A schema is a mental structure that organises knowledge about a kind of thing or situation: what a restaurant visit involves, what a family is, how an economy works. Schemas let us make sense of the world quickly by filling in what we expect, and they shape what we notice, what we remember and what feels normal or thinkable. Most of the time they run below awareness.
Origins
The modern idea comes from the psychologist Frederic Bartlett, whose 1932 book Remembering showed that English participants retelling an unfamiliar Native American folk tale, The War of the Ghosts, reshaped it over successive retellings to fit their own cultural expectations: strange details dropped out, others were rationalised. Memory, Bartlett argued, is reconstruction through schemas rather than playback. Jean Piaget developed the idea for child development, describing how new experience is either absorbed into existing schemas (assimilation) or forces them to change (accommodation).
Cultural schemas
Schemas are not only individual. The sociologist Paul DiMaggio, in his 1997 review ‘Culture and Cognition’, drew cognitive psychology and the sociology of culture together around the point that people experience culture partly as schematic structures that organise information. Shared schemas are how a culture gets into people’s heads, and they are the building blocks of what anthropologists call cultural models and what framing researchers study as deep frames.
Why it matters for deep disposition work
Schemas are the working machinery of a deep disposition: the defaults a culture fills in before any argument begins. They explain why a message that contradicts a dominant schema tends to be misheard, forgotten or rationalised back into the familiar, as Bartlett’s tale was. They also suggest why change is slow. Schemas are built by repeated experience, so they shift through repeated encounters with a different world, lived and told, much more than through single persuasive moments. That is the link to Cultivation Theory on repetition and to Narrative Transportation on how a story can stage a different default without arguing for it.
Key sources: Frederic C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 1932); Paul DiMaggio, ‘Culture and Cognition’, Annual Review of Sociology 23 (1997).
Also see Deep Frames, Mindsets, Priors, Implicit Model and Worldview