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SocialPsychology-5.2SchemasandScripts.html5.2 Schemas and Scripts
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Our automatic system allows us to make shortcuts and come to conclusions without taxing the conscious system (Shah & Oppenheimer, 2008). In fact, when our resources are depleted we are more likely to use the shortcuts offered by the automatic system (Masicampo & Baumeister, 2008). The automatic system has two ways of doing this; one focuses on things like objects or people, while the other focuses on events, what they include, and how they are sequenced.
Schemas
Figure 5.1: Schemas
Your schema for a baseball game may include a baseball diamond, a salute to the American flag, and peanuts.
Dorling Kindersley RF/Thinkstock, iStockphoto/Thinkstock, iStockphoto/Thinkstock
Chapter 2 introduced the idea of schemas as knowledge structures that organize what we know and that can affect how we process information. Self-schemas are knowledge structures about the self, but we can have schemas about many other things in our world, such as animals, objects, places, and concepts (see Figure 5.1). When we are making judgments, schemas may affect those judgments. For example, a boss might have a schema about an employee as a good, reliable worker. If that employee is late one day, the boss makes a different judgment about that employee than she would if the boss had a schema about that employee as lazy and irresponsible. Because of the positive schema about her employee, the boss might also quickly remember the employee's contributions to past projects, eventually concluding that the employee had a good reason to be late. While schemas can help us remember things by organizing them into preconceived structures, they may also create false memories for us (Lampinen, Copeland, & Neuschatz, 2001). If you were to sit in a professor's office for several minutes and then, outside of the office hours later were asked what you saw in that office, your schema could help you answer. You expect to see bookshelves with books, a desk, a computer, a stapler, and some pens in a professor's office. As you remember what was in the office, your existing schema might help you remember that you saw a bookshelf. But the schema may lead you to remember something that was not there. If you expected to see a stapler, you might report that a stapler was there, even if it was not.
Schemas
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How schemas influence behavior.
- Why are schemas considered a fundamental part of social psychology?
- How does a victim's schema put people at a higher risk of being victimized?
- toggle Cover and Front Matter
- toggle Ch 1: Discovering Social Psy…
- toggle Ch 2: Studying the Self
- toggle Ch 3: Culture and Gender
- toggle Ch 4: Attitudes, Attributions,…
- toggle Ch 5: Making Judgments
- toggle Ch 6: Prejudice
- toggle Ch 7: Persuasion
- toggle Ch 8: Conformity and Obedie…
- toggle Ch 9: Groups
- toggle Ch 10: Aggression
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- toggle Ch 12: Attraction and Relatio…
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- Glossary
- References
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+Cover and Front Matter
- Copyright
- About the Author
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
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+Ch 1: Discovering Social Psychology
- 1.1 What Is Social Psychology?
- 1.2 Where Did Social Psychology Come From?
- 1.3 How Do We Do Social Psychology?
- Chapter Summary
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+Ch 2: Studying the Self
- 2.1 Who Am I?
- 2.2 The Acting Self
- Chapter Summary
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+Ch 3: Culture and Gender
- 3.1 Culture
- 3.2 Gender
- Chapter Summary
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+Ch 4: Attitudes, Attributions, and Behavior
- 4.1 Attitudes
- 4.2 Behavior and Attitudes
- 4.3 Explaining the Behavior of Others
- 4.4 Fundamental Attribution Error
- 4.5 Explanations and our Behavior
- Chapter Summary
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+Ch 5: Making Judgments
- 5.1 Conscious and Automatic Processes
- 5.2 Schemas and Scripts
- 5.3 Heuristics
- 5.4 Errors in Judgment
- 5.5 Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
- Chapter Summary
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+Ch 6: Prejudice
- 6.1 Prejudice, Stereotypes, and Discrimination
- 6.2 Social/Cognitive Origins
- 6.3 Societal Origins
- 6.4 Influences on Those Stereotyped
- 6.5 Reducing Prejudice
- Chapter Summary
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+Ch 7: Persuasion
- 7.1 Who—Characteristics of the Persuader
- 7.2 What—Characteristics of the Message
- 7.3 To Whom—Characteristics of the Audience
- 7.4 How—Persuasion Techniques
- Chapter Summary
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+Ch 8: Conformity and Obedience
- 8.1 Conformity
- 8.2 Obedience to Authority
- 8.3 Leadership
- Chapter Summary
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+Ch 9: Groups
- 9.1 Group Actions
- 9.2 Group Cognition
- 9.3 Social Dilemmas
- Chapter Summary
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+Ch 10: Aggression
- 10.1 Aggression
- 10.2 Aggression Cues
- 10.3 Catharsis and Aggression
- 10.4 Other Antisocial Behavior
- Chapter Summary
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+Ch 11: Prosocial Behavior
- 11.1 Altruism
- 11.2 Reasons Behind Helping
- 11.3 Bystander Help
- Chapter Summary
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+Ch 12: Attraction and Relationships
- 12.1 Factors in Attraction
- 12.2 Need to Belong
- 12.3 Love
- 12.4 Relationship Maintenance
- 12.5 When Relationships End
- Chapter Summary
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+Ch 13: Social Psychology, Stress, and Health
- 13.1 Stress
- 13.2 Personal Beliefs and Health
- 13.3 Decision Making by Health Care Providers
- 13.4 Encouraging Healthy Behaviors
- Chapter Summary
- Glossary
- References
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Notebook
- Notes 1 Notes 2 Notes 3 Highlights 1 Highlights 2 Highlights 3
- Show:
Critical Thinking Questions
Schemas can also help us remember items because they violate a schema. If you were to see a stuffed teddy bear in a professor's office, you might remember and recall it because it was outside of your typical professor's-office schema. This type of effect may have serious consequences when we examine the role of schemas in eyewitness testimony in court. Researchers have found that schemas for crimes can influence the details people remember about crimes they witness (Tuckey & Brewer, 2003). For example, you would expect a bank robbery to include a thief with a bag; a bag is a schema-consistent element. You would not expect the thief to wear bright clothing; bright clothing is a schema-inconsistent element. People tend to be accurate about schema-relevant and schema-inconsistent information. Information that is irrelevant to the schema is most likely to be forgotten.
