Schemata and Schema and ... bears (oh my)!

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_Res Ipsa
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Re: Schemata and Schema and ... bears (oh my)!

Post by _Res Ipsa »

Jersey Girl wrote:Good news! I didn't die!

Bad news! I polished off all the Valentine's candy!

:lol:


That's the best part of cabin fever!
​“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”

― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
_Res Ipsa
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Re: Schemata and Schema and ... bears (oh my)!

Post by _Res Ipsa »

Jersey Girl wrote:I haven't had a lot of time to think about this.

I think...the first thing we do is admit that there will be no possible way to contain the dialogue. That said, I think it would be helpful to identify the various schema that went into our assessments of the Covington students incident.

Let me name a few schema in no particular order, I'm lying it'll be in some kind of order as it spills out of my head.

1. What does a Maga hat represent? What is a Trump supporter?
2. What does Trump represent?
3. What are Republicans?
4. What are Democrats?
5. What are the characteristics of white male high school students?
6. What are the characteristics of white male high school students in groups?
7. What do Native Americans represent?
8. What do the elderly represent?
9. What is a Black Israelite?
10. What are protestors? What happens at a protest?

Then you have to fully admit that every one of your definitions above relies on your education as well as your subjective life experience, and the stage of development that YOU are in because it influences how you evaluate what you experience in the world.

Then as you work your way through the list defining each schema, knowing that your education, subjective life experience, and your own particular stage of human development, justifies every schema within the schemata represented in the incident that you viewed you have to admit that your evaluation is at least somewhat reliant on your personally held bias.

:-D

Then as you begin to evaluate your schema, you find yourself blaming the press for frittering out the information in teeny tiny little bytes of information and torturing you until the information you've got is as complete as you can expect and it serves to 1) either served to confirm your bias or 2) served to disabuse you of your bias and therefore caused you to revise your assumptions which requires a level of self honesty that is difficult for us to achieve.

Then...you blame the chief players in the incident when they rework their stories to make themselves appear all noble and their stories compete with your confirmed biases or revised position, then you cast blame on yourself for being gullible enough to think that you could possibly know the actual truth and are suddenly overwhelmed with self disgust because you spent so much time thinking about something that is essentially unknowable, arguing on a message board over every minute detail and possible explanation with other folks who have gone through the same exact process as you have applying their own schema to the incident, and ruminate over how those kids are going to end up richer than God and you are not.

But in the end, you pat yourself on the back for being a good skeptic who questioned all of the above to start with because the value is in the questioning and the process. Yeah, that'll work so you can at least rescue a bit of self esteem. ;-)

Or you compartmentalized the whole damn thing, your schema is going to remain intact come hell or high water, and you refuse to let your position go under any circumstances so help you God, the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny and Flying Spaghetti Monster, or whatever is your individual persuasion up to and including various forms of animal worship possibly even performing certain rituals that involve an aluminum pole in the living room. Don't want to hear it no way no how. It was definitely the _____who was at fault.

And then you talk to some cabin fevered overly wordy Jersey Girl about why you didn't know what you couldn't have known about Mormonism after you read some book and wished you had it way back when so you didn't have to spend so much time smacking yourself upside your own head, doubting yourself after doubting the church, feeling guilty for not knowing what you couldn't have known, and she ends up telling you that you are only human like the rest of us are and we all fall for ____ until we don't. But she'll still engage your thoughts anyway if it helps.

:-)

That's a pretty good description of the process, I think. One thing that both books stressed was the natural tendency to avoid having to change the schemata. (They didn't use the terminology, but that's pretty much what they were saying.) Any conflict between new information and the schemata results in cognitive dissonance (is there a Piagettian term for CD?) The easiest (?) way for the brain to resolve the CD is to either discount the new information, forget the new information, or interpret the new information in a way that makes it consistent with the schemata. Would that be similar to assimilation? Less commonly, the brain changes the schemata to accommodate the new information. (Accommodation, right?) One of the main points of both books seemed to be that the desire to self-justify the schemata, or more appropriately maybe actions taken based on the schemata, is really, really powerful. And we see this over and over again here with LDS folks who are confronted with evidence that the LDS Church is not what it purports to be.
​“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”

― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
_Res Ipsa
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Joined: Fri Oct 05, 2012 11:37 pm

Re: Schemata and Schema and ... bears (oh my)!

