I want to continue to make sense of some conceptual stuff. Today I’m adding the ideas about schemas and bias to yesterday’s post about values and metaphor.

One aspect of the frames we have of the world comes from the schemas we create. Virginia Valian, in her gender tutorials, has this to say about schemas:

What are schemas? Schemas are similar to stereotypes, but I prefer the term schema because it is more inclusive and more neutral. We can have schemas about social groups, such as men or women, or different age groups or different ethnic groups; we can have schemas about things that have nothing to do with people, such as chairs and skyscrapers. A schema is a hypothesis about the basics of some category. Schemas are useful. They allow us to categorize the people and objects and events in our environment. They help us orient ourselves, know what to expect, and make predictions. Schemas are proto-scientific.

Gender schemas, she goes on to say, are hypotheses about what it means to be male or female.

It’s hard to know what schemas we hold, because schemas are largely unconscious and when researchers ask us about them, we give them what we think is a socially acceptable response. One way of accessing our schemas is to take the Harvard Implicit Association Test (IAT), which bypasses our assumptions about what people want to hear and tests how easy or difficult we find it to associate positive descriptors with members of particular groups. There are tests for race, gender, and a range of other categories. Great if you are prepared to find out something about yourself that you may not find comfortable!

In yesterday’s post I reported the research finding that certain values can be activated by instruction. It appears that schemas can be activated and de-activated through the same process. For example, there is a schema that women are less good at maths than men. When women studying maths are told before sitting a maths test that women do less well in the test than men do, they perform less well in the test than women who are not given this ‘instruction’. (This is stereotype threat: Virginia Valian gives an example of  it in her gender tutorials.) And Pearn Kandola, the occupational psychologists, ran an experiment in which participants were able to eliminate unconscious bias – as measured by the IAT – by simply setting themselves a clear intention (e.g. ‘when I meet a black candidate, I will ignore skin colour’). This experiment is described in Binna Kandola’s excellent book The Value of Difference. Kandola describes the clear intentions as ‘a memory of the future’: visualising what we want to happen as clearly as we visualise past events. Note that when participants used a less clear statement (e.g. ‘I will not be biased’) their bias was reduced but not eliminated.

I wonder if schema and bias research has found the same pattern as reported on values: that activating a bias in one direction reduces a bias in the opposite direction? Or is it bias itself (rather than a bias) that is reduced?