Chapter 3. Schemas (Higgins et al. study)

Introduction

Schemas help us efficiently make sense of our environment. For instance, most people have a schema associated with the category “leader” that contains information about typical leaders (e.g., many people believe leaders are assertive, knowledgeable, extraverted). The availability of this stored knowledge helps us quickly make sense of our social world. For example, upon meeting the leader of a prominent student organization, you can assume that she is intelligent, motivated, and possesses a high degree of social competence without even seeing her display those traits. Schemas that represent knowledge about other people are impressions and schemas that represent knowledge about events are scripts.

This task is designed to illustrate how personality and contextual factors influence how specific schemas can be activated.

Instructions

To begin, we will assess your ability to process information under cognitive load, an important cognitive aspect of your personality. We will ask you to “rehearse” a random word as you complete a task. For the task, you will be asked to retype words associated with different categories (e.g., geometric shapes) while simultaneously thinking about an unrelated word. As soon as you see a word displayed on the screen, please type it out. We will record how long it takes you to respond to each word.

After completing this baseline assessment, you will read a short vignette describing an individual, followed by a short survey where you will assess the individual’s personality.

Experiment

Results

Debriefing

The purpose of this task is to demonstrate how information “on the mind” biases our impressions of others (Higgins, Rholes, & Jones, 1977). Chronically accessible schemas are schemas that are easily brought to mind. For some people, certain thoughts and ideas are chronically (or more easily) activated. For example, happy people tend to be able to bring positive thoughts to mind more easily than people who are depressed (Schimmack & Oishi, 2005).

In addition, environmental stimuli can also prime particular schemas, though temporarily. For instance, even people who have more chronically accessible negative thoughts are more likely to have positive thoughts after a pleasant conversation with a friend.

Importantly, research has shown that whatever type of information is currently “on the mind” can bias how we perceive the world (see Higgins, 1986). In this task, we relied on the concept of priming to make sure that the word you rehearsed was temporarily accessible to you, or “on your mind.” In the present study, you were either asked to rehearse the word “persistent” or the word “stubborn” while you completed a bogus typing task (i.e., you were primed to either think about persistence or stubbornness). After this task, you read an ambiguous passage about a man named Donald. Donald’s behavior could be perceived differently depending on the context. For example, “Once Donald made up his mind to do something, it was as good as done no matter how long it might take of how difficult the going might be,” could be perceived positively (e.g., Donald possess a lot of grit) or negatively (e.g., Donald is an inflexible jerk). Based on previous research, we predicted that those of you who were primed with the concept of persistence would view Donald as being persistent, while those of you who were primed with the concept of stubbornness would perceive him a being stubborn.

While this study may seem artificial, the real world often proves the truth of the idea behind it! For example, imagine that you are watching a scary movie and suddenly someone unexpectedly knocks at your door. Chances are you would interpret the noise as more threatening than you would if you were watching a comedy.

Quiz