Post by _Res Ipsa »

Jersey Girl wrote:Oh and if the kid who was engaged in a stare down had long hair, red hair, or no hair at all and looked like that kid who mocked you in middle school every freaking chance he got--then the kid in the stare down was definitely the instigator.

No question about it. Guilty as hell. Lock his cocky little ass up in Juvie. That'll teach him to screw with you!


Good point. And it's likely you don't even consciously recognize the resemblance.
​“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”

― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
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Re: Schemata and Schema and ... bears (oh my)!

Post by _Maksutov »

Jersey Girl wrote:
Maksutov wrote:Piaget is underrated.

Piaget is a God. Write that down.

Never mind Freud and Skinner. Piaget treated us like us.
"God" is the original deus ex machina. --Maksutov
_Res Ipsa
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Re: Schemata and Schema and ... bears (oh my)!

Post by _Res Ipsa »

Jersey Girl wrote:Don't mind me. I'm having a thread all to myself. Introverted only child's dream come true this is!

Nope. I'm shadowing you here. :lol:

Res Ipsa wrote:I wish this book had been around when I left Mormonism. I had a tough time dealing with the fact that I had been so wrong about something so important in my life.

Jersey Girl wrote:I don't know how old you were when you left Mormonism but it's possible that the book might have been too much for you to process at the time OR it could have made all the difference in the world.

I was 19. I left my mission about six months in. Moving from a place where I new the answers to life, the universe, and everything to a place where I didn't know anything except I'd been horribly wrong was an extremely disorienting experience for me. I'd going through an agonizing bout of cognitive dissonance, but I didn't even have a word for what had happened. It was pre-internet, so I didn't even have anyone I could compare notes with. I really wanted someone who had been through this to tell me that I wasn't going crazy and I was going to be okay -- or at least as okay as people ever are.

Of course, I can't know, but I think the book would have been helpful. It would have at least given me a framework for how to think about what had happened to me. How being wrong -- even really, really wrong -- is simply part of having a brain. And that being really, really wrong once doesn't mean I'd be really, really wrong ever again.

Jersey Girl wrote:There are, for example, issues and shifts in my own life that were years in the making, years in the processing, and continue to evolve today as I take in more information, gain more experience as in just when you think you have a thing all whipped something or someone comes along and causes you to revise. Again.

Life is a journey, be present I say.

Always good advice.

Jersey Girl wrote:I can well understand a sense of betrayal, feeling like you were taken for a ride and beating yourself up because you didn't know it at the time.

Oddly, I never really felt betrayed. I was BIC. My parents didn't mean to fool me. The folks in my ward didn't mean to fool me. I didn't even really think about the leadership in Salt Lake. But I did beat myself up for being fooled.

Jersey Girl wrote:I don't think it's so much about how wrong you were about Mormonism, more to the point it's about how right you believed you were. And if you were BIC, you barely stood a chance at seeing it from a different perspective because you were indoctrinated from basically the womb and I would almost bet my house (if I didn't need some place to sleep) that your journey out of Mormonism began in adulthood when you were more ready to evaluate the information before you.

That's absolutely correct. I had zero doubts about the church growing up. And it was the fact that I had known how right I was that was the most troubling thing.

Jersey Girl wrote:All I really can say (not knowing the specifics) is that something made your antenna go up and it probably couldn't have happened any earlier than it did happen.

Exactly right. It started during my freshman year at BYU, when I had more access to information than I'd had before.

Jersey Girl wrote:(Some of the things I've seen over time on these boards from certain posters whose ages I know, are completely consistent with their stage of development.)

