If the balloons popped, the sound wouldn't be able to carry since everything would be too far away from the correct floor. A closed window would also prevent the sound from carrying, since most buildings tend to be well insulated. Since the whole operation depends on a steady flow of electricity, a break in the middle of the wire would also cause problems. Of course, the fellow could shout, but the human voice is not loud enough to carry that far. An additional problem is that a string could break on the instrument. Then there could be no accompaniment to the message. It is clear that the best situation would involve less distance. Then there would be fewer potential problems. With face to face contact, the least number of things could go wrong. (p. 719)
The group of people were divided into three groups before they were given the text; the first was told to read it with no pre-information, the second read the text and after was shown a picture and the third were shown the picture and then given the text. After they read the text they were asked to recall as much as possible. Group one could hardly remember anything, group two who saw the picture after they read the text could only remember fragments and group three who saw the picture before the text could remember significant amounts of the paragraph. This is because the text doesn't make any sense without the picture, and the picture acts as a schema. It serves to structure the informaton attained in the text and with it the information given will have a meaning and the mind will know what to remember. The picture in question is shown below.
This study by Bransford and Johnson in 1972 perfectly illustrates how a schema helps encode a situation. It structures the information and gives it use and context whereas if there were no schemata people would walk around not knowing which information is relevant and for which concept it would be useful.
Schemata don't only have good effects though, a schema will produce prejudice and stereotypes about people. One common stereotype is the gender stereotype in which often women are expected to do the house work, men to have a career, etc. This is due to schemata as the women schema includes house work, cleaning and many other similar things, whereas the male schema involves having a career, doing sports, being stronger than women and making money. Schemata also result in racism, as if a person sees a dark skinned person committing a crime on TV repeatedly the person will start associating dark skinned people with crime. Crime is then added to the schema.
A prejudice study which was conducted in 1968 by a school teacher showed how schemata influence people. To show how unfair racism was she told her school class that children with brown eyes were inferior to those with blue or green eyes. The brown eyed children were given an armband and weren't allowed to things the other children were. They weren't for example allowed to drink out of the same water fountain. She noticed that the children slowly added being stupid to the schema of brown eyed children and intelligence to that of the fair eyed. Therefore everytime a blue-eyed child met a brown-eyed student he thought he was stupid and inferior, due to his schema.
This study shows how schemata form prejudices and stereotypes, even if one doesn't intentionally want to be racist, he unknowingly adds certain prejudices to his schemata. The small study the teacher did on her students shows how easily pejudices are added to schemata.
Another study which looks at different prejudices in a schema included 119 participants, which were flashed with pictures of black and white men. They were then given the words “legla” and “illegal”. The two words were always swapped around and the participats asked to press the legal word button. The participants although the difference was extremely slight nearly always pressed the legal button faster for the white men than for the black men. This shows that that the participants asssociate dark skinned people much faster with illegal things. This is because thir schema of dark-skinned people has a component which suggests illegal activity. This means that many people are racist without intending to be, primarily because their schemata have associated certain things, with peple of different skin colours.
The main advantage of schemata is that a person knows what information to recover and recall from memory in a certain situation. He knows how to act and what to do. For example when confronted with a tiger most people will know not to run at him and start hitting the tiger, instead their schema will tell them that tigers have teeth, are agressive, and that tiger bites are often lethal.
That schemata act like this is shown in a study by Bower in 1979, he asked participants to in order, list events which occur when eating at a restaurant. 73% of the participants included sitting down, looking at the menu, ordering, eating, paying the bill and leaving. While 43% stated entering, discussing the menu, talking, eating salad or soup, ordering dessert, and leaving a tip. This shows a high concordance rate of what people associate with eating at a restaurant. It also shows the effect of schemata,which tell a person what do to in ceratin situations. This is extremely useful because through this a person is able to identify that he needs the knowledge of using a key to turn on a car, when his car schema has been activated. Otherwise everyone would be sitting in their cars thinking for minutes to hours pondering on what information neeeds to be recovered.
The study suggests another advantage of schemata. A special type of schemata called “scripts”. “Scripts” as the name suggests are a set order in which a person expects events to occur. The people imagining the restaurant, know what they need to do in what order and have no problem recovering the information in a specif order. Scripts allow a person to not only recall information but to sort the information into a specific order through which he is then able to, master situations.
Schemata are abstract, so that for one they can not only fill in information but also apply the information. Which means that if one is told to go to a kitchen one has never been to before one can usually always identify the fridge, oven, microwave and other kitchen objects because the schema can abstractly apply them. This is similar to the dog example used before, not matter which dog a person sees, whether a golden retriever, a doberman, a rottweiler or a chihuahua which all look very different a person can nearly always deduce that a dog is a dog, because he fits into the schema of having four legs, teeth, a tail and a snout.
Schemata are extremely useful and although they have the setbacks of people becoming racist, without them no human would be able to function properly, as he wouldn't know what information to recover in what situation, whether to remember something or not and a person would often not be able to identify things for what they are. Therefore schemata are extremely important for humans day-to-day life and incredibly valuable as they allow us to function in an appropriate manner.
