Automatic Thinking

Schemas are preconceived ideas about people, places, objects or situations that quickly organize perceptions to act socially efficient without effort. People use schemas everyday.

Heuristics are a type of schema that is commonly used. Heuristics are how people come to make decisions, make judgments and to solve problems. If there is too much information the person may use judgmental heuristics. The representation heuristic is a mental shortcut to clarify something according of how similar it’s to a typical case. The availability heuristic is the frequency of an event based on how easily something comes to mind.

One advantage of heuristics is problem solving. It helps to simplify a complex problem and reduce the number of possible solutions into a manageable set. An advantage of the availability heuristic is that it helps in memory retrieval.

Stereotyping is another schema that can be used. Stereotyping is holding ideas about a certain group of people. This may cause people to interpret situations incorrectly. Stereotypes can be good or bad. A disadvantage of stereotyping is that they suggest that people are prone to certain behaviors. Social factors have contributed to this phenomenon. Another con to stereotyping is prejudice. This causes people to judge a person before even meeting them. The sayings don’t judge a book by its cover is an example that proves that appearances are not the only way to understand who a person really is. Stereotyping can make people ignore the differences between individuals and think things about people that may not be true. Stereotyping can prevent new friendships from building because of certain preconceived notions about them. Stereotyping can have an impact on the individual’s identity in a certain group. If a child learns that their nationality is labeled as lazy they might start to believe that they are lazy. Stereotyping can cause discrimination. For example a person is charged with a crime based on their gender and the color of their skin. Stereotyping can also cause hate crimes. If people feel negatively and strongly toward a certain group they may be more incline to harm people of that certain group.

An advantage of stereotyping is that it enables people to respond rapidly to situations especially if they have experienced them before. Stereotyping does simplify people’s social world when they meet new people. This helps people to put people into manageable boxes to form expectations about people and make situations more predictable and easier to understand.

Automatic thinking is thoughts that happen automatically in a given situation. It is automatic because people don’t create them and they are based on beliefs people have about themselves and the world that they live in. Automatic thoughts create feelings and behavior. For example when a person pulls out in front of you automatically you think that was rude and dangerous. One disadvantage of automatic thinking is loss in a person’s abilities. For example if Ken always gets bad grades on his math tests he might think that he’s a terrible math student. Then he may not take the necessary steps to correct the situation. Another bad thing about automatic thoughts is assuming that a person has a certain opinion about us. For example if someone corrects our mistake in a conversation we might think they think that we are dumb. But in reality they may not think that at all they maybe are only attempting to express accuracy.

People can be very critical about themselves really more than other people are towards them. Self criticism can be a form of emotional reasoning. For example Ted is going to give a speech to a group of people. When he goes up to the podium he is nervous. He thinks I am not very prepared for this speech even though he has put a lot of time into it.

Shouldering is when someone criticizes themselves by concentrating on things that they should be doing instead of what they actually are doing. For example if they are attempting to take a nap, they can’t take the nap because all they can think about is that they should clean the house or be making lunch. Automatic thinking can cause blaming. If Megan’s boyfriend breaks up with her because he moves away she might think he broke up with her because she is ugly and stupid when it really has nothing to do with that.

One advantage of automatic thoughts would be to access what is going on and to make a snap judgment based on information at hand. This could be used in a situation where the use of automatic thoughts is desired like in crisis situations.