What is automatic thinking, and how are schemas an example of that kind of thought?
People are very good at sizing up a new situation quickly and accurately. They figure out who is there, what is happening, and what might happen next. When you attended your first college class, for example, you probably made quick assumptions about who people were (the person standing at the lectern was the professor) and how to behave. We doubt that you confused the class with a fraternity party. And you probably reached these conclusions without even being aware that you were doing so. Imagine a different approach: Every time you encounter a new situation, you stop and think about it slowly and deliberately, like Rodin’s statue The Thinker. When you are introduced to someone new, you have to excuse yourself for 15 minutes while you analyze what you have learned and how much you like the person. Sounds exhausting, doesn’t it? Fortunately, we form impressions of people quickly and effortlessly, without much conscious analysis of what we are doing. We do these things by engaging in an automatic analysis of our environments, based on our past experiences and knowledge of the world. Automatic thinking is thought that is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effort[1]less. Although different kinds of automatic thinking meet these criteria to varying degrees (Bargh et al., 2012; Hassin, 2013; Jonas, 2013; Moors & De Houwer, 2006), for our purposes we can define automaticity as thinking that satisfies all or most of them.
Automatic Thinking Defnition:
Automatic Thinking Thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless.
Automatic thinking helps us understand new situations by relating them to our prior experiences. When we meet someone new, we don’t start from scratch to figure out what he or she is like; we categorize the person as “an engineering student” or “like my cousin Helen.” The same goes for places, objects, and situations. When we walk into a fast-food restaurant we’ve never visited, we know, without thinking, not to wait at a table for a waiter and a menu. We know that we have to go to the counter and order, because our past experience automatically tells us that this is what we do in fast-food restaurants. More formally, people use schemas, which are mental structures that organize our knowledge about the social world. These mental structures influence the information we notice, think about, and remember (Bartlett, 1932; Heine, Proulx, & Vohs, 2006; Markus, 1977).
The term schema is very general; it encompasses our knowledge about many things—other people, ourselves, social roles (e.g., what a librarian or an engineer is like), and specific events (e.g., what usually happens when people eat a meal in a restaurant). In each case, our schemas contain our basic knowledge and impressions that we use to organize what we know about the social world and interpret new situations. For example, if you watch the television show The Bachelor or The Bachelorette, you have probably developed schemas for different types of contestants, such as “the snide backstabbing villain” and the “naïve one whose heart will be broken.”
Schemas definition:
Schemas Mental structures people use to organize their knowledge about the social world around themes or subjects and that influence the information people notice, think about, and remember.
Schemas are very useful for helping us organize and make sense of the world and to fill in the gaps of our knowledge. Think for a moment what it would be like to have no schemas at all. What if everything you encountered was inexplicable, confusing, and unlike anything else you’ve ever known? Tragically, this is what happens to people who suffer from a neurological disorder called Korsakov’s syndrome. People with this disorder lose the ability to form new memories and must approach every situation as if they were encountering it for the first time, even if they have actually experienced it many times before. This can be so unsettling—even terrifying—that some people with Korsakov’s syndrome go to great lengths to try to impose meaning on their experiences.
In short, having continuity, being able to relate new experiences to our past schemas, is so important that people who lose this ability invent schemas where none exist. Schemas are particularly useful when we are in confusing situations, because they help us figure out what is going on. Consider a classic study by Harold Kelley (1950) in which students in different sections of a college economics class were told that a guest lecturer would be filling in that day. To create a schema about what the guest lecturer would be like, Kelley told the students that the economics department was interested in how different classes reacted to different instructors and that the students would thus receive a brief biographical note about the instructor before he arrived. The note contained information about the instructor’s age, background, teaching experience, and personality. One version said, “People who know him consider him to be a very warm person, industrious, critical, practical, and determined.” The other version was identical except that the phrase “a very warm person” was replaced with “a rather cold person.” The students received one of these personality descriptions at random. The guest lecturer then conducted a class discussion for 20 minutes, after which the students rated their impressions of him. Given that there was some ambiguity in this situation—after all, the students had seen the instructor for only a brief time— Kelley hypothesized that they would use the schema provided by the biographical note to fill in the blanks. This is exactly what happened. The students who expected the instructor to be warm gave him significantly higher ratings than the students who expected him to be cold, even though all the students had observed the exact same teacher behaving in the same way. The students who expected the instructor to be warm were also more likely to ask him questions and to participate in the class discussion. Has this happened to you? Have your expectations about a professor influenced your impressions of him or her? Did you find, oddly enough, that the professor acted just as you’d expected? Ask a classmate who had a different expectation about the professor what he or she thought. Do the two of you have different perceptions of the instructor based on the different schemas you were using? Of course, people are not totally blind to what is actually out there in the world. Sometimes what we see is relatively unambiguous and we do not need to use our schemas to help us interpret it. For example, in one of the classes in which Kelley conducted his study, the guest instructor was quite self-confident, even a little arrogant. Given that arrogance is a relatively unambiguous trait, the students did not need to rely on their expectations to fill in the blanks. They rated the instructor as arrogant in both the warm and cold conditions. However, when they rated this instructor’s sense of humor, which was less clear-cut, the students relied on their schemas: The students in the warm condition thought he was funnier than the students in the cold condition did. The more ambiguous our information is, then, the more we use schemas to fill in the blanks. It is important to note that there is nothing wrong with what the students in Kelley’s study did. As long as people have reason to believe their schemas are accurate, it is perfectly reasonable to use them to resolve ambiguity. If a stranger comes up to you in a dark alley and says, “Take out your wallet,” your schema about such encounters tells you that the person wants to steal your money, not admire pictures of your family. This schema helps you avert a serious and perhaps deadly misunderstanding.
