According to Susan Fisk and Shelly Taylor, a schema is defined as ‘a cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept, or type of stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among these attributes’. This means that if a social collective, for example, the Generation X population, are perceived, and/or perceive themselves to be comfortable with authority, to work hard as is needed ,and to value work life balance, this concept would qualify as a schema. Schemas induce top-down or prior knowledge-based cognitive processing, as opposed to bottom-up, or data-driven cognitive processing of information. What this means is that once we have this Generation X schema, we will have a tendency to assume and expect certain behaviors from an individual whom we have identified as a member of that category, and understand what we observe based on these assumptions rather than focusing on what this person actually does. Social categorization is a form of cognitive schema, and is based on observed similarities and differences between groups of people. From a young age we form categories through our observations of similarities between individuals, for example, people with long hair, and differences with others, that would be people with short hair. We may also observe that the people with long hair also share other features, such as dress and speech patterns. Based on these observations, we may formulate the category women as people with long hair. In this example, the differentiating group is those with short hair. That would be men. We find that young children whose observations have been limited to interactions with women with long hair and men with short hair, can make the error of identifying a man with long hair as female. When this is the case, they are not easily convinced by arguments to the contrary. Overtime, further observations and experiences lead to a more nuance categorization, such that other features are also taken into account to make general distinctions making the categorization of male and female more complex and fluid. With the possibility that any given feature is not necessarily present in all members of a category. Social categorization theory asserts that an underlying theme of human social cognition is to categorize oneself and others into groups based on certain characteristics such as gender, nationality, ethnicity, or religion. This categorization occurs in reaction to perceptions of difference, and serves to determine how to react to particular stimuli. Once we have made these in-group, out-group distinctions, this in turn leads to positive sentiment for similar others, and negative sentiment for dissimilar others. This has been demonstrated by Henri Tajfel in his study of the minimal group paradigm. He found that even when people are classified into distinct, differentiating groups on the basis of arbitrary and trivial criteria, such as those that can roll their tongues and those who cannot, this artificially created difference results in discriminatory behavior in favor of those who are like us, that is to say in-group members. The Social Categorization Literature shows that individuals are motivated to make distinctions in favor of their in-group based on the importance of the group in the situation. So under conditions where the individual perceives intergroup competition, in-group minority status, or threat to the in-group. there is a tendency to maximize the positive distinctiveness of the in-group. This phenomena was vividly put into action in a classroom experiment that was carried out by Jane Elliot who was a grade school teacher in Iowa in the United States in the 1070’s. She became an internationally acclaimed teacher, lecturer, diversity trainer, and recipient of the National Mental Health Association Award for excellence in education. Jane Elliot wanted to address racial segregation in her classroom with young children who were predominantly white. She created a field experiment in which she divided the children into two groups - one group of children with brown eyes, and the other group of children with blue eyes. In her field experiment, we see that once the children were categorized, and a clear distinction made between the two groups, which is also legitimated, in this case by the teacher, who is an authority figure. the consequences predicted by social categorization theory fall into place. It is important to keep in mind that categorization is a fundamental social cognition that is necessary for us to quickly assess our physical and social environment and to interact meaningfully with it. Our observations of perceived differences allow us to differentiate and distinguish and to facilitate information processing. This impacts how we interact and treat people who are similar to us or are different from us and can result in discrimination against those who are different from us.
