What is social schemata? |

Introduction

Life would be very complicated if people did not have the ability to store things in memory or to organize the information that did get stored; people would have to relearn information over and over. Because of memories of past experiences, people do not have to relearn what an apple is, for example, or what to do with it each time they come in contact with one.

A well-organized memory system also helps people make educated guesses. People are able to conclude that because of an apple’s texture, it will not make a satisfactory baseball. People are able to make educated guesses because the human brain has the ability to categorize objects and to generalize from past experiences to new experiences. Indeed, social psychologists believe that the brain has not only the ability to categorize but also the tendency to do so. For example, a very young city child who is taken to the zoo may point to a goat and say, “Doggy!”

The brain’s memory system categorizes objects, people, and events by connecting different pieces of related information together. Social psychologists call this collection of related information a schema. The young child knows that “doggies,” for example, have fur, four legs, and wet noses. Somehow, the brain links these pieces of information together. In the child’s mind, there is an idea of the typical characteristics an object must have for it to be a “doggy.”

Types of Social Schemata

All people have many schemata, covering the entire range of topics about which a given person knows things. Some of these topics are social in nature; some are not. If the content of a schema concerns a person, group of people, or social event, the schema is called a social schema. One type of social schema is a script. A script is a schema about a social event, such as a “good party” or “going to class.” Another type of social schema is a stereotype, which is a schema about a group of people. If a person were to list, for example, everything that individual could think of regarding “criminals,” including personal opinions or experiences, that person would have listed the contents of his or her “criminal” stereotype.

A third type of social schema is a self-schema. Each of a person’s many self-schemata combine to make up the person’s overall self-concept, and the self-schema most salient at any given moment is called the working self-concept. A person might, for example, have a self-schema regarding himself or herself as a student, another one as a man or woman, and yet another regarding his or her athletic abilities. Each self-schema might have many, or few, pieces of information. A person’s self-schema as a student, for example, might include information about where the individual goes to school, the classes being taken, the level of enjoyment of student life, memories of the first day in kindergarten, or memorable books. Some of these pieces of information might also be included in other schemata; the information stored in the “student” self-schema might also be stored in a script about school, for example.

Another type of social schema is the relational schema. Relational schemata are cognitive structures that exist within an interpersonal, interdependent context. Relational schemata are truly social psychological in nature, as they reflect people’s views about themselves and others, not in an isolated context but in the context of others. Relational schemata contain three aspects. First is the self-schema in relation to another person, or how the self is experienced in interaction with another. A good example of this relational self-schema is the distinct self-schema a person has when interacting with a parent or romantic partner. The second component of relational schemata is a partner or particular other schema within the context of an interaction or relationship. For instance, a person holds a distinct schema of a parent, unique to his or her particular parent/child relationship. Finally, relational schemata also include an interpersonal script composed of expectations about how the relationship will and should transpire based on past experiences within the relationship. These three components of relational schemata interact to influence expectations and behavior. As a result, a person having a relational schema with a parent would have a specific self-schema when interacting with the parent (“When I’m with Mom I feel incompetent”), a specific schema of the parent within the interaction (“When Mom is with me, she is very critical”), and, finally, an interpersonal script specific to the parent-child relationship (“If I bring up school, Mom will start yelling at me”).

Social Schemata as Mental Shortcuts

Schemata, whether they are self-schemata, scripts, stereotypes, relational schemata, or other types of schemata, help people organize and understand new events. They function as shortcuts to help people navigate through both their physical and social worlds. Just as a person’s schema for an apple helps the individual recognize and know what to do with an apple, a person’s social schemata help the individual function in social situations. For example, most high school juniors know what to do in a new classroom without having to be told because their “classroom” schema, created during previous semesters, already holds information about how to behave in class. Schemata, then, help people simplify the world; they do not constantly have to relearn information about events, concepts, objects, or people.

To understand how social schemata help people simplify the world, social psychologists study the cognitive processes that schemata affect. This area of study is called social cognition
. Cognitive processes are thinking processes, such as paying attention, that enable the brain to perceive events. Research has shown that schemata affect what people pay attention to, what they store in permanent memory and then later recall, how they interpret events, and even how people behave (although “behaving” is not considered a cognitive process).