Which Schemas Do We Use? Accessibility and Priming:
The social world is full of ambiguous information that is open to interpretation. Imagine, for example, that you are riding on a city bus and a man gets on and sits beside you. He mutters incoherently to himself and rocks back and forth in his seat. At one point, he starts singing an old Nirvana tune. How would you make sense of his behavior? You have several schemas you could use. Should you interpret his behavior with your “alcoholic” or “mentally ill person” schema? How will you decide? The schema that comes to mind and guides your impressions of the man can be affected by accessibility, the extent to which schemas and concepts are at the fore[1]front of the mind and are therefore likely to be used when making judgments about the social world (Chaxel, 2014; Higgins, 1996a; Wheeler & DeMarree, 2009; Wyer & Srull, 1989). Something can become accessible for three reasons. First, some schemas are chronically accessible due to past experience (Chen & Andersen, 1999; Coane & Balota, 2009; Schlegel et al., 2009). This means that these schemas are constantly active and ready to use to interpret ambiguous situations. For example, if there is a history of alcoholism in your family, traits describing a person with alcoholism are likely to be chronically accessible to you, increasing the likelihood that you will assume that the man on the bus has had too much to drink. If someone you know has a mental illness, however, thoughts about how people with mental illnesses behave are likely to be more accessible than thoughts about someone with alcoholism, leading you to interpret the man’s behavior very differently.
Second, something can become accessible because it is related to a current goal. The concept of mental illness might not be chronically accessible to you, but if you are studying for a test in your abnormal psychology class and need to learn about different kinds of mental disorders, this concept might be temporarily accessible. As a consequence, you might be more likely to notice the man on the bus and interpret his behavior as a sign of a mental disorder—at least until your test is over and you no longer have the goal of learning about mental illnesses (Eitam & Higgins, 2010; Martin & Tesser, 1996; Masicampo & Ambady, 2014).
Lastly, schemas can become temporarily acces[1]sible because of our recent experiences (Bargh, 1996; Higgins & Bargh, 1987; Oishi, Schimmack, & Colcombe, 2003). This means that a particular schema or trait happens to be primed by something people have been thinking or doing before encountering an event. Suppose that right before the man on the bus sat down, you were reading Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen’s memoir about her time in a psychiatric hospital. Given that thoughts about psychiatric patients were accessible in your mind, you would probably assume that the man had a mental illness. If, however, you had just looked out the window and seen a man leaning against a building drinking from a paper bag, you would probably assume that the man on the bus was drunk. These are examples of priming, the process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of a schema, trait, or concept. Reading Girl, Interrupted primes certain traits, such as those describing people with mental illnesses, making it more likely that these traits will be used to interpret a new event, such as the behavior of the man on the bus, even though this new event is completely unrelated to the one that originally primed the traits.
Accessibility:
The extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people’s minds and are therefore likely to be used when making judgments about the social world
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy:
The case wherein people have an expectation about what another person is like, which influences how they act toward that person, which causes that person to behave consistently with people’s original expectations, making the expectations come true.
Low-Effort Thinking:
People are extremely good at social cognition, which refers to the ways in which people think about themselves and the social world. Although no computer can match us in this kind of thinking, we are not perfect social thinkers. Social psychologists have uncovered some fascinating mistakes to which we are prone, despite our uncanny cognitive abilities. A great deal of social cognition—how people think about themselves and the social world—involves automatic thinking, which is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless.
People as Everyday Theorists:
Automatic Thinking with Schemas An important part of automatic thinking is using our past knowledge to organize and interpret new information. More specifically, people use schemas, mental structures for organizing their knowledge about the social world around themes or subjects and for influencing what they notice, think about, and remember. Schemas are extremely useful tools for reducing ambiguity about the social world.
Which Schemas Do We Use?:
Accessibility and Priming Sometimes a situation is ambiguous and it is not clear what schema applies. Schemas are most likely to be used if they are high in accessibility, which means they are at the forefront of our minds. Schemas can be accessible because we have used them a lot in the past, because they are related to our current goals, or because of priming, which is the process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of a schema.
What are other types of automatic thinking and how do they operate?
• Types of Automatic Thinking There are several other forms of automatic thinking that help us interpret the social world and make decisions, without necessarily intending to do so.
• Automatic Goal Pursuit In our everyday lives there are often competing goals, and the one we choose to follow can happen automatically. People often act on goals that have been recently primed.
• Automatic Decision Making People’s unconscious minds often help them make good decisions. A good procedure is to analyze all the alternatives, spend some time analyzing the options consciously, and then distract oneself to allow unconscious processes to operate.
• Automatic Thinking and Metaphors About the Body and the Mind In addition to using schemas to reduce ambiguity about the world, people use metaphors about the mind and the body. Physical sensations (e.g., holding a heavy clipboard) can prime a metaphor (e.g., that important thoughts “have weight”), which then influences people’s judgments (e.g., that student opinion should be given more weight on a campus issue).
• Mental Strategies and Shortcuts: Judgmental Heuristics Another form of automatic thinking is the use of judgmental heuristics, which are mental shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently. Examples are the availability heuristic, whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind, and the representativeness heuristic, whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case. Heuristics are extremely useful and often produce accurate judgments, but can be misused, producing faulty judgments.
Social Psychology Ninth Edition ;Elliot Aronson, Timothy D. Wilson, Robin M. Akert, Samuel R. Sommers
https://learn-psychology.com/automatic-thinking/
