Summary
A schema is a mental structure that organises knowledge about a kind of situation: what a restaurant visit involves, or what a family is. They let us make sense of things quickly by filling in what we expect, and they shape what we notice, remember and find normal, mostly below awareness.
The psychologist Frederic Bartlett showed this in 1932: asked to recall a Chinook folk tale, his participants reshaped it to fit their cultural expectations. Jean Piaget used the term for children’s developing understanding. In 1997 the sociologist Paul DiMaggio took the idea into the study of culture, which he said people experience as schematic structures and as “disparate bits of information”.
Rationale
Psychology’s account of one part of a deep disposition: the defaults filled in before any argument begins. Only a part, since Part 1 holds that “cognition doesn’t just exist in our heads”.