Schemas: Psychology and Social Cognition

The self could be defined simply as the sense of who we are, and who we are is created and developed over time and through interactions with other individuals in society. Charles Horton Cooley compares the development of self to a mirror in which an individual’s self is basically a reflection of how we think we are viewed by society. This idea of the “looking-glass self” focuses on how we imagine others see us opposed to how they really see us. There are three phases of the looking-glass self that repeats throughout life. In the first phase, an individual imagines he or she appear to others. The second phase involves imagining how others would judge him or her, based off that appearance. In the final phase, the individual uses the assumptions from the first two phases to define his or her

“A stereotype is a rigid, oversimplified, often exaggerated belief that is applied both to an entire social category of people and to each individual within it. Stereotypes form the basis for prejudice, which in turn is used to justify discrimination and attitudes. They can be positive as well as negative.” Stereotypes exist within any social group, and social group or cliques which are groups of people who share similar characteristics and interests such as the ones priorly said.

A "stereotype" is a social perception of an individual in terms of group membership or physical attributes. Stereotypes are generalizations made about a group and then attributed to all members of that group.

Carol Rogers. (2011). Self Concept. Available: http://www.simplypsychology.org/carl-rogers.html. Last accessed 06/11/2014 According to Rogers (1959), we want to sense, experience and behave in ways which are dependable with our self-image and which replicate what we would like to be like known as our ideal-self. The closer our self-image and ideal-self are to each other, the more steady or congruent we are the advanced our sense of self-worth is.

A stereotype is a widely held, but fixed and oversimplified image of a person or thing. Stereotypes can drastically affect the way people view themselves and others.

The first cognitive psychologist to study this important concept is Bartlett who concluded that these expectancies are called schemas. These schemas are usually formed by the culture in which one lives in. (Bartlett, 1932).

An example would be a student who believes all teachers are intimidating and bossy from past experiences, but after having a shy and timid teacher, their view may change their internal schema and stereotype of all teachers being individual. Scientists may want to study the reactions of the student and how he or she will integrate the new schema. Social cognition researchers are also interested to study the regulation of activated schemas. It is widely perceived that the situational activation of schemata is automatic, outside of conscious control. However, the regulation and activation of social schemas is self-regulatory and independently motivated.

A schema is a cognitive pattern or structure comprised of beliefs and perceptions. Worldview is a type of schema, which can be formed by cultural cues, family socialization, and identity. Schemas can change over time, and they can be helpful for organizing the complex world. Some schemas are helpful in that they anchor the mind and emotions in the midst of an overwhelming amount of information and stimuli in the environment. However, schemas can easily become maladaptive. Examples of how schemas become maladaptive are most noticeable with regards to stereotyping, biases, and paranoia. Abuse and trauma can significantly and adversely impact an individual's schemata. Conflicting schemata can also lead to experiences of cognitive dissonance or confused identity.

Stereotypes refers to the features imposed upon individual groups which are conventional, formulaic and exaggerated regarding to their nationality, race and sexual alignment, among many others (Stuart Ewen & Elizabeth Ewen; 2006). These features tend to be over simplications of the groups involved. For instance, somebody who meets some few people from a certain country and finds them to be old fashioned and quit may spread to all the people from the country in question are reserved and quiet. A simplification like this doesn’t tolerate diversity among groups and may lead in stigmatization and wrong perception of the groups if the stereotypes associated to them are largely negative (Hilton &von, 1996). Even the so known as

A schema according to Henry Gleitman (2007) is a mental representation that summarises what we know about a certain event or situation. Schemas reflect the fact that many aspects of our experience are redundant and schemas seek to provide a summary of this redundancy.

A stereotype is a view or idea that is placed on a person or group of people normally based off of a one time encounter. It can also be the way a person or group of persons is viewed by someone. Most stereotypical remarks are racist or rude and consist of false facts. Although some stereotypes are

The first approach to self-schema development we will evaluate is Self-Discrepancy Theory (SDT) (Higgins, 1987). In this theory self-schemas develop to drive the actual self (who somebody is now) towards the ideal self (who somebody wants to be) and the ought self (who somebody should be according to others). Reflected appraisals build a network of the actual self, and this knowledge is used to move towards the ideal and ought selves. Discrepancies between actual and ideal result in dejection, and discrepancies between actual and ought result in agitation (Higgins, Bond, Klein, &

Social cognition is the underlying processes that make social behavior possible, such as attention and memory. As we expand our knowledge about the brain, cognitive neuroscience has become increasingly important to understand these processes. Biological structures and processes in the brain help us navigate our social environment, like recognizing a friend’s face in a crowd, making assumptions about a person, or feeling empathy towards others.

For the private self-schema task, the participants were then given a task designed to measure to the extent at which they had articulated a private self-schema in each of

George Herbert Mead’s theory of the “I and the Me” claims that people are an object to the audience due to the emergence of the perspective of the others. The self is recognized as a social object set by our social structure and behavior. Mead divided the self into two separate parts. The “I” is known as the actor of the self. The “me” is the object that is formed by the evaluations of the audience’s perspective towards the self. Thus, the “me” controls and discipline the “I” of the self. The concept of the “I and the Me” was first derived from the work of self development. Mead wanted to focus on how the two separate part of the self define the identity of the person through symbolic interaction.