What is Schema and Schematic Processing? [Social Psychology]

  

One way we assign meaning is to use the information we collected to assign the person to a category or group, which makes them seem less like distinct individuals. Each category has a schema or a set of beliefs or expectations about the group that are presumed to apply to all members of the group and are based on experience we have had with other members of that group. For instance, you are expected to wait long for the doctor’s appointment so whenever you go to the doctor, you don’t complain for waiting at the counter.

Schema is a well-organized structure of cognition about social entity like a person, group, role or event.

Schema is a mental structure containing information related to self, other people, situations and events.

Schemas are defined as the mental framework around a specific theme that help us in organizing social information and guiding the processing of such information (Baron, 2006).

Characteristics of schema:

·       It helps us to organize social information, guide our actions and process information relevant to particular contexts.

·       People in same groups or society share same schemas.

·       Schemas make cognitive processing move quicker.

·       Schemas are of different types, such as-

1. Role schema: which relate to how people carrying out certain roles or jobs are to act.
2. Event schema: tells us what is to occur in certain situations such as at a party or in a chemistry lab.
3. Person schema: relates to certain types of people such as firefighters, introverts /extroverts, geeks, or jocks.
4. Self-schema: relates to generalization about one’s own characteristics based on past experiences.
5. Group schemas also called as stereotypes: tend to indicate such behaviors or attributes which are typical of a member of a certain group of people.

 Schematic Processing

The processing of schema has an impact on our social cognition as processes such as attention. Encoding and retrieval are engaged in it.

1. Attention: It refers to what we notice selectively. Schemas provide us with a criterion for being selective. Information regarding stimulus or person, which is consistent with the schema, is likely to be noticed and entered into the consciousness. Information that is inconsistent with the schemas is often ignored unless it is extraordinary in some sense.

2. Encoding: It refers to matching one’s existing schema with the incoming information. Once schemas are formed, info consistent with them is easier to encode, rather than encoding inconsistent info.

3. Retrieval: It refers to how we recover info from memory in order to use it in some manner. Schema-consistent information is better recalled than schema-inconsistent information.