The i people and e people are not over yet, why are the strong people and the weak people starting again?

After i-people and e-people, new personality categories have emerged on social media, namely strong people and weak people. What are strong people and weak people? Why are personality labels still popular after decades?

A while ago, Xiao Lajiao saw a post: Are you a light person or a strong person?

What the hell? Can people also tell salty and sweet food apart?

When I clicked on it, I realized that it is similar to i person e person, and it is another new personality classification.

The so-called indifferent person is someone who is indifferent to everything.

Be indifferent in mood, neither sad nor happy; speak indifferently, receive good things; work indifferently, work according to your mood, and get money by fate.

A strong person is someone who is very spiritual and often goes crazy. A strong person in life has many friends and attends parties all the time. A strong person in work is a roller coaster.

Ah, isn’t this a variation of i-man and e-man?

Then I checked again and found out that Danren Nongren has been popular for several months. He has been on the hot search list on Weibo and has spawned countless memes.

In the comment sections of these posts, countless people have tagged their friends to see whether the sentiment is strong or weak.

Seeing this, the poor friends will not only subconsciously identify themselves with the situation, but may also frown and mutter:

Why are you here again?

Yes, why are you here again?

Everyone still remembers the scene two years ago when the MBTI personality test swept the entire Chinese Internet.

When people introduce themselves, they always say i and e.

But the momentum of i and e did not last long. P and J people in the MBTI category suddenly became popular half a year ago. J people are often clear and organized, and they will make plans for doing things, while P people are better at improvisation.

The P and J people are still on the hot search, and the light and thick people are here again.

Do you think that's the end?

On social platforms, the media also divide netizens into socially fearful, socially supportive, and socially indifferent.

According to the element family, people's personalities are divided into air signs and water signs. The personalities and love patterns of "different signs" are different.

Seeing this, some friends may not understand.

A long time ago, people liked to label their friends' personalities according to the twelve zodiac signs.

Why are personality labels still so popular after decades?

To understand why, let's take a look at an example from a Reddit user:

The word "autism" was only coined a few decades ago, but the disorder has been around for a long time.

Imagine if you lived a few hundred years ago and a strange child appeared around you who was unwilling to speak and afraid to make eye contact.

The people in the town didn’t know what the child’s future would be like, and the child’s parents were also very worried.

Until one day, a doctor from afar came to take a look and said that the child was autistic.

He then told parents how to communicate, how to avoid irritating their children, and how to help their children find suitable jobs.

But the most important thing is that the doctor said: the child is not alone, there are many people like him in the world, and most of these autistic patients also live a happy and fulfilling life.

At this time, the label "autism" is a relief for the child's parents.

Tags are popular because they allow people with common experiences to find each other and no longer feel alone.

Let’s take Pepper’s personal experience as an example.

Last year, there was an issue of "Today's Best" on the official account that I still remember vividly. It was about how people would constantly confirm their car and seat numbers when taking the high-speed train.

Before reading this best article, Xiao La Jiao always thought that she was the only one like this, and even suspected that she had a character defect.

After reading everyone’s comments, I found that many people felt the same way. I felt relieved because I found a sense of belonging.

You see, human beings are wired to crave self-understanding and to seek approval from others.

Why are hashtag memes so popular?

Because what it is best at is bringing everyone a sense of belonging and allowing similar people to gather together for warmth.

In addition, hashtag memes are low-cost and can be mass-produced by grasping human nature. Naturally, they have become a topic that many self-media never get tired of, and then they appear in front of you and me every now and then.

It is true that label memes have a group-building effect and can also improve social efficiency, allowing everyone to quickly understand a person's personality and behavioral characteristics.

But Xiao Lajiao feels that once the label meme goes too far, what is presented is prejudice.

When I was in elementary school, many people were obsessed with zodiac signs.

When they meet a new partner, they always ask each other what their zodiac sign is. Once they find that their zodiac signs conflict with each other, although they don't say it out loud, the seeds of prejudice have been planted in their hearts.

Xiao La Jiao is a Libra, and I have actually heard someone mutter next to her: Be careful of scumbags.

What I didn’t expect was that the prejudice and misunderstanding this personality label brought to people reappeared in a different form more than a decade later.

One time, when Little Lajiao was having a party with some friends, they were having a lot of fun playing board games. One of them said, "Hey, aren't you from i?"

Isn't it? Do people really have to hide in a corner when they have a party as the Internet portrays?

Similar situations occur frequently on social platforms, with a very high number of likes.

For example, INFJs have no sense of boundaries, low emotional intelligence, and always mess up every relationship;

ISFJ is a typical people-pleaser, always playing the role of a nanny;

ESTJ is a typical egoist.

But is this really the case? I have INFJs around me, and I don’t think they have low emotional intelligence or lack of boundaries.

Well, once people are framed by labels, they will have preconceived ideas and prejudices.

Talk show blogger Hu Lan was labeled as having a "competitive mind" because he only slept for 3 hours while writing an article. As a result, everyone thought he only slept three hours a day.

There is also a famous experiment in psychology.

In 1972, Stanford University professor Rosenhan recruited eight normal people and asked them to go to a mental hospital for treatment. They only claimed that they had auditory hallucinations, and everything else was normal.

As a result, they were all successfully admitted to a psychiatric hospital, and seven of them were diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Rosenhan explained this: Medical staff have a fixed mindset that if you come to a mental hospital, you must be a mental patient, and it is easy to diagnose you as a mental patient.

This is because labels give people preconceived ideas and affect their own judgment.

Not only will labels create prejudice, but they can even affect yourself.

In the 1960s, there was a popular theory called labeling theory. Simply put, when people are labeled, they make their behavior consistent with the content of the label and become the person marked by the label.

Just like when Libra people learn that Libra has an indecisive character, the more they think about it, the more they will struggle to do things in the future.

If someone is found to be an INFJ, he or she will subconsciously find all the points on his or her body to prove that he or she is an INFJ, and then believe it without a doubt.

But in fact, he may not have many shortcomings.

This kind of psychological suggestion will somehow influence the way he judges things in the future.

Of course, the impact of labels is not entirely negative.

Some parents are good at using labels to make their children believe that they have such and such advantages and to guide them to make progress.

However, based on examples around me, I think labels bring more prejudice and negative implications.

Human nature is multidimensional and extremely complex.

Simply classifying human personality into a dozen or even dozens of types is not enough to 100% correctly describe a person.

I once read a book called "Is It Bad to Be Introverted?"

The author is an introvert, but she has a "socialization switch" that turns on in certain situations, turning her into an extrovert who can easily talk to strangers.

If you are also an introvert, you may find it strange that this is simply impossible for you.

You can raise doubts because the terms “introversion” and “extroversion” are too simplistic and crude ways of dividing personality, which leads to great deviations among “the same type of people”.

In fact, the twelve zodiac signs, water signs, air signs, light people and strong people, or the MBTI with a layer of "scientific" cloak, they all do not match your description and have deviations.

It’s just that these deviations are not obvious enough. Under the Barnum effect, you don’t think it’s wrong and even take it as your life creed.

If I were to say, hashtag memes will only become more and more frequent on the Internet in the future, and I sincerely suggest that everyone just have fun with them.

Your personality and the way you deal with things are not determined by the day you were born, nor will they be affected by the stars in the sky, nor can they be summarized by four simple letters.

The only one who can define you is yourself.

Image and information sources:

Xiaohongshu, Douyin

Reddit : Why are people nowadays obsessed with labeling everything?

Wikipedia: Labeling theory, Barnum effect, Rosenhan experiment