Mental Representation: Structure and Process 263emphasized in his seminal writings, schemas also serve an
important function in facilitating the reconstruction of the past.
Schematic inferences undoubtedly do contribute to our memo-
ries for past experiences in important ways.
In many situations, competing schemas may be potentially
applicable, and the understanding one gains of the situation
may be substantially altered depending upon which schema
is activated to parse the situation. Consider the famous case
of Kitty Genovese, a New York resident who was brutally
murdered in 1964. After observing Ms. Genovese being
chased, screaming, by an unknown man, many witnesses
failed to activate and apply the correct schema (i.e., homici-
dal maniac pursuing victim) and instead applied a quite
mistaken one (e.g., teenagers engaging in horseplay). The
failure of other bystanders to take action only served to
underscore the plausibility of the erroneous interpretation.
Clearly, the meaning of observed behavior can take on a very
different meaning—and obliges very different behavioral
reactions—depending upon which schema is invoked. Re-
search by Shotland and Straw (1976) subsequently showed
that when people observe an ambiguous situation in which a
man is harassing a woman on the street, they often assume by
default that it is a lover’s quarrel and fail to take any steps to
help the woman. Only when this schema was rendered inap-
plicable (by the woman’s exclaiming, “I don’t know you!”)
did people perceive the situation as one in which they should
intervene. Research such as this underscores the importance
of understanding the conditions under which particular
schemas will be applied.
Sometimes a relevant schema is activated because it fits
the current situation unambiguously. But when there is any
ambiguity and competing schemas can each afford some de-
gree of fit to the situation, then the schema that is applied is
likely to be the one that most accessible (Bruner, 1957). Ac-
cessibility, in turn, is a function of relevance of the contend-
ing schemas to the perceiver’s chronically and momentarily
active goals, as well as the recency and frequency with which
each of the competing schemas has been used. As such,
schemas that are goal-relevant or that have been recently or
frequently used will be much more likely to be applied.
Dodge (1993) has shown, for example, that some boys have a
chronically accessible schema for parsing social interactions,
in which they assume that the behavior of others toward them
is motivated by hostile intentions and disrespect. When
confronted with ambiguous behavior, they consistently as-
sume the worst. These schema-based impressions then lead
to hostile reactions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these same boys
have a tendency to show poor social adjustment and are at
higher risk for delinquency. In addition to dispositional
biases in the accessibility of schemas, situational factors can
prompt certain schemas to become more accessible. The
expansive literature on priming effects is built on the realiza-
tion that schemas that have been activated in unrelated con-
texts may continue to exert an influence on social cognition
because their previous use has rendered them momentarily
accessible (e.g., Higgins, 1996).
Schema theory has been applied in a wide variety of topi-
cal domains. One domain in which schematic models have
been especially influential is gender. Bem (1981) proposed a
gender schema theory, which asserts that cultural conven-
tions regarding gender become a sort of lens through which
perceptions of others are filtered. Bem (1993, p. 154) ex-
plains that the gender-schematic person “has a readiness to
superimpose gender-based classification on every heteroge-
neous collection of human possibilities that presents itself.”
In one of the most well-known studies of this phenomenon,
Bem (1981) first identified individuals who were or were not
gender schematic (i.e., based on their sex-role attitudes, they
either did or did not appear to possess an internalized schema
for gender appropriateness that was consistent with prevail-
ing cultural conventions). Then she presented them with lists
of concepts (animals, verbs, clothing) to learn, in a randomly
mixed order. An important aspect of this study was that some
of the concepts were pretested as being conventionally mas-
culine (e.g., gorilla, hurling, trousers), some were conven-
tionally feminine (e.g., butterfly, blushing, bikini), and some
had no gender connotations (e.g., ant, stepping, sweater). The
order in which these concepts were recalled in a memory task
revealed that gender-schematic individuals were far more
likely than were aschematic persons to cluster the concepts
together in terms of their gender connotations, consistent
with the idea that a gender schema guided the way the infor-
mation was interpreted and organized in the minds of the
gender-schematic participants.
Gender is but one of many domains in which the schema
construct has been invoked to account for the regularities
of social cognition. Person schemas, event schemas, self
schemas, role schemas, and many others have been proposed
(for a review, see Fiske & Taylor, 1991). The appeal of
schema theory as opposed to associative network models of
mental representation appears to lie in the recognition that the
stimuli of the social world are often quite complex, and the
assumptions of structured organization contained within
schema models seems more appropriate for capturing this
complexity, compared to the comparatively simple structural
assumptions underlying network models. Moreover, the em-
phasis of schema approaches on processes of selective atten-
tion and organization of social information has an undeniable
resonance with many phenomena of long-standing interest to
social cognition researchers. Nevertheless, schematic models
have been criticized as being too loose and theoretically un-
derspecified (e.g., Alba & Hasher, 1983; Fiske & Linville,