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Review Article | DOI: https://doi.org/10.31579/2637-8892/046
J Free Lance Writer, USA.
*Corresponding Author: James F Welles, J Free Lance Writer, USA.
Citation: James F Welles (2019) The Cognition of Schema J. Psychology and Mental Health Care. 3(4); DOI: 10.31579/2637-8892/046
Copyright: © 2019 James F Welles, This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,provided the original author and source are credited.
Received: 12 April 2019 | Accepted: 13 November 2019 | Published: 20 December 2019
Keywords: envisaged;schema;cognition
The brain of an infant may be the blank tablet envisaged by Locke, but as it is shaped by both experience and language it develops into the mind of an adult. As the character of the ma-turing individual becomes defined, the mind shapes experiences decreasingly according to immediate stimuli themselves and increasingly according to linguistic interpretations of and emo-tional reactions to perceptions.
The brain of an infant may be the blank tablet envisaged by Locke, but as it is shaped by both experience and language it develops into the mind of an adult. As the character of the ma-turing individual becomes defined, the mind shapes experiences decreasingly according to immediate stimuli themselves and increasingly according to linguistic interpretations of and emo-tional reactions to perceptions. Thus, the environment does not dictate human behavior but provides a context for its expression.The basis for interpreting environmental stimuli is the schema—the cognitive program (Ger: Weltanschauung) which acts as a template for perceptual experience and provides expec-tations and explanations about objects and their relations to and interactions with each other. It is populated by or constructed of memes, which are subjected to selection pressure by the psychocultural environment and thus are not necessarily as true as they are gratifying and popular. Just as a reigning intellectual paradigm defines each of our modern sciences (e.g., atoms in chemistry), a schema defines the mental life of an individual by providing an intellectual frame of reference for information, ideas and behavior. Traceable back to Edmound Husserl’s phenomenological observation of the mind’s tendency to organize experiences, like Piaget’s mental structure, it comprises the "Cognitive map" of the individual's reality and determines his 1.) world-view, 2.) self-concept, 3.) self-ideal and 4.) ethical convictions.
While providing basic notions about principles of nature and theories about how the world works, the schema both fosters and inhibits further learning. It is particularly good at promoting learning of refinement, whereby established expectations are confirmed and reinforced and responses made more subtle. However, learning of novelty is made less probable and more difficult by preset patterns of thought which limit an individual's range of cognitive adjustment. Thus, the schema encourages self-corrective, fine tuning of itself even in cases in which it remains a maladaptive behavioral program.
The learning process can be broken down into two interrelated steps: assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is the perception of stimuli and the incorporation of experience into an existing schema; it is accomplished by assigning the percept of an object or phenomenon to an established cognitive category as defined by the individual's vocabulary. Accommodation is the change or modification of the schema due to the assimilation of new information. Minor adjustments, refinements and modifications of the schema are very common and occur with little or no awareness or emotion. The resulting schema is the individual's reorganization of his experience into a system which provides both predictability of events and a sound basic strategy for successful behavior.
Attitudes: However, as an individual matures, the presence of the schema tends to dominate the process of assimilation by defining perception in progressively restrictive terms and by the formation of attitudes which evaluate perceived data. Attitudes determine whether a given fact is construed favorably or not. This point is easily demonstrated by a play on a standard form of humor: "I have some good news and some bad news: the Yankees won last night". This is good news to Yankee fans and bad news to a Yankee haters.
Laugh or not, there are three factors which may contribute to the formation of attitudes. First of all, attitudes may be rooted in a person's need to know about the environment. Such atti-tudes are data based and provide a verbal knowledge system to which incoming bits of information are compared or contrasted. Attitudes may also be adopted because of externally applied social rewards and pressures of normative group influ-ence. Finally, attitudes may be expressions of the value system of the individual and provide him with the self-satisfaction of self-sustaining internal rewards.
Along with their function of evaluating information, attitudes also act to promote the achievement of goals deemed to be worthy, to maintain self-esteem and to express views. Most important of all to students of stupidity, attitudes determine what a person considers to be his "Best interest". This is crucial if stupidity is deliberate, informed, maladaptive behavior—that is, behavior counter to one's own best interest.
