The Use of Labels to Publicly Rule Someone Guilty

James Miller is a licensed psychotherapist and iHeartRadio talk show host.

Observation: some negative labels, meant to identify wrongdoing and shame people or organizations, are becoming impulsively commonplace. I wonder if, for this reason, they could possibly lose at least some of their shock value and effectiveness?

Thus, I am curious, how effective are the use of such labels to affect successful-and-lasting change? Or are we as society using them merely to vent and for punitive reasons? Yes, bad behavior needs to have attention brought to it. Enabling is always a terrible, shortsighted, flawed decision and choice.

Communication Intelligence Brief Exchanges conversation
with James Miller, licensed psychotherapist
and host of the syndicated talk show, James Miller LIFEOLOGY® at iHeart Radio

If a person has a strong ego a label that is used to shame them will not be effective. They can easily ignore the label and separate themselves from the offensive person and organization.

A person who has a fragile ego will, more than likely, already have a list of labels that have been used against her. The new negative label will simply justify what she already believes about herself and the intended lesson will be missed.

There is a misperception of what shame is. Shame is connoted as a person feeling shame about everything about herself. Whereas guilt is allocated towards behavior or action. The concept of guilt should be used as opposed to attempting to have a person feel shame.

Emotional reasoning — I feel it, so it must be true — is one of 15 common cognitive distortions —thinking errors — that can plague someone. If the sender of the guilt/shame is attempting to have the person experience emotional reasoning for the change, then, unfortunately, they are creating a cognitive distortion in the receiver.

This leads to ineffective and often unresolvable communication.

Communication Intelligence
Final Thoughts

Learning what we did from James Miller, additional questions come to mind. For one, are we ready for potential dangerous consequences of the immediate and impulsive nature of slapping definitive and inflammatory labels on people and 2) how often are our perceptions quite possibly inaccurate?