the value of the prototype

When we talk about information categorization, we assume that our coarse categories have no impact on the people who deal with them. People need to adapt to the atrocious indexing that we do, right? If a category is wrong, it’ll be adapted, right?

But the thing is that if you believe Elliot Aronson’s arguments in “Social Animal,” you have to believe that our early categorizations play a significant role in how people relate to the material, as they are more likely to reinterpret current information to fit their early mental models than to adjust their early categories.

What does this mean for coarse categorization that is implied to evolve? How does Yahoo!s listing of categories shape the way we think about web information?

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