The determination of "Best interest" thus turns out to be quite an arbitrary process. The basic problem with such an eval-uation is that judgment is so "Attitudinal". For example, the extreme case of homicide may variously be considered a crime (murder), necessity (self-defense), heroic (combat) or simply negligent if not accidental: the evaluation of the act depends very much upon the circumstances and the attitude of the judge.
It is by interacting with the environment that people reveal their attitudes—the beliefs, values and ideas which the reference group's language and norms have molded into a schema. Socialization internalizes this system so that it defines who and what a member is and does. As a young person matures or an initiate conforms, external rewards and punishments become anticipated and behavior adjusts to preconceived expectations.
It is important to note that the creed of a group functions as a unifying force. Political and economic systems (e.g., de-mocracy, capitalism, etc.) are often misconstrued as descriptive of how societies interact with their environments. Actually, along with behavioral rituals which are also binding, such systems are concrete expressions of ideological creeds which promote group unity. When the system's values are internalized, the individual feels himself to be part of a homogeneous group of people comfortable with themselves regardless of what they are doing.
One of the inherent drawbacks of intense group loyalty, however, is that it can interfere with logical analysis of problems and corrupt the super-ego values of the group. The unacknowledged goal of most groups is maintenance of the sche-ma. Reason is used to rationalize, and value-based perception is skewed to favor the schematic/social quo. Conformity is the standard and intellectual integrity a threat to short-term, immediate complacence. Unfortunately, the long-term consequences can be disastrous, as happened in the Penn State scandal centered on convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky.
To achieve and maintain a healthy balance, there must be a dynamic trade off between the short-term social needs of the group and the long-term intellectual imperative of information. This inherent compromise is typical of the human condition and displays itself as emotional conflict, suppressed or expressed, in all but the total conformist. One of the saving graces of a schema is that, consistent with the theory of cognitive dissonance, it can easily make minor adjustments—changes which reduce rather than arouse emotional tension. Accumulated minor adjustments can add up to a significant schematic alteration which would be traumatic if forced in one step. This process is comparable to the gradual evolution of one species into another by the accumulation of genetic mutations.
Minor adjustment make it possible to retain the schema while behavior adapts to novel circumstances. This is ideal for a stupid society, as it permits vague and ambiguous leaders to do somewhat more or less than they should while their followers can believe their cause to be sacred. As new behavioral norms emerge, so too may an identity crisis or conflict gradually evolve as traditional values are deemphasized for the sake of group cooperation in new circumstances. The mechanism of successful schematic adaptation to novelty is, usually, largely language dependent, as it is language that provides the basis for our cognitive life, including the expanded mental capacity to be both very intelligent and very stupid.
Language: Language probably evolved as a means of sharing information and promoting group cooperation, but as a correlated side effect, it shaped the human psyche by the very nature of words. These are really audible symbols which represent selected, generalized aspects of the environment. In this sense, language is a code, with each particular language necessarily biased and restrictive as it defines perceptions in terms of the specific culturally determined categories to which the encoded symbols are attached.
It is the linguistic requisite for categorizing which makes the human way of experiencing nature different from that of all other species. While making the human psyche unique, our verbal tradition prohibits "Freedom of experience" from the human condition, as only feral children can escape the subjective impact that the specific verbal values of his given reference group imposes. Each language segments the environmental continua (motion, color, sound, etc.) into various arbitrary cate-gories. Collectively, these provide the cognitive context in which members of the language group think, feel and evaluate experience: that is, we live by symbols.
Although categorizing permits the streamlining of some perceptions for the sake of mental efficiency, there are drawbacks. For example, every group is somewhat compromised by the very human tendency to indulge in "Stereotyping". This is a process of "Over-generalizing" to the point that important discriminable experiences are treated equally. As we go through life, we fill out our verbal categories with discrete items or events. When we deal with people, for example, certain salient characteristics which members of some perceived group share in common (skin color, language, religion, etc.) are considered determining factors in evaluating the group in general. For the sake of expedience, individual variation may then be ignored and generalizing carried to the extreme that all people who can possibly be placed in a given pigeon-hole are lumped together mentally under the label for that category.
