind. People thought that he was crazy. If he had let what people said about him affect himself, he would have genuinely become crazy.

The three terms I was most familiar with were biracial, stereotype, and ethnocentrism. Growing up I think nearly everyone is taught about the harm that stereotyping can do to a person. To treat every person as an individual and to get to know everyone personally is something that I was taught as a student in elementary and has always been apart of my life.

Others. That one word distinctively separates people base on a certain trait or characteristic. Society affects us more than we realize. We are oblivious to fact that we have been categorized in a society particularly due to our race, gender, social class. It affects how we react to certain beliefs or people. Barbara Ehrenreich, Allan G. Johnson, and Austin Fuentes all wrote an essay that examines how closely one factor can lead to labeling a person. Each author has creditability in understanding social issues as they have researched social issues and earned a degree for their knowledge. Each essay from these authors focuses on a different topic relating to how as a society label each concept. The writer’s audience is any individual that

Another example of everyday imposition of positive (rather than negative) labels, that I have noticed, just recently, is with my daughter. She is both gifted with intelligence and beauty, she is always working out and is very heath conscience. People use the labels; she is healthy, smart, educated. She graduated high school a year early, so due to her age, she doesn’t fit into college life and doesn’t fit back into her high school friends either. Due to those labels many people will not approach her, so its hard for her to make friends, so positives labels, create an everyday imposition for her in that aspect.

In school there always is that one really dumb kid that everyone knows, but what if that kid was not dumb. Stereotypes and misconceptions are what people use to easily label people. A stereotype is when a person or group is given a name or label assuming this just because of a few people in the group. An example of that would be when people say someone with glasses is smart when that was just given to them for their appearance. A misconception is a label or name that has been given to a person or group with no truth at all. An example of this would be people saying a danish pastry is from Denmark when nobody knows where they come from. Most jocks care about school and usually have really good grades. It is the few that

Labeling theory based on so many things and it is causing people to look at society to have a positive attitude towards

Every time you label someone, every time you write a name on someone’s forehead with permanent marker it stays there, forever. And forever is a really long time for a label that’s not true to be roaming in someone’s head. Past studies have shown that people act poorly when they are stereotyped and have difficulty making better decisions and tend to rely on unhealthy food. Even if people are not the label that we call them, they would slowly start to act like the stereotype therefore proving to us that they are the label when in fact that they aren’t. Labelling someone doesn’t only affect the way some people act, but it also affects how you act. It is said that when we are around the people that we have labelled most of our lives, we somehow start to act like them too. For example when we are around elder people, we consider them slow and fragile therefore making our movements slow

Labeling theory is very much self explanatory. This theory states that people become criminals because someone labeled them as one and this becomes part of their self identity. Having a label such as a trouble maker could stick with you. Not only does this affect you at school, but at work, and to anyone else who knows you have them label. This also very much goes along with stereotypes. If you dress like a stereotypical gang member people are going to associate you with that and that will become a part of your identity.

Labels. They can destroy your life. And I don’t mean the small piece of paper attacted to a product or item. I’m talking about the labels that we let define who we are. Jock. Popular. Nerd. Slut. Loner. It’s not so much fun to have a label on your back. I would know.

Throughout the discussion in class about social diversity, I learned about several issues in society that affect people everyday. When minority labels become words with negative connotations they are also known as the Labeling Theory. For example, the words lame,dumb,retarded, and gay are all negatively used in society. Sometimes, I am with a group of friends giggling and joking and toss these words around.

People are labeled by words everyday. Lazy, ugly, nerdy, brainiac, the list never ends and some labels may be harsher than others. But stereotypes have been used to categorize people since anyone could remember. These generalizations do not always have to be a bad thing though. Sometimes these labels may remind people who they are and what people think of them. Throughout the last seventeen years of my life I have developed quite the social image and these are the top words that I would label myself with.

The labeling theory argues that members from particular sections of a society can behave in a way that is expected of them. They learn this through the way people from other sections of society describe them, the way they are labeled. An example is: people assume that Arab teenage boys from deprived areas in New York are

conception of value and the way that value is perceived is an affective mode of

During the 1960’s the theory of labeling came about. It was a theory that believed labeling someone as a stereotype, it was created by Frank Tannerbaum. When people label each other, they put the other person down, and if the