Schemas

Schemas are a form of automatic thinking that people use to help them interpret people, places, objects, and situations based on their prior experiences. A schema consists of mental frameworks that help them organize their social world. It is influenced by the information that people notice, think about or remember. People use schemas everyday to help them quickly interpret a situation, organize the perceptions and help make a choice of how to act efficiently without effort. The accessibility of the schema often influences the social interpretation. The accessibility can be drawn from a chronic, current or recent experience schema.

Heuristics are a type of schema that is commonly used. Heuristics are how people come to make decisions, make judgments and to solve problems. There is judgmental, representative and availability heuristics. If a person has too many schemas already developed that seems to fit a given situation they will use judgmental heuristics. Many times the use of such a shortcut is not accurate.

The representation heuristic is a mental shortcut to clarify something according to how similar it’s to a typical case. The representation heuristic would be used if a person wanted to identify where someone is from. People may interpret a situation differently based on prior experience. For example if you meet a person who loves the cold and likes to ski you might think that they live in a cold state like New York.

The availability heuristic is the frequency of an event based on how easily something comes to mind. For example if the news shows a story about people being raped people are more likely to think about being raped when walking alone at night and will be more cautious. By recently heightening a person’s awareness of such an issue it could be helpful where someone needs to be more careful.

Stereotyping is another shortcut people use when considering ideas about a race or gender. Stereotypes can be good or bad. Many times it can cause people to interpret situations incorrectly. A positive stereotype could be that Asians are good at math or blacks are good dancers and a negative stereotype could be that all Muslims are terrorists. Obviously these stereotypes are not necessarily true or accurate. There are gender stereotypes as well. Men are depicted as being strong and adventurous while women are depicted as being great cooks and like to take care of their appearances. Stereotyping could be helpful in a situation where making snap judgments about someone could help a person make a quick decision but a person needs to keep in mind that margin of error can be high.