Concepts: Representing knowledge

The next section reviews the idea of concepts and representing knowledge. Although the book focuses on social knowledge, it's evident that other types of knowledge can be represented. In fact, it's easier for us as psychologists to conceptualize the idea of knowledge about things than the idea of knowledges about people. It's easier to think of the idea and category of "chair" than it is for something like "extrovert."

Concepts are the basis for cognition. Our cognitive processes would be highly inefficient if we had no way to make inferences about an object based on its categorization. When I see a pen, I don't have to spend time trying to ascertain what it does and how to use it. Even if I've never seen this particular pen before, my experiences with other pens tell me that it's likely to be useful for writing and I would be familiar with how to hold it.

This makes life a great deal simpler than if we didn't have a way to categorize and infer things about objects. It gets messier with people, however. Stereotypes are an excellent example of this. Even though most of us don't like to think of ourselves as constantly stereotyping people and making inferences about people based on initial appearances, I imagine that most of us do. Again, life would be harder if we didn't. We may talk for someone for a few minutes and make some generalizations about how they behave and change the way we will act around them accordingly. If I talk to someone for a while and they misuse grammar and seem to have a low level vocabulary, I'm not likely to strike up a conversation about math. However, a lower level of English ability certainly doesn't imply a low level math ability. Yet, I'm still likely to put such a person in a category of "unable to understand higher math" just because of a subject-verb disagreement!

We're not on the chapter about stereotypes yet, but I'm very interested to learn more about and how we use them in both positive and negative ways.