Impact on Memory and Interpretation

Research in social cognition shows that having a schema makes it more likely that a person will pay attention to events that are relevant to the schema than to events that are irrelevant. Schemata also make it more likely that a person will store in permanent memory and later recall new information that confirms the beliefs that person already has in his or her schemata.

An interesting study illuminating this tendency had research participants view a videotape of a woman eating dinner with her husband. Half of the participants had previously learned that this woman was a librarian, while the other half had been told that the woman was a waitress. The researchers found that when they later asked participants to recall what they had seen on the videotape, those who had been told the woman was a librarian recalled more information consistent with the “librarian schema,” such as the fact that the woman wore glasses or that she played the piano. Those participants who had been told the woman was a waitress recalled more information consistent with a “waitress schema,” for instance, that the woman had a bowling ball in the room or that there were no bookshelves.

There are exceptions to this general rule. When a schema is either very new or very well established, inconsistent information becomes more important and is often more likely to be recalled than when a schema is only moderately established. For example, if one is just getting to know a new person or if the person is one’s best friend, information inconsistent with one’s schema is more likely to stand out.

Schemata also affect how people interpret events. When people have a schema for an event or person, they are likely to interpret that event or the person’s behavior in a way that is consistent with the beliefs already held in the schema. For example, researchers found that when participants were exposed to either a list of words designed to bring to mind a schema of an adventurous person (brave, courageous, daring) or to invoke the schema of a reckless person (foolish, careless), their later judgments of a paragraph they read about a fictional person named Donald, who loved to go white-water rafting and skydiving, were influenced. Specifically, participants whose adventurous schema had been activated judged Donald positively, while those whose reckless schema had been activated judged Donald negatively.

Finally, people tend to act in ways that are consistent with the schemata they hold in memory, and their actions can affect the actions of others in such a way as to confirm the original beliefs. All these cognitive memory biases result in confirmation of the beliefs that are already held; thus, these biases often produce self-fulfilling prophecies.

The Negative Impact

Although social schemata can facilitate people’s understanding of their social world, they also can bias people’s social perceptions. Often, people are not accurate recorders of the world around them; rather, their own beliefs and expectations, clustered and stored as schemata, distort their perceptions of social events. Such distortions help explain why stereotypes are so difficult to change.

If a person has a schema, a stereotype, about criminals and then meets a man who is introduced as a criminal, perceptions of this person can be biased by the schema. Because schemata affect what people notice, this person will be more likely to notice things about this man that are consistent with his or her schema than things that are irrelevant. Perhaps the person believes that criminals use foul language but has no expectations regarding the type of listening skills a criminal might have. In this case, the person might be more likely to notice when the criminal swears than to notice his empathic listening skills. Then, because schemata affect what is stored in and recalled from memory, the person might be more likely to put into memory, and later remember, the criminal’s swearing. Even if the person did notice his good listening skills, he or she would be less likely to store that in memory, or to recall it later, than to store information about his swearing.

On the other hand, if a person believes that criminals are not very empathic, he or she might be especially likely to notice this new acquaintance’s empathic listening skills. It is unlikely, though, that a person would change his or her schema to fit this new information; what is more likely is that he or she would interpret this information in such a way as to make it fit the stereotype—for example, consider this one criminal to be the exception to the rule, or conclude he developed his listening skills as a con to get out of jail more quickly.

Finally, a person very well might treat a criminal in a way that fits his or her beliefs about him. For example, a person who believes criminals lie might express doubt over things he says. The criminal might then respond to these doubts by acting defensively, which might then confirm the other person’s belief that criminals act aggressively or that they have reasons to feel guilty. The criminal also might respond to doubting comments by actually lying. He might have the attitude, “If you expect me to lie, I might as well.” What has happened, in this case, is this: a person’s beliefs have affected his or her behavior, which in turn has affected the criminal’s behavior, and the criminal’s behavior now confirms the person’s stereotype. This chain of events is one of the problems created by schemata. Very often, negative beliefs make it more likely that a person will find or produce confirmation for these beliefs.

