I thought this Sally Haslanger passage was pretty relevant to current events and discussions of racial schematization and implicit biases. Just for basic educational purposes: The basic idea of a schema is: “A mental construct that, as the name suggests, contains in a schematic or abbreviated form someone’s concept about an individual or event, or a group of people or events. It includes the person’s or group’s main characteristics, from the perceiver’s point of view, and the relationship among those features” (Valian 1998, 104). Schemas work somewhat like hypotheses in that “they give rise to expectations. They interpret behavior in ways that are consistent with the schema rather than inconsistent with it. They supply explanations where data are missing or ambiguous. They direct the search for new information. They make subtyping a likely way of handling exceptions (106). However, schemas are often more primitive than hypotheses and are more like a patterned set of dispositions in response to one’s circumstances. Schemas are also typically intersubjective in a way that an individual’s hypothesis is not.
Posted on: Tue, 02 Dec 2014 06:12:03 +0000
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