Cementing psychological ownership

Naming something changes how we see it.

Once we label a person, place or object, we have just forever changed how it’s perceived. Because there’s no such thing as a neutral label. Words evoke images. They’re pointers to deeper meanings. Names bring things into being. They deliver the most priceless gift, which is visibility.

Labeling means suddenly, someone or something is seen. It’s the linguistic expression of the observer effect. The act of observation has an effect on the thing being observed.

Popova wrote about this beautifully in her award winning blog:

To name a thing is to acknowledge its existence as separate from everything else that has a name. To confer upon it the dignity of autonomy while at the same time affirming its belonging with the rest of the namable world. And to transform its strangeness into familiarity, which is the root of empathy. To name is to pay attention. To name is to love. Parents name their babies as a first nonbiological marker of individuality amid the human lot, lovers give each other private nicknames that sanctify their intimacy.

Interestingly, the converse is also true when it comes to names. I’m thinking of my cousin, who operates a small family farm. She harvests mostly crops, but also owns chickens to produce eggs. I once asked if she named her birds, and here’s what she told me.

With animals like chickens, you regularly run the risk of losing them to predators. Inevitably you’re going come across a pile of feathers in the woods by the coop, so you don’t want to get too attached to them. Also, if you name the chickens, they become your pets. You don’t want to think about eating your pets.

Now, it’s also important to make sure animals are cared for and treated humanely, she told me. But naming the chickens takes it one step too far. There’s a difference between dignifying them and sentimentalizing them.

What’s your favorite thing to name? Have you seen the power of labels bring beings and objects to life?

It’s funny, children are encouraged to name their toys as a developmental milestone. Stuffed animals are the most popular example. It’s fundamental to human cognition to give them names because doing so enshrines the objects in the child’s memory. Later being able to recall them stimulates learning.

And yet, there’s no reason to stop once we get older. Personally, I find naming things as an adult not only fun, but also meaningful. If I choose to anoint an entity in the world with a word of my choosing, my relationship to that thing drops down a level deeper.

Naming triggers bonding. Suddenly we’re connected in a much more robust way. Even if I know this first name is an arbitrary label with no inherent meaning, that label still brings something to life.

What’s more, naming satisfies my sense of structure. Not unlike a scientist following the proper nomenclature for discovering a new species, naming is a way of placing order on our world by helping us differentiate between things we care about. It prevents confusion by being specific.

Fun fact, before the seventeen hundreds, there were no standard scientific naming rules. People simply used common names for organisms they described.

Sounds boring to me. I don’t know about you, but giving things names makes me feel human. It’s this specific desire that’s fundamental to our species. Naming is one of those practices that transcends culture, religion, geography and chronology.

Here’s an example from the tech world.

Siri is the name of everyone’s favorite artificial intelligence system. But that wasn’t an accident. Apple knew nobody would say, hey phone, where is the nearest gas station? No, they want to use the object’s name to make conversing with this nine hundred dollar hunk of metal and glass feel natural.

Siri, can you find me a gas station before my piece of shit rental car breaks down on the side of the road? Thanks.

My old startup was another tech example in the power of naming.

We were big on naming our projects. That’s an act of creation in and of itself. Before a new initiative or a project has a name, people have little power to work with and communicate about it. Which makes collaboration more difficult. Whereas once we’ve labeled our new thing, now it’s more real. Naming cements psychological ownership. We have changed how we see the thing by giving it the gift of visibility. And public usage of its personal idiom via everyday conversation becomes a sign of relationship solidarity. Once our work has been named, oftentimes ridiculously, we can identify, organize and improve it.

There’s actual scientific research behind this process. Hinton explains in his outstanding book on information architecture that we use language to add structures to our environment, structures that inform us in ways that wouldn’t exist without language.

Language is infrastructure, and it can actually create new invariants for us to interact with an inhabit. Labeling is how we bring stability to our experience and make explicit sense of the world as humans. Labeling functions as a kind of augmented reality trick where we supplement our surroundings with new structure.

Ultimately, you don’t need to be a child hugging their stuffed animal to name what’s important to you. Labels make things easier to classify and comprehend. Use them intentionally, and watch your relationships with people and things deepen.

Unless you own a poultry farm.

Not only should you not count your chickens before they hatch, but you should also not give them nametags once they do.

B’gock.

What arbitrary label with no inherent meaning might bring something of yours to life?