How do we organize the information? Schemes and Categories

Every second that we find ourselves awake our senses collect information from the outside and from our internal organs. All this information is not 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: schemes Y categories.

Both are structures that associate and manage the information we receive, providing us with valuable representations and interpretations of reality, fundamental to orient ourselves and guide our behavior towards the objectives that we propose.

Cognitive schemas

The cognitive schemas They are the cognitive tools that people have to organize knowledge about a concept, be it a person, situation, role or group. The human being has the need to synthesize and organize information. We are not capable of integrating everything that comes to us at each moment, so we have to select, simplify and emphasize what is important. But then, under what criteria is this distribution of the information carried out by the schemes carried out? Our interests, values, emotions and tastes take care of this simplification.

Schemas are activated by everyday life situations. The stimuli activate the scheme, and once the scheme is activated, it fills in the missing information or creates expectations about what is surely going to happen or what is certain to be something. They are filters of reality.

Having schemes always implies having expectations about how people act and how different events are going to happen.. For example, our outline of a master class implies a series of expectations about how a class will go, if something were to happen. new during the course of the class, this new information would activate our attention and would be added as a possible new element in the diagram after a previous schema break since this new information was not in the schema so it surprises us and we may not know 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. Eg: someone who relates everything to football, and always acts directed and meaningful to it.

People schemas

The schemas of people group organized information on the different traits, objectives, motivations and behaviors associated with different types of people. Having person schemas determines what I expect from each person depending on the label that we have established on them. These schemes determine the type of relationship we have with others.

Causality schemes

The causality schemes are Experience-based beliefs 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 schematics

The auto schematics 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.

Schemes of events or situations

Schemes of events or situations are organized knowledge about a sequence of events that appear in certain situations everyday social activities. They impose a linear-temporal order by representing the sequence of interactions that occur on stage. 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 supposes to simplify since the categories relate elements.

The elements that share the category are grouped around a prototype that is the element that best represents the category. The prototype can be defined as the most representative specimens of the category, that is, a set of characteristics significantly associated with the 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 made based on its similarity to the prototype.

As we move away from the prototype, the members become less and less representative examples of the category.

The consequences of categorizing

Intuitively categorizing people and without taking into account all the information available in the environment, can lead us to fall into the representation bias, what consists of classifying a person in a social category by the simple fact of having attributes that belong to the prototype of that category. Not everyone who wears glasses is intellectual, and not everyone with a beard is 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 them to be produce discriminatory behaviors and accentuate the 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 leads 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 it is a human condition by the mere fact of socially categorizing people others.