PERSON SCHEMAS AND GROUP STEREOTYPES

• Person Schemas are cognitive structures that

describe the personalities of other individuals:
Example: your partner, you knew if your partner
is lying to you maybe because he / she have
some mannerisms
• Other person schemas are very abstract and
focus on the relations among personality traits
• A schema of this type is an implicit personality
traits
Implicit personality traits
• A set of unstated assumptions about which
personality traits are correlated with one
another
• If you learn that a child is gifted, do you
automatically assume the child has attributes?
• Recent research explored the beliefs that teachers in
Germany associate with giftedness. When a student
was described as “gifted,” teachers were more likely to
also perceive the student as emotionally deficient.
Although teachers believed gifted students would be
more open to new experiences than students of
average ability, they also saw them as more
introverted, less emotionally stable, and less
agreeable.
• These beliefs are considered implicit, or automatic,
because we seldom subject our person schemas to
close examination and are usually not explicitly aware
of the schemas contents. Therefore, the teachers were
likely unaware of their biased judgments of gifted
students and how these implicit assumptions were
influencing their behavior toward the students in class
Group Stereotypes
• Stereotype is a set of characteristics attributed to all members of
some specified group or social category
• Just like other types of schemas, stereotypes simplify the complex
social world. Rather than encouraging us to treat each member of a
group individually
• Stereotypes enable us to form impressions of people and predict their
behavior with only minimal information – the groups to which they
belong

• Stereotypes however, involve overgeneralization and even though

stereotypes overgeneralized things we still constantly use them and
are often unaware of their impact on our judgment of others
Stereotype threat
• When a member of a group believes there is a real threat of being
judged based on group stereotypes, this can negatively affect their
performance and actually cause an individual to perform more poorly
than he or she would when not under stereotype threat