Do People Always Use Schemas?

Schemas are important because they help people make sense of experience quickly. If we approached every situation as if for the first time, it would be impossible for us to function in our everyday lives. Schemas, then, represent our social learning, the social categories that we use to impute meaning to the people we meet and the situations we encounter.

 

But as we also noted earlier in the chapter, there are liabilities to schematic processioning. Sometimes we make assumptions about people and situations on the basis of our schemas that turn out not to be true. If we had paid more attention to the information at hand instead of jumping to conclusions on the basis of our schemas, certain mistakes could be avoided. For example, categorizing another person as loud-mouthed, opinionated, arrogant, and conservative may not matter much under most circumstances, but if the person happens to be the father of the woman you are hoping to date, you might want to pay closer attention to his qualities and opinions.

• Outcome Dependency. Under certain curcumstances we pay less attention to our schemas and more attention to the data at hand. What are those circcumstances? One condition that leads to less frequent use of schemas and more attention to the information is outcome dependency. When your outcomes depend on someone else’s actions, you pay more attention to the other person (Berscheld, Graziano, Monson, & Dermer, 1976, Rush & Russell,1988) and to schema-inconsistent information, apparently because it is potentially informative (Erber & Fiske, 1984). When people’s outcomes are involved, they probe for more information about others (Darley, Fleming, Hilton, & Swann, 1988). For example, competitors remember more about members of a group with which they are in competition than do those not in competition with the group (Judd & Park, 1988).

• Need to Be Accurate. The need to be accurate is another condition that leads people to pay more attention to data and less attention to their schemas. Asked if the nerdy person is smart, you may draw on your schema which tells you that nerds usually are smary. However, if it is up to you to decide whether or not to admit him to your debating team, you will probably want more information than your stereotype about needs will provide. Consequently, you will pay closer attention to his actual behavior, focusing less on the ways in which he matches your schema for nerds.

• Accountability. When people have to justify their decisions to other people and accountability is therefore high, they tend to go beyond the schema to look more closely at the data (Tetlock & Boettger, 1989). For example, you will probably pay more attention to information about another person if you must decide whether to admit him to your fraternity than if you are simply asked your impression of him.

• Time Pressure. Conversely, other facts favor schema use over careful consideration of the data. For example, when people are forming impressions or making decisions under time pressure, they tend to use their schemas more. In one study, male and female participants were asked to judge the suitability of male and female candidates for particular jobs. When the decisions were made under time pressure conditions, male participants as well as female participants with conservative attitudes toward women tended to discriminate against the female job applicants. In the absence of time pressure, however, discrimination toward the female applicants was less strong. Under time pressure conditions, then, the participants resorted to their attitudes abou men and women in jobs for making the judgments, whereas when they had time to consider the evidence and found that the female applicants were at least as well qualified as the male applicants, their degree of discrimination against the female candidates was considerably less (Bechtold, Naccarato, & Zanna, 1986).

                We also fall back on our schemas when all the available information seems to fir the schema well and when we are not particularly motivated to examine the data more thoroughly. However, when we are told that a task is important or when some of the information is incongruent with the schema, we are mre likely to engage in systematic processing of the data (Maheswaran & Chaiken, 1991).

                To summarize, then, when there are pressures in the situation to be accurate, people tend to look at data more closely, sometimes rejecting easy schematically based conclusions. They may attend to more of the information and particularly pay attention to schema-inconsistent information. Conditions that seem to favor this kind of data-driven processing are outcome dependency, accountability, or other situational cues suggesting a need to be accurate. In contrast, other circumstances favor more schematically based processing. In particular, any pressure to form a judgment quickly or in a coherent way that can be communicated easily to others may favor the use of schemas (Fiske & Taylor, 1991).

(Source: Taylor, S. E., Peplau, L. A., Sears, D. O. 1997. SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY. 9th Ed. United States of America: Prentice-Hall, Inc. pg. 49-50)

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