COMS 201 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Dialectic

• School: University of Calgary
• Department: Communications Studies
• Course: COMS 201
• Professor: Dawn Johnson

Document Summary

Personal constructs are the building blocks of our interpretations of experience, and help us make meaning. Cognitive schemata are kinds of knowledge structures, or organized ways of knowing. Prototypes: ideal or optimal example; the best of something. E. g the prototype of a best friend what ideal qualities they have, worst type of restaurant ever; perfect way of incapulating something. Personal constructs: binary oppositions of category; what we think of as the i or or examples. Idea that we have categories in our head that we understand extreme of category; we should use these types of construct when categorizing people and situations. Stereotypes: predictive generalization; making assumptions a group of people based on one particular characteristic trait (e. g. Asians can all do math; black people can"t swim. ) Scripts: guides and routines and sequences for our interactions (simple pleasantries, first introductions) We rely on these scripts to anticipate how the situation will unfold.