Human thought fundamentally requires categorizing new experiences into old concepts.

Evidence

One of Allport’s most provocative and inspiring ideas was that stereotyping is grounded in a basic, unavoidable, categorization process. People are not capable of thought in the absence of concepts. New experiences remain meaningless unless they are incorporated into preexisting categories. Open-mindedness, Allport noted, “is considered to be a virtue. But strictly speaking, it cannot occur. A new experience must be redacted into old categories” (1954/1979, p. 20). — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 1151

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Allport’s core claim that categorization is not optional but a structural prerequisite of thought itself.
• XREF: Resonates with the reader’s interests in how perception and knowledge get structured; connects to reading on communication and how categories shape cognition. — connects to: Alterity is the fundamental category of human thought, original to consciousness itself — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 54; Dialectical thinking requires abstraction from existing forms to form general concepts. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 12; Time pressure drives designers to copy old solutions to new problems — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 2091