How could you be so wrong about something so important? The same way the rest of us are, RI. If you are indoctrinated to a belief as a child, it's not even so much that you are wrong or right about a thing, it's what you accept that IS.

Mormonism was part of your schemata that represented the world to you as a child and it was likely reinforced time after time, year after year, by all of your experiences and by virtually everyone you knew, because the accepted premise was that Mormonism IS and what you assimilated and accommodated into your schema regarding Mormonism was taken from those reinforcers.

Yep. Thankfully, it didn't take me that long to get to the point where I could say "OK, you were wrong. You can assume the fetal position in a corner for the rest of your life, or you can dust yourself off, get out there, and risk being wrong again." But I can't explain how I got there. It just happened.

Jersey Girl wrote:Until it wasn't.

Yep.
​“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”

― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
_Jersey Girl
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Re: Schemata and Schema and ... bears (oh my)!

Post by _Jersey Girl »

Res Ipsa wrote:
Jersey Girl wrote:I haven't had a lot of time to think about this.

I think...the first thing we do is admit that there will be no possible way to contain the dialogue. That said, I think it would be helpful to identify the various schema that went into our assessments of the Covington students incident.

Let me name a few schema in no particular order, I'm lying it'll be in some kind of order as it spills out of my head.

1. What does a Maga hat represent? What is a Trump supporter?
2. What does Trump represent?
3. What are Republicans?
4. What are Democrats?
5. What are the characteristics of white male high school students?
6. What are the characteristics of white male high school students in groups?
7. What do Native Americans represent?
8. What do the elderly represent?
9. What is a Black Israelite?
10. What are protestors? What happens at a protest?

Then you have to fully admit that every one of your definitions above relies on your education as well as your subjective life experience, and the stage of development that YOU are in because it influences how you evaluate what you experience in the world.

Then as you work your way through the list defining each schema, knowing that your education, subjective life experience, and your own particular stage of human development, justifies every schema within the schemata represented in the incident that you viewed you have to admit that your evaluation is at least somewhat reliant on your personally held bias.

:-D

Then as you begin to evaluate your schema, you find yourself blaming the press for frittering out the information in teeny tiny little bytes of information and torturing you until the information you've got is as complete as you can expect and it serves to 1) either served to confirm your bias or 2) served to disabuse you of your bias and therefore caused you to revise your assumptions which requires a level of self honesty that is difficult for us to achieve.

Then...you blame the chief players in the incident when they rework their stories to make themselves appear all noble and their stories compete with your confirmed biases or revised position, then you cast blame on yourself for being gullible enough to think that you could possibly know the actual truth and are suddenly overwhelmed with self disgust because you spent so much time thinking about something that is essentially unknowable, arguing on a message board over every minute detail and possible explanation with other folks who have gone through the same exact process as you have applying their own schema to the incident, and ruminate over how those kids are going to end up richer than God and you are not.

But in the end, you pat yourself on the back for being a good skeptic who questioned all of the above to start with because the value is in the questioning and the process. Yeah, that'll work so you can at least rescue a bit of self esteem. ;-)

Or you compartmentalized the whole damn thing, your schema is going to remain intact come hell or high water, and you refuse to let your position go under any circumstances so help you God, the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny and Flying Spaghetti Monster, or whatever is your individual persuasion up to and including various forms of animal worship possibly even performing certain rituals that involve an aluminum pole in the living room. Don't want to hear it no way no how. It was definitely the _____who was at fault.

And then you talk to some cabin fevered overly wordy Jersey Girl about why you didn't know what you couldn't have known about Mormonism after you read some book and wished you had it way back when so you didn't have to spend so much time smacking yourself upside your own head, doubting yourself after doubting the church, feeling guilty for not knowing what you couldn't have known, and she ends up telling you that you are only human like the rest of us are and we all fall for ____ until we don't. But she'll still engage your thoughts anyway if it helps.

