How Do We Organize Information In Our Mind? Schemes And Categories
Every second that we are awake, our senses collect information from the outside and from our internal organs All this information is not found in our brain in a random and chaotic way, on the contrary, our brain is a great association machine that organizes our perception of the world thanks to two cognitive structures: the schemes and categories.
Both are structures that associate and manage the information we receive, providing us with valuable representations and interpretations of reality, essential to orient ourselves and guide our behavior towards the objectives we set for ourselves.
The cognitive schemes They are the cognitive tools that people have to organize knowledge about a concept, whether it is a person, situation, role or group. Human beings have the need to synthesize and organize information. We are not able to integrate everything that comes to us at any given moment, so we have to select, simplify and emphasize what is important. But then, under what criteria is this distribution of information carried out by the schemes carried out? Our interests, values, emotions and tastes are responsible for this simplification.
Schemas are activated by everyday life situations. The stimuli activate the schema, and once activated the schema fills in the missing information or creates expectations about what is surely going to happen or what something is surely going to be. They are reality filters.
Having schemas implies always having expectations about how people act and how different events are going to happen For example, our outline for a master class involves a series of expectations about how a class is going to go; if something new were to occur during the course of the class, this new information would activate our attention and would be added as a possible new element to the outline. after a previous break in the scheme since that new information was not in the scheme so it surprises us and we may not know how to react.
There are very schematic subjects who are guided by very few schemas and only use these few to organize all the information and to act. Ex: someone who relates everything to football, and always acts directed and directed towards it.
People schemes
The schemes of people They group organized information about different traits, objectives, motivations and behaviors associated with different types of people. Having people schemas determines what I expect from each person depending on the label we have established for them. These schemes determine the type of relationship we have with others.
Causation schemes
The causality schemes are beliefs based on experience about how certain types of causes interact to cause an effect. It is a way for our brain to establish associations between acts and consequences, between causes and effects.
Auto schemes
The auto schemes are the structured representation of knowledge about oneself They can be understood as theories that the person has about himself in different areas. That is, cognitive generalizations about oneself.
The schemes of events or situations are organized knowledge about a sequence of events that appear in certain situations everyday social. They impose a linear-temporal order when representing the sequence of interactions that occur in the scenario. They are shared by people who belong to the same cultural groups.
The categories
In psychology, when we talk about categories, We refer to the structures in charge of classifying elements based on their similarity Categorize It means simplifying since the categories relate elements.
The elements that share the category are grouped around a prototype, which is the element that best represents the category. He prototype can be defined as the most representative specimens of the category, that is, a set of characteristics significantly associated with members of the category A cognitive representation of the typical/ideal characteristics that define a category. The assignment of an object, person or social situation to a category is done based on its similarity to the prototype.
As we move away from the prototype, members become increasingly less representative examples of the category.
The consequences of categorizing
Categorizing people intuitively and without taking into account all the information available in the environment, can lead us to fall into representation bias, which It consists of classifying a person into a social category simply because they have attributes that belong to the prototype of that category Not all those who wear glasses are intellectuals nor are all those who wear beards more manly.
Likewise, according to Tajfel’s minimal group paradigm, the simple fact of categorizing someone in a social group is a sufficient condition for discriminatory behavior to occur and accentuate similarities between members of the same group and differentiate between members belonging to different categories. social.
Categorization is a process of social adaptation, but one of the most important consequences of dividing the world into categories (race, age, sex, religion, social groups) is that it gives rise to stereotypes, prejudices and discrimination.
This gives rise to a conclusion as sad as it is real that was already postulated by Henri Tajfel in the early 1970s: discrimination is not typical of bad people, but is a human condition due to the mere fact of socially categorizing others.