Schemas can be fairly broad, applicable in a wide variety of situations or with a wide variety of objects or people, or relatively narrow, being very specific to one or two objects, people, or situations. Broader schemas take us longer to learn, as we encounter different ways to think about and view a particular entity or problem. But these broader schemas may allow us to be more flexible (Chen & Mo, 2004). For example, as a child you might have learned the concept of sharing toys and applied it when playing at home with friends. But, if you were provided with examples of a variety of ways to share over the course of your life, including sharing resources and time with others, you may be more able to recognize when someone needed your help and know how to provide it.
Scripts
How do you know what to do when you go into a restaurant? How do you know what is expected on a first date? In our lives it is helpful to know how to act and respond in social situations. Psychologists call expected series of events scripts, like the scripts in a movie or play that tell the actors what is going to occur next. Scripts can be very helpful to us. When a restaurant follows a script, both the server and the diner know what to do and what is expected of them without having to discuss the process. If you have ever lived or traveled in a different country, or if you are part of a distinctive subculture in your own country, you know that others do things differently. For example, in Chinese culture when someone shows admiration for something done well, the appropriate response in the Chinese social script is to respond with modesty. According to the script, the admirer's next response should show even greater admiration for the accomplishment (Han, 2011). If you are new to a culture or situation, you may find yourself confused and unsure. In those kinds of situations you may feel like everyone knows what is going on but you—you do not know the script.
©Getty Images/Hemera Technologies/AbleStock.com/Thinkstock
Adhering to your script of grocery shopping, what might occur next in the sequence of events? What next event would violate your script for grocery shopping?
In a dating scenario between a heterosexual couple, it is likely the man will pick the woman up at her home for the first date, they will go to a restaurant, talk about their lives, hope to impress one another, and perhaps then attend a movie. The man will likely offer to pay for both the dinner and the movie. Not all first dates follow this pattern, but many do (Eaton & Rose, 2012; Laner & Ventrone, 2000). Like schemas, we use scripts to make sense of and organize our experience. Schemas involve our expectations for things or concepts, while scripts involve our expectations for events or sequences of events.
Dating scripts can be quite detailed and can include behaviors that are different for men and women. In a 1989 study, undergraduate students listed 19 different actions that women would engage in and 27 different actions for men. Most of these students agreed on what belonged in the script, indicating that scripts are shared within a culture (Rose & Frieze, 1989). Students noted that certain foods were date foods and others were not; foods that could be eaten neatly, foods that were not too smelly, and foods that were not likely to cause bad breath were suggested date foods (Amiraian & Sobal, 2009). Dating scripts go beyond the first date, implicating how a relationship should develop over time. When partners share a script for how the relationship should develop, they show greater relationship satisfaction (Holmberg & MacKenzie, 2002). For example, if both partners expect to call one another daily and go out on a date every Friday night, each will be more satisfied than if one is expecting only a couple phone calls a week and a date every other Saturday night.
The effects of scripts on our lives are not always benign or helpful. A script that supports risky sexual behavior, such as not using a condom, may lead to high-risk behavior and, therefore, increased rates of infection with sexually transmitted diseases (Bowleg, Lucas, & Tschann, 2004; Hussen, Bowleg, Sangaramoorthy, & Malebranche, 2012). Sexual scripts come from parents, peers, school, television and the movies, as well as pornography (Hussen, et al., 2012). Sexual scripts might also be learned from romance novels. Such novels generally have very similar sexual scripts and these scripts have changed little over the last 20 years (Menard & Cabrera, 2011). A sexual script includes when and where a couple has sex. For example, some might expect sex after a few dates while others may need to know their partner for months or be engaged or married before engaging in sexual intercourse. Partners might expect to have sex in a bed in one of their bedrooms or in some other location in their living space, their car, or in a hotel. The script will also include elements of the encounter itself such as who initiates sex, length of foreplay, type of activities expected in foreplay, and the use of condoms or other barriers that reduce the risk of sexually transmitted diseases or pregnancy.
The ability to describe a script or put events in a script in the correct order seems to lie in the frontal lobe of the brain, directly behind the forehead. People with brain damage to this part of the brain sometimes show difficulties with scripts (Grafman, 1989). Our ability to work with scripts can also be influenced by age. Older adults had more difficulty correctly ordering extensive scripts than younger adults (Allain et al., 2007). For example, an older adult may have more difficulty accurately describing the sequence of events needed to change a flat tire.
Test Yourself
Click on each question below to reveal the answer.
Both are knowledge structures that help us make sense of and organize our experiences.
Schemas may cause us to remember that something was there because we expected it to be there and because it was part of our schema even if it was not actually there.
Discussions-
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