2. In what way do single stories affect our own identities, how we view others, and the choices we make?

If you lined up 1000 randomly selected people from across the earth, none of them would share the exact same skin tone. You could arrange them from darkest to lightest and there wouldn't be a single tie. Of course, the continuity of skin tone hasn't stopped humans from assigning each other to discrete skin-color categories like black and white—categories that have no basis in biology but nonetheless go on to determine the social, political, and economic well-being of their members.

Categorical labeling is a tool that humans use to resolve the impossible complexity of the environments we grapple to perceive. Like so many human faculties, it's adaptive and miraculous, but it also contributes to some of the deepest problems that we face.

Researchers began to study the cognitive effects of labeling in the 1930s when linguist Benjamin Whorf proposed the linguistic relativity hypothesis. According to his hypothesis, the words we use to describe what we see aren't just idle placeholders; they determine what we see. According to one apocryphal tale, the Inuit can distinguish between dozens of different types of snow that the rest of us perceive, simply, as "snow," because they have a different label for each type. The story isn't true (the Inuit have the same number of words for snow as we do), but research by cognitive psychologist Lera Boroditsky and several of her colleagues suggests that it holds a kernel of truth. Boroditsky and her colleagues asked English and Russian speakers to distinguish between two similar but subtly different shades of blue.

In English, we have a single word for the color blue, but Russians divide the spectrum of blue into lighter blues (goluboy) and darker blues (siniy). Where we use a single label for the color, they use two different labels. When the two shades of blue straddled the goluboy/siniy divide, the Russian speakers were much quicker to distinguish between them, because they had readily available labels for the two colors that the English speakers lumped together as blue.

Labels shape more than our perception of color; they also change how we perceive more complex targets, like people. Jennifer Eberhardt, a social psychologist at Stanford, and her colleagues showed white college students pictures of a man who was racially ambiguous; he could have plausibly fallen into the white category or the black category. For half the students, the face was described as belonging to a white man, and for the other half, it was described as belonging to a black man.

In one task, the experimenter asked the students to spend four minutes drawing the face as it sat on the screen in front of them. Although all the students were looking at the same face, those who tended to believe that race is an entrenched human characteristic drew faces that matched the stereotype associated with the label (see a sample below). The racial labels formed a lens through with the students saw the man, and they were incapable of perceiving him independently of that label.

Explanation: