PSYC212 Social and Applied Psychology

schemata

The representation of knowledge about a concept.

The cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among those attributes

social cognition

how people select, interpret, remember and use social information to make judgments and decisions

types of schemata

person schema, role schema, self schema, group schema, trait schema, scripts, content-free

person schema

knowlege structure about specific people

role schema

knowlege structure about role occupants

self-schema

schema about yourself

group schema

knowledge structure about specific groups (stereotypes)

trait schema

knowledge structure about trait attributes

scripts

schemas about events

content-free

how the world works (causal schema)

central traits

concepts that have a disproportionate influence on impressions of others

traits that shape our perception

ex cold vs warm

Solomon Asch showed that certain central traits (like warm/cold) influence how other traits are interpreted and disproportionately affect the overall impression of a person.

content-free schemas

-cognitive, content-free schema

• The world is an orderly, stable & fair—People get what they deserve

Defensive mechanism: Reduces anxiety and feelings of vulnerability, as well as mortality

• Can lead to increase victim-blaming & decreased empathy

schemata our cognitive GPS (what are some pros of schemata)

• Schemata help create a sense of order, structure,and coherence in our social world

• Schemata actively fill in the gaps of our experience and memory

• Schemata make cognitive social processing more efficient

• But Schemata only appear to be accurate representations of reality

schemta improve ability to navigate day-to-day life, yet narrow cognitive focus

real world consequences of hostile media effect

Lead to missing individuating information

• Reduced accuracy, and resistance to change once invoked

• Example: Hostile Media Effect

the tendency for opposing groups to perceive media reports as biased against their side.

Media cannot be biased in both directions simultaneously

self-fulfilling prohecy

-another real world consequence

-people have an expectation about what another person is like, which influnces how they act towards that person which causes that person to behave consitenlty with peoples original expectation

perseverance effect

-real world consequence #3

-The finding that people’s beliefs aboutthemselves and the social world persist even

after the evidence supporting these beliefsis discredited

miller et al, 2018

-study exsample of changing schemata

• Children increasingly draw women as scientists from 1980–2018

• Still proportionally less than men

• Less so in older children (increased gender-scientist stereotypes &exposure)

bookkeeping

slow change in the face of accumulating evidence

conversion

sudden and massive change once a critical mass of disconfirming evidance has accumulated

subtyping

schema morphs in. a subcategory to accommodate disconfirming evidence