THE STORY:
Recall your experience when you were a young kid getting on a bicycle for the first time. You paid tremendous attention to keeping your balance and steering. Perhaps you needed stabilizers until you've mastered the skill. Yet, some weeks or months later, you became competent and didn’t have to relearn each time you cycle away. That's because you generalized from one experience to the next.

THE GOOD:
Do you know that your ability to generalize from past experiences is an important skill that saves huge amounts of time and energy in learning about the world? These generalized experiences can also be represented by words. Think of the word ‘car’. You know what one’s like: you’ve sat or driven on many and seen different types. As a kid, you discover that the word represents a particular car. Then you make a generalization. So the next time you see a car, you’re able to name it. And now, whenever you see a car, you understand its function.

THE BAD:
Although vitally important to communication, the skill of generalization can also limit your experience of options and differences in certain contexts. When you have a bad experience, you may expect it to happen time and time again. For example, a man who experiences a string of unhappy romantic encounters may conclude that ‘all women are a pain’ and decide that he’s never going to meet a woman with whom he can live happily.

THE CONCLUSION:
Generalizing is a way of simplifying things in our mind. And by ignoring the exceptions to the rule and making things absolute we are cutting down the variables to make an easier-to-manage representation in our mind.