I saw a headline: “Banker caught smuggling Cocaine”. Another one: “Car salesman (46) kills wife”. And wondered why it mattered what their profession or age was.

I think the answer is twofold.

For one it reads more smoothly, because it’s less abstract. We can easily imagine a banker or a car salesman, but if it’s just a person, maybe even without age and gender then imagining takes a little more work. There is an extra step and another abstraction involved, in order to either maintain the abstraction or to replace it with something more real.

The second reason behind these headlines is that we love stereotypes. We are prejudiced. We use mental drawers and put people in them. Every drawer takes a lot of qualities and assumptions and replaces that clunky complicated mess with a tiny label that names the drawer.

Of course it obscures truth, falsifies it completely in many cases, and fools us into believing that we know more than we do, just because we have stored a bunch of labels.

But the truth is we usually prefer the label to the real thing and we actively prefer it when reading news. The newspaper folks know this of course and that is why they write their headlines the way they do.

They know their audience.

There are things in life where a label will not do, of course. We need to know the sublabels, and their sublabels precisely. We need to actually know how some things work. But this takes awareness, first of all. The willingness to look and see if we are not deluding ourselves. Then it takes work to learn. Sometimes a lot of work. We want to be convinced it’s worth the effort before we start.