Schemas: Psychology and Social Cognition
Schema Theory
1. Introduction
A schema contains both abstract knowledge and specific examples about a particular social object. It ‘provides hypotheses about incoming stimuli, which includes plans for interpreting and gathering schema-related information. Schemas therefore give us some sense of prediction and control of the social world. They guide what we attend to, what we perceive, what we remember and what we infer. All schemas appear to serve similar functions – they all influence the encoding (taking in and interpretation) of new information, memory for old information and inferences about missing information. Not only are schemas functional, but they are also essential to our well-being. A dominant theme in social cognition research is that we are cognitive misers, economizing as much as we can on the effort we need to expend when processing information. So schemas are a kind of mental short-hand used to simplify reality and facilitate processing. Schema research has been applied to four main areas: person schemas, self-schemas, role schemas and event schemas (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). 2. Understanding Social perception
During the 1980s social cognition research began to posit that people apprehended and made sense of complex social information by simplifying and organizing this information into meaningful cognitive structures called schemas. The concept of schema has appeared in various psychological writings, but the most influential tradition of research, which preceded the work on social schema theory, was Bartlett’s book on Remembering (1932). Bartlett was an English psychologist whose research in the 1930s concerned human memory for pictures, figures and stories. He argued that people organize images and information into meaningful patterns and these patterns facilitate later memory recall. This view was different to the most dominant view at the time, which argued that people perceived and represented information as isolated elements. As
1. Introduction
A schema contains both abstract knowledge and specific examples about a particular social object. It ‘provides hypotheses about incoming stimuli, which includes plans for interpreting and gathering schema-related information. Schemas therefore give us some sense of prediction and control of the social world. They guide what we attend to, what we perceive, what we remember and what we infer. All schemas appear to serve similar functions – they all influence the encoding (taking in and interpretation) of new information, memory for old information and inferences about missing information. Not only are schemas functional, but they are also essential to our well-being. A dominant theme in social cognition research is that we are cognitive misers, economizing as much as we can on the effort we need to expend when processing information. So schemas are a kind of mental short-hand used to simplify reality and facilitate processing. Schema research has been applied to four main areas: person schemas, self-schemas, role schemas and event schemas (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). 2. Understanding Social perception
During the 1980s social cognition research began to posit that people apprehended and made sense of complex social information by simplifying and organizing this information into meaningful cognitive structures called schemas. The concept of schema has appeared in various psychological writings, but the most influential tradition of research, which preceded the work on social schema theory, was Bartlett’s book on Remembering (1932). Bartlett was an English psychologist whose research in the 1930s concerned human memory for pictures, figures and stories. He argued that people organize images and information into meaningful patterns and these patterns facilitate later memory recall. This view was different to the most dominant view at the time, which argued that people perceived and represented information as isolated elements. As