Why we put people in boxes (and why we need to break out of them)

We all do it: within a fraction of a second of meeting someone, we have already put them in a box, whether it's the 'quiet colleague' or the 'typical contrarian'. It is often said that this pigeonholing is purely harmful and limiting, especially when looking at themes like introversion or neurodiversity. But the reality is that without this mechanism, our own brains would crash pretty quickly.

Just imagine our heads as a huge attic full of stuff where books, clothes, and tools are scattered all over the place. If you are looking for something in that chaos, it will take you hours, until you put everything in boxes with clear labels on them. Our brain does exactly the same with the messy world around us. Every day we encounter hundreds of people, and to avoid going crazy from all those stimuli, our brain has built a large sorting machine that lightning-fast puts people into little boxes. That feels nice, safe, and organized, but there is a problem: people are not old books or winter sweaters. They change, they often fit into ten boxes at once, and sometimes they are put in a box where they don't belong at all.

Lazy

By the way, it's not your own fault that you think in boxes, because you are simply biologically programmed to do so. Our distant ancestors had to decide at lightning speed whether someone was a friend who helped, or an enemy who came to steal. Anyone who had to think about that for ten minutes probably didn't live long. Scientists Fiske and Taylor (2013) call this 'cognitive miserliness' in their book Social Cognition: From Brains to Culture. Our brain is naturally a bit lazy and wants to expend as little energy as possible.

A box then works as a kind of mental shortcut. Instead of getting to know someone completely and with nuance, your brain activates the shortcut of a certain stereotype and thinks it knows exactly what to expect. Social psychologist Henri Tajfel (1981) described this in Human Groups and Social Categories as social categorization, a mechanism that helps us understand the world without getting mentally overloaded. But what was once a crucial survival plan in nature now sometimes gets very much in our way.

Harmful

Once we have put a label on someone, it turns out in practice to be very difficult to peel it off again. This is due to the so-called confirmation bias, a phenomenon that psychologist Nickerson (1998) described extensively in the Review of General Psychology. Our brain automatically starts looking for evidence that the applied label is correct. If you have put someone in the 'boring' box and that person tells a brilliant story once, you quickly forget it. But if that same person yawns once, your brain immediately sees that as the absolute proof that the judgment was right.

This is the point where thinking in boxes becomes truly harmful, because we are no longer looking at the real person, but purely at the label. For example, with giftedness, this happens regularly. People often unjustly associate that label with someone who is brilliant in science and never makes mistakes. If such a person then makes a human blunder or struggles with a seemingly simple task, their environment no longer understands it. The box no longer fits, and instead of adjusting our own assumptions, we suddenly find the person in question 'difficult'.

Stuck in a mold

The most damaging consequence of these rigid boxes is that people ultimately start living up to them. When someone is constantly told that he or she is difficult or too hyper, that person will eventually start believing it themselves. Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) already demonstrated this mechanism in their research on the Pygmalion effect. In neurodivergent people, we often see this process derail when they are unjustly slapped with the label 'limited' or 'dysfunctional'. As a result, they lose sight of their own unique talents and become stuck in a mold cast by others. In the eyes of society, they are no longer a multifaceted person who happens to get overstimulated easily, but they are reduced to 'that autistic person', which is a massively harmful difference.

Lifeline

Yet it is an illusion to think that we can simply abolish all boxes, because they can also be a massive lifeline. Imagine feeling fundamentally different your whole life, getting exhausted more quickly, thinking significantly deeper than your peers, and feeling chronically misunderstood as a result. If someone then explains that your specific way of being has a name, a heavy burden often falls from your shoulders.

Suddenly you are no longer broken or abnormal, but you belong to a group of like-minded people. Philosopher of science Ian Hacking (1995) called this complex interaction between a classification and human behavior the looping effect. In those kinds of situations, a label actually helps you to better understand yourself and gives you the vocabulary to explain what you need. The box then functions not as a suffocating prison, but as an illuminating map.

The challenge is therefore to utilize the benefits of boxes without succumbing to the disadvantages. We must learn to look at people as a complete library instead of as a single book. That starts with the realization that we should write our mental classifications in pencil instead of permanent marker, so that we leave room for the fact that people continuously grow and change. An introvert can thrive beautifully on a stage, and a gifted professional can sometimes be incredibly clumsy.

Overlap

Furthermore, it is crucial to have an eye for the immense overlap, because no one consists of just one dimension. Someone might be a manager, but at the same time also a parent, an athlete, and a music lover. The more different facets we learn to see in the other person, the more the complete human being emerges again. And if we really get stuck, we simply have to stop guessing what's in the box and start a conversation.

Thinking in boxes is and remains deeply human and biologically necessary, but the art is to use a label as a temporary pair of glasses to see the other person a bit sharper, and to take those glasses off in time to make genuine contact. Let's therefore agree to leave the lids of our imaginary boxes open from now on, because it is exactly in between all those boxes that we find the real person.