Not only do we lose information to stereotyping, but the many groups of people become separated from each other because their different languages segment the common environment into different categories. Sad to say, when people in "Opposing" cultures experi-ence the same stimuli differently, they often squabble about their perceptions and reactions rather than enlightening each other with complementary views of the world. Only in superficial matters can alternative interpretations be accepted as interesting or humorous without being threatening. On the other hand, most of history's great religious and military conflicts had their origins in perceptual/philosophical differences of competing groups which found they could not live in both the same and different worlds.
Such conflicts underscore the point that language functions as a "Defining system" for people. It is through words that "Relevance" is determined for each of us by our culture with behavior being shaped by the structuring of our reactions to what we construe to be relevant. What may really be relevant to one's best interest may not be identified as such by a necessarily if unfortunately biased language system.
This bias of the language system is based on the descriptive categories and labels used to construct a person's cognitive world. As the schema is formed, accuracy and objectivity of perceptions are sacrificed for and by euphemisms. These enhance self-esteem by giving favorable interpretations of the actions of the individual and his reference group and negative stereotypes to rivals and opponents. This verbal phenomenon can be carried beyond the selection of words even to their pronunciation as happened, for example, with the affected Spanish accent favored among the leftist elites of the United States in the 1980's to show their support for the pro-Soviet regime in “Knee-car-AH-gew-ah”.
As for terminology, when dealing with Vietnam, the Johnson administration began with a humanistic way of thinking and talking about the war but ended up following the lead of the military. The change to a detached attitude and then to a dehumanizing outlook was facilitated by euphemisms. "Gooks" were to be “Converted” into "Body counts" by “Defoliation” and "Surgical air strikes"– itself a misnomer for inaccurate bombing–which were to accomplish “Attrition” which would precede "Pacification". It was as difficult to argue against such strategy as it was easy to misjudge American's best interest in those terms, as opposed to “Napalm” and “My Lai”.
A few years later, the Nixon administration had a similar problem judging its own best interest and literally got hung up on the terms "Executive privilege" and "National security". The Nixonians were also disposed to use derogatory terms for their presumed enemies—meaning the press, students, hippies, Jews, Italians, Germans, blacks and liberals in the State Department and Congress and committed to destroying anyone who did not support the Nixon team.
Along with defining means and experience, words shape the schema by directing attention to certain facets of the environment which are deemed important by the verbal value system. Each language system has an inherent tendency to emphasize certain experiences while others are trivialized. Thus, accuracy of overall perception and objectivity of interpretation are sacrificed to verbal appeal as people focus on particular stimuli at the expense of others. Of course, events of expected significance receive the most attention and analysis—particularly if they pose either a serious threat to the schema or an opportunity for a triumphant achievement worthy of the Superego Seal of Approval.
Language further serves as a memory system, in that cate-gorized, encoded experiences act as a basis for comparing the present with the past and for projecting future expectations. Naturally, the process of memory formation is systematically skewed off by forgetting some events that happened and including others that did not. Thus, some aviation accidents (and even more so, near misses) can be redefined out of existence while fantasy provides a rosy picture of what self-serving experts at the FAA (Flying Accidents Administration ) can trick themselves into interpreting and believing. The worst that can be said about language in this regard is that it allows people to remain firmly in touch with their delusions, or, as Goethe’s Mephistopheles believed: “With words, you can do anything”.
While examining the role language plays in the formation and functioning of the schema, we have considered it as a sys-tem for encoding, categorizing, stereotyping, defining, focusing and memorizing. We should not forget that it also functions as a communication system, making the individual's schema a product of and contributor to the group creed. As a means of sharing experiences, language is quite efficient, but as a means of permitting people to talk to and about themselves re-alistically, it is too biased to allow accurate self-analysis.