These biases in information processing also can apply to how people perceive themselves, and thus explain why it can be difficult to change a negative self-concept. If a woman sees herself as incompetent, for example, she is likely to notice when her own behavior or thoughts are less than adequate, to store those examples in memory, and to recall such examples from memory. Furthermore, if she engages in an activity and her performance is up for interpretation, she will be more likely to evaluate that performance as incompetent than as competent. Finally, if she believes she is incompetent, this can lead her actually to act that way. For example, her belief may lead her to feel nervous when it is time to perform, and her nervousness might then lead her to perform less competently than she otherwise might have. This provides her with more proof of her own incompetence, another self-fulfilling prophecy.

History of Research

Research in social cognition, the area of social psychology that focuses on social schemata, evolved as a hybrid from two areas of psychology: social psychology and cognitive psychology. In 1924, Floyd Allport published a book titled Social Psychology; this early text was the first to assert that an individual’s behavior is affected by the presence and actions of other individuals. In the 1950s, though, Kurt Lewin asserted that an individual is more influenced by his or her perceptions of other individuals than by what the other individuals actually are doing. For many years after, a popular subfield in social psychology was person perception. Researchers studying person perception discovered many factors that influence people’s judgments and impressions of others. For example, researchers showed that individuals are more influenced by unpleasant than by pleasant information when forming an impression of a stranger. Person perception research focused on how individuals perceive others, rather than on how individuals are influenced by others, and such research provided one of the main foundations for the field of social cognition.

The second main foundation was research on cognitive processes. In the 1980s, researchers studying person perception realized they could better understand why people perceive others as they do by learning more about cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology was first developed to explain how individuals learn—for example, to explain the relationship between a child’s ability to pay attention, put information into memory, and recall information, and the child’s ability to learn information from a textbook. As cognitive psychologists created techniques for studying these cognitive processes, researchers studying person perception realized that the same processes that affect a schoolchild’s ability to learn textbook material also might affect how individuals learn about other individuals. As these new cognitive research techniques began answering many questions in the field of person perception, that field branched into a second field, the field called social cognition.

Practical Applications of Research

In the 1970s and 1980s, Aaron T. Beck
demonstrated that individuals who are depressed have a self-schema for depression and also a hopeless schema about the world in general. Beck’s work has been extremely influential in the understanding of depression. Because of his work, one of the major approaches to treating depression is to help the depressed individual change his or her thoughts and cognitive processes.

Understanding that schemata can bias people’s thinking can help people resist such biases. Resisting the biases can help people change parts of their self-concepts, their stereotypes of others, or even their schemata about their loved ones. If a person sees his or her roommate as messy, for example, that individual might be especially likely to notice and remember the roommate’s messy behaviors and may respond by cleaning up after the roommate, nagging, or joining the roommate in being messy. The roommate might then rebel against all these responses by becoming even more messy, resulting in a downward spiral. If the person’s roommate also is his or her spouse, this can lead to marital problems. Not all self-fulfilling prophecies have these types of unpleasant consequences, but to stop the cycle of those that do, people need to search actively for evidence that disconfirms their schemata.

One of the earliest contributions from the field of social cognition and social schemata research was a better understanding of interracial problems. Before their understanding of social schemata, social psychologists had been interested in discovering the factors that lead to unpleasant feelings toward other racial groups and the conditions that would eliminate such feelings. Research on social schemata helped explain unpleasant intergroup relations by showing that thoughts, that is, schemata, can be resistant to change for reasons that have nothing to do with unpleasant feelings toward a group; the biases in attention, storing information in memory, recalling information, and interpreting events can occur even when unpleasant feelings are not present. Just as a young child’s brain perceives a goat to be a “doggy,” an adult’s brain also tends to perceive new events in ways that fit information already held in memory.

Social psychologists came to understand that cognitive processes also affect many other psychological phenomena that formerly were explained by emotional processes alone. For example, social schemata contribute to psychologists’ understanding of why crime victims do not always receive help, why bullies initiate fights, and why some teenagers are so angry with their parents.

Social schemata, studied by social psychologists, have such far-reaching effects that researchers in areas of psychology other than social psychology also study them. For example, personality psychologists study how social schemata affect self-concept, and clinical psychologists study how social schemata can inhibit or facilitate therapy sessions. Social schemata themselves may simplify people’s understanding of social events, but the study of schemata has greatly enriched the understanding of the social perceiver.

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