Automatic categorization is necessary for managing everyday cognitive load.

Evidence

In order to effectively process the large amount of information we are confronted with every day, we form a category system. All it takes is a small detail of appearance, and immediately a person is pigeonholed into one of these categories. This happens automatically, is convenient, and is rarely questioned. This shortcut also makes perfect sense. Our complex everyday life would not be manageable if we wanted to examine every single piece of information we are confronted with as if we were hearing the fact for the very first time, realign our world view with every discussion, and act as if encountering a new species for the first time with every encounter with a person. — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 150

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to stereotype literature and the functionalist accounts of prejudice.

Related

• Categorization is an unavoidable cognitive basis for prejudgment. (similarity 0.84)
• Categorization inherently produces prejudgment that cannot be avoided (similarity 0.84)
• Categorization both enables judgment and necessarily biases it (similarity 0.81)
• Categorization simultaneously enables and impoverishes human perception and judgment. (similarity 0.81)
• Social categorization dominates perception by selecting and interpreting sensory data (similarity 0.80)
• Prejudice is primary; categorization only serves it (similarity 0.80)
• Categories require an intuitive theory linking features, not just shared similarities (similarity 0.80)
• Categorization enables thought but inevitably blurs the individual features it generalizes. (similarity 0.80)
• Social categorization is a normal, inevitable mental process underlying prejudice (similarity 0.80)
• Categorization processes facilitate the harm of prejudice (similarity 0.79)
• Categorization itself is not the problem; prejudice drives stereotypes, not vice versa. (similarity 0.79)
• Categorization reduces uncertainty at a predictable cost to accuracy (similarity 0.79)
• Categorization and identity processes will outlast the elimination of prejudice (similarity 0.79)