SOC 104 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Santa Barbara City College, Observational Learning
Document Summary
Human beings, depending on their considerable cognitive abilities, respond to the social challenges they face. Their information about social events and their responses are established and decided by operational learning, interaction learning, and observational learning. The creation of conceptual interpretations of our environments schemes and attitudes is one product of our experiences. Once they have grown, our schemas influence our subsequent learning, so that we perceive and understand the new people and situations we experience in terms of our existing knowledge. Accommodation happens as new information is used to change existing schemas. Assimilation takes place as our intelligence serves to manipulate new information so that the conflicting information matches our current schemes. Since our expectations affect our attention and reactions to, and our memory for, new information, assimilation is generally more likely than accommodation, often in a way that keeps our expectations going.
