A label is a way to stop thinking

This is why biases are cognitively alluring. The Free Energy Principle is a concept from neuroscience that states the brain is a prediction machine, constantly guessing what’s going to happen next, and it’s trying to stop all the time; energy is expensive. When you can label something, you assign it to a category, you can stop thinking about it. This is why categories are both powerful and dangerous.

Once you create a category, or give something a label, it’s very hard to undo your work and insist that the category doesn’t exist after all. People’s cognition is too used to the convenience of the category for that. Instead, you end up expanding the definition of what fits inside the category. It’s an easier sell than rationalizing it out of existence.