Cognitive distinctiveness of social schemata (original) (raw)

The Cognitive Structure of Social Categories*

Cognitive Science, 1985

Support for the prototype theory of categorization was found i n a study of the structure of social categories. Though occupational terms such as DOCTOR are socially defined, they do not have the classical structure their clear definitional origins would predict. Conceptions of social categories are richer and more complex than those of physical object categories and subjects agree upon them. Comparison of various instructions for eliciting attributes of categories showed that whether subjects are asked to define a term, give characteristics, or describe ways they recognize members of categories, the attributes they list contribute to a prototype structure. These data provide evi dence against the view that prototype structure is relevant only to an identification procedure and not to the care of concepts, as has been suggested.

Putting social structure in its place, schematically

Issues in Integrative Studies, 2001

I apply the schema I developed in a recent Issues in Integrative Studies (IIS ) paper (consisting of a hierarchically organized list of the phenomena of interest to human scientists, and the causal links or influences among these) to the case of social structure, which is defined in terms of the subgroups into which societies are divided. I discuss causal links in both directions between elements of social structure and phenomena in each of the nine other categories in my schema. This illustrates the validity of my schema, by showing that diverse causal links can be placed within it. I also illustrate the value of the schema as an organizing device for the study of social structure (or other phenomena). I draw several lessons for the future study of social structure.

Us, ourselves, and we: Thoughts about social (self-) categorization

ACM Siggroup Bulletin, 2004

In a recent Workshop on community-based learning at the 6th International Conference on Learning Sciences (ICLS 2004), one persistent theme was the variety of terms used to describe collections of people (group, community, network, collective) and components of interaction (culture, identity, collaboration, cooperation) in group learning activities. Here, we describe some of the thinking that emerged in those discussions, not as a comprehensive literature review or completely elaborated socio-cultural theory, but rather as an invitation to further discussion. We suggest that a group is the most generic and general social category: all of the analytical units in the literature on collective learning - teams, social networks, and communities - are groups. We argue that these other terms have additional structural characteristics that make them distinct subsets of the generic term group. For example, a team is a group with a common task, a network is a group with strong social ties, and a community is a group with a shared culture. We propose a two-dimensional space of social organizations characterized by shared culture and shared interaction, and suggest both individuals and collectives show a developmental history through the space of collectives, moving from loose group affiliation to increasing identification with, development of, and participation in shared interactions within a shared culture. This analysis suggests, we argue, that: (a) tools to support “collaboration” may need different affordances for different kinds of collectives; (b) understanding different kinds of collectives requires different methodologies; and (c) culture plays a prominent role in the space of collectives we describe, and thus, we argue, should play a significant role in the analysis of any community. We hope that this brief discussion will lead to further work on the social entities within which group learning takes place, on the processes of learning in such settings, and on the technologies that can support such processes.

On structuring and outlining processes in the study of social representations

Papers on social representations, 2016

Jodelet, D. (2016). On structuring and outlining processes in the study of social representations. Papers on social representations, 26(2), 2.1-2.11. The paradigm proposed by Moscovici describes three steps to the objectification process: selection/outlining/naturalization. An analogy is often made between the " core nucleus " from the structural model and the " illustrative nucleus " that results from outlining in Moscovici's model. Many authors have developed the notion of outlining. Drawing on these contributions, we offer to demonstrate how the structural approach to social representations puts cognitive processes of outlining in a collectivist perspective.