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The American Psychology Association ( Apa )

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Labels distinguish individuals in everyday life; if 2000 people from across the world were randomly selected and put into categories of hair colour, none of them would share exactly the same shade of colour. Despite this continuity humans still continue to assign each other to discrete hair-colour categories such as ‘blonde’ or ‘brown’ which have no basis in biology but still go on to determine how that person is thought of in society. The American Psychology Association (APA) provides guidelines for researchers to follow in both research and writing scientifically in order to avoid any form of labelling bias when referring to participants or groups of participants. These guidelines are in place to ensure that the participants within research or experiments are protected against any psychological harm on a personal and emotional level but also from the effects of labelling within society.
Benjamin Whorf (1930) began to study the cognitive effects of labelling in which he proposed the linguistic relativity hypothesis. This hypothesis stated that the words we use to describe what we see aren’t insignificant as they don’t simply describe but determine what we see also. The APA aims to be able to describe participants at an appropriate level of specificity in order to achieve precision within scientific writing. Being specific enables researchers to avoid broad clinical terms such as ‘borderline’ and ‘at risk’ which are connected to innuendos which could be potentially harmful

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