As a belief system, the schema promotes coping with some problems while limiting the ability to recognize even the existence of others. The schema promotes coping with acknowledged problems if the discrepancy between verbal beliefs and necessary behavior is emotionally tolerable, so in such situations, both individual and group efficiency is enhanced. However, when the discrepancy is so pronounced as to make people self-conscious, and when coping has to be treated as heresy, psychological and social disruption result from the delusive mental set of stupidity.
Interestingly enough, living out the expressed creed—that is, living up to the ideals—can also be aggravating to the devout who flout their beliefs in daily life. Christ was crucified for ful-filling prophesies and embodying ideals. Like most great rebels, he endeavored to live up to stated standards; unlike most, he did. For example, his kicking money lenders out of the temple was an expression of his intolerance for organized impurity. Such a person may be a great model for the dispossessed but is very dangerous for the establishment, so he was betrayed by the leaders of his own community. In this case, they responded in a manner typical of authorities who would be displaced if their promises were realized, and they had no difficulty recognizing what course of action was in their own immediate best interest. His crucifixion was an allegorical warning for everyone that the more one lives up to expressed ideals, the more likely he will suffer for the sin of doing so.
In the absence of whistle blowers, who are usually persecuted to the degree that they live up to the creed, language maximizes the potential of a social group to cooperate at whatever is accepted as necessary. Ironically, it promotes cooperation among members by inhibiting an appreciation of what it is they are doing or to what extent they may have over- or underdone it. Hence, although language normally functions as a screen between people and their environment, it can become a barrier if perception and cognition become skewed off and distorted for the sake of biased values.
In the two dimensional world of the schema, information from the reality of the behavioral environment is often redefined by the social imperative of language. An individual may find himself experiencing momentary cognitive dissonance when finding incoming data from the world of "Doing" contradicting or conflicting with his ideology—the system of ideas built on his established beliefs. The usual reaction in such a situation is to "Save the schema" at the expense of learning about the environment. Thus, numerous Freudian defense mechanisms (e.g., rationalization, repression, suppression, etc.) keep individuals content with their superego value systems, albeit at the cost of improving their behavioral schemas.
Physical reality may be a better source of information, but social values are preferable, as they are comforting and reassuring even while they are misleading. The social world is really a symbolic environment of subjective judgments, all routinely condoned and defined by the prevailing language system. Incoming perceptions are compared to the established schema, and if a way of fitting them in can be found, it will be. If none can be found, the data are usually rejected by the defense mechanisms mentioned above. In more extreme cases, undeniable perceptions may force an uncomfortable awareness on an individual (or discussions in a group) which eventually lead to a new, more inclusive schema. This changing of one's mind is the last resort, however, particularly if it tends to isolate an individual from his social group.
Finally, language extends to matters which are beyond con-firmation–that is, matters of the imagination. The universal presence of this facet of human affairs attests to its survival advantage, although there is obviously need for diplomatic caution when evaluating the reality of any such conjured phenomena or processes. Put the other way, there is no monkey dumb enough to give up a real banana now for a promise of all the bananas it can eat after it is dead. If there is some psychological advantage to human individuals who believe stories of an afterlife, there is even more gained by groups which collectively share and coordinate activities based on myths.
Norms: A group is defined as "Individuals who share a common set of norms, beliefs and values" (i.e., a schema). The behavior of any member is usually of consequence to all other members, and for most people, the social support of the group is vital in that it defines existence. A sense of belonging is a most compelling factor in the human experience and the feeling of isolation a tempering sensation unpleasant to most. The vast majority of people do almost all their learning in the immediate presence of others who serve as teachers or role models. Thus, socialization proceeds as initiates learn appropriate behavior and correlated linguistic values which make group members out of an assembly of individuals.
Norms function in the formation of the schema by providing social reinforcement (positive and negative) to the development of both the linguistic value system and the behavioral control system. It is group norms which define group values by shaping the language, attitudes, sentiments, aspirations and goals of the members. These give the in-group a sense of identity and a degree of solidarity proportional to the hostility which may be directed toward conflicting out-groups.
