There is a limit to the informational processing that the mind can dope with. Categorisation is an adaptation necessary to cope with this limitation. Those that fail to use this adaptation usually suffer from so form of mental breakdown and often have extreme difficult interacting with the world.
Schizophrenics: Unable to categorise sensory input into required/ignored categories thus end up with a sensory overload.
Autistics: Unable to categorise internal constructions of the world and thus cannot recognise patterns as there is too much information to processes.
Categorisation is a survival mechanism with a probable genetic predisposition controlling how much information an individual can cope with, the strategies that that their mind will use to control the information and finally how well they will be able to perceive and correct for their own internal limitations.
It is IMHO in the last area that the most work can be done in terms of understanding how one processes information and allowing for the imperfections of your perceptions. From here you may be able to attempt to implement better filtering stratifies, but as most of these are systemic brain functions there is not enough research yet on the subject to be certain of this.
As a News provider your job is to inform people, you best bet is to accept the majority of people are going to limit their information flow and thus to present the information in the easiest way for them to digest, you need to break it up with clear indication as to the important points.
This unfortunately requires someone to decide the important points for you, but at least in this information age those of us who wish to know more at least have access to alternative sources of information.
But if an adult asked why they didn’t go to church and you said they were muslim they would have understood. It doesn’t help to say “asian muslims” if your daughter has no idea what an asian is or what a muslim is.
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How is saying someone is an asian muslim a judgement based on assumption? Telling her that everybody is different from everyone else doesn’t really answer her question either. It still doesn’t tell her why they are a different color and why they don’t go to church.
So it isn’t categorization that you dislike it is stereotypes?
Possibly you are right; there are some categories that I think are particularly useful and valid, like those which group people by their actions (‘terrorist’, ‘pacifist’, ‘pedestrian’).
I paraphrased the conversation with my daughter for brevity - what I didn’t mention is that at the time, I felt she was asking the question thinking that our neighbours were inferior or strange, but you’re right; telling her that people are just different and leaving it at that wouldn’t be helpful, but in that particular case, the conversation was more to do with “how we interact with people who seem different” in the sense of “why isn’t everybody else normal like us?” (I didn’t explain this in my post above).
Classification is so ubiquitous, I believe it’s instinctive. (Ah, joy, this is exactly the sort of thread that begs for a psuedo-academic like me to waltz in and start boring the pants off everyone).
Let me lift a quote here: “Classification is arguably one of the most central and generic of all our conceptual exercises. It is the foundation not only for conceptualization, langauge, and speech, but also for mathematics, statistics, and data analysis in general.” That’s from my Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences monograph on “Typologies and Taxonomies.”
Grouping things together according to similarity makes it easier to process and recall information. However, it’s also true that sometimes we use “similarities” that aren’t at all meaningful. Right now we rarely classify people by eye color, which is probably smart. No one reports how many blue-eyed people were on the plane. However, we also use certain other similarities, like race or national origin, in dubious ways. Sure, those groups are “similar” in certain ways, but are they similar in the other things we assume about or apply to them? Probably not.
I think we might have some error in our classification schemes, but I don’t think that the tendency to classify in itself is immoral or dysfunctional.