Norms function to induce conformity wherever social organ-ization is found. They provide the means group members use to exert subtle and indirect pressure on each other to think and behave appropriately. They are the customs, traditions, standards, rules, fashions and other unofficial criteria of conduct which organize the interactions of individuals into the codified behavior of group members. In fact, the initiate becomes a member to the degree that he focuses on the norms of a specific group and guides his actions according to them. Identification is complete when the norms become internalized and function as subconscious reward systems. They then serve as the criteria that sustain the attitudes and objectives of the group as members' judgments and interpretations of perceptions tend toward conformity. The result is similarity if not uniformity of thought and action —a condition which can be regarded as normal or intellectually depressing.
Of particular importance in formation of the schema is the role norms play in shaping the attitudes of group members, since attitudes are the evaluative components of the schema. That is, it is through social norms that words come to be evaluative labels with positive or negative connotations for group identity and survival. Usually, group attitudes are formed as members concurrently share experiences. Such common experiences provide the basis for the formation of attitudes which express the emotional values of and make certain words loaded terms to members (e.g., "Liberty" to revolutionaries, "Good Christian" to the local holy rollers and "Old Siwash" to loyal grads).
These loaded terms and the attitudes they signify provide standards of thought, expression and behavior for the individuals who consider themselves group members. Norms and attitudes then become mutually reinforcing because the attitudes of the group, expressing its essential values, provide strong psychological pressure on members to honor the norms by conformity. In fact, norms and the verbal attitudes they engender make it very likely true blue members will think, feel, believe and behave in socially acceptable, predetermined ways about relevant objects and events. Thus, for example, Joshua commanded his troops to “Devote” the people of Canaan to God under “The curse of destruction”( i.e., execute them).
Groups: When a group determines the set of values an individual uses for judging behavior, it is known as his "Reference group” (i.e., what Edmond Burke once referred to as a “Little platoon” –an association of citizens pursuing their common interests). By shaping verbal attitudes with emotionally laden terms, the reference group provides a standard of comparison for evaluating one's own behavior as well as that of others. As identity with a group develops, a self-conscious sense of obedience to expectation is replaced by a devoted commitment to common values. The fully functional member is a collaborating component of the group and contributes to perpetuating group norms by cooperating with colleagues.
Of course, a reference group is all the more effective in imposing its values on members if it surrounds their heads with halos and arouses in them a sense of holiness. The emotional attitudes then become even more effective in promoting conformity to norms as they assume the mantle of moral righteousness. Beliefs condition the existence of any social group and become all the more firmly entrenched if they are sanctified as they are inculcated into the schemas of the devout. The most effective beliefs structure both the consciousness and the conscience of group members.
Along with shaping verbal attitudes into ethical values, group norms serve to regulate the behavioral actions and interactions of members by providing both a communication net-work and social support for each individual. The best that can be said for the functional value of norms is that they promote group cooperation. If they do this, the beliefs they promote and sustain will gain the status of sacred ideals. Once a belief is ensconced in the schema to the point of unilateral respect, it defines "Moral realism" which supports and transcends the "Verbal realism" of attitudes expressing its basic values. This process can go to an extreme, as cooperating members sharing the same values reinforce their common belief about reality.
With such social support, a new or altered schema may achieve mass acceptance if it once is established in the minds of a simple majority of group members. This self-promotion of a belief system through intensifying reinforcement is known as "The Gold Effect", having been described by Professor Thomas Gold, F.R.S. The process is akin to genetic drift in that in cultural life, a field is dominated by a factor (an idea rather than an allele) not because it is superior to competing items but simply because it is more common. This fact alone enhances the likelihood that, in cultural life, a self-reinforcing fad will become a posfeed mania. In terms of schemas, a popular belief can become extremely popular even if popularity is not directly dependent upon accuracy or veracity.
Such an extreme may be ideal, if the standard of success is group cohesion. A legitimate goal of any society is to keep disputes within reasonable bounds, which is exactly what the common value system of a shared schema renders more probable. Being a human system, it is rarely 100
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