:-)

That's a pretty good description of the process, I think. One thing that both books stressed was the natural tendency to avoid having to change the schemata. (They didn't use the terminology, but that's pretty much what they were saying.) Any conflict between new information and the schemata results in cognitive dissonance (is there a Piagettian term for CD?) The easiest (?) way for the brain to resolve the CD is to either discount the new information, forget the new information, or interpret the new information in a way that makes it consistent with the schemata. Would that be similar to assimilation? Less commonly, the brain changes the schemata to accommodate the new information. (Accommodation, right?) One of the main points of both books seemed to be that the desire to self-justify the schemata, or more appropriately maybe actions taken based on the schemata, is really, really powerful. And we see this over and over again here with LDS folks who are confronted with evidence that the LDS Church is not what it purports to be.


Wow. In my wall climbing craziness I must've done something right!

You: Any conflict between new information and the schemata results in cognitive dissonance (is there a Piagettian term for CD?)

Me: Yep. Disequilibrium. :-) Keep in mind that Piagetian theory involves children. Young children go through periods of equilibrium and disequilibrium and they work their way through various tasks of childhood. Dr. T. Berry Brazelton (also one of my gods) calls these touchpoints. I'm actually Touchpoints trained and educated. Yes, it's a thing through the Brazelton Institute. :-)

Easy example: What is the task of the approx. 12 month old child? Walking. When the child begins to pull up and cruise furniture (crib rails, sofa, etc.) and begins to let go and takes his/her first steps it is not uncommon for the child's sleep routine to suddenly go off balance. The baby is up throughout the night, crying, wired, what have you. But by golly his/her exhausted sleep deprived parents proudly exclaim "S/he's walking!!!) :-)

Once the child has mastered the task or milestone, the sleep cycle returns to normal and there is peace on earth once again!

Walking is both a Piagetian stage of disequilibrium and a Brazelton Touchpoint.

While it's related to the sensory motor stage in Piaget's stage model theory, and adults whose ability to reason and process is more formalized are faced with a cognitive dilemma, both involve the brain and I see both disequilibrium and cog dis as being part of the same type of process only at a different stage of development.

Essentially: Something new has taken place or new information has been received that presents a challenge that sets both the 12 month old and the adult off balance. Both go a little crazy for a while until they've worked things out. :-)

I'm sure that if I fished around long enough I could find internal conflict management/cog dis in yet another theory regarding adults. It's just not coming to me at the moment. Maybe Kohlberg though probably not.

I do think that the type of cog dis that has to do with transition from a religion such as Mormonism and the adjustment that accompanies it , is fairly represented in Kübler-Ross model of the 5 stages of grief and also in adjustment psychology.

I think the thing to know is that these stage models all hold value to us and if you laid them side by side you could draw a line from one stage in one model to the other and see overall human development at various stages cradle to grave. In the case of the adult transitioning their thinking away from Mormonism, we're talking about a myriad of issues not the least of which is how we are able to process the experience. What have I lost? What do I have to lose here? With regard to Mormonism the personal cost to the individual is sky high and so I would assume that the very first time one's antenna goes up that it poses a threat to the individual. That's why you stuff various things on "the shelf" that you all talk about. It's safer to tuck them away (and take flight) than face what you might be losing (and fight your way through it).

I skipped your question about accommodation. I'll come back to it eventually.

Hmmm...let's see if I can represent something here...

Cog dis>>>>>Disquilbrium>>>>>Flight>>>>>Denial.

Does that make any obvious sense in that they are all the same response to a dilemma or crisis state?

I just got off the road, I need food. :-D
Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.
Chinese Proverb
_Res Ipsa
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Re: Schemata and Schema and ... bears (oh my)!

Post by _Res Ipsa »

Jersey Girl wrote:I do think that the type of cognitive dissonance that has to do with transition from a religion such as Mormonism and the adjustment that accompanies it , is fairly represented in Kübler-Ross model of the 5 stages of grief and also in adjustment psychology.

Yeah, that sounds right to me.

Jersey Girl wrote:I think the thing to know is that these stage models all hold value to us and if you laid them side by side you could draw a line from one stage in one model to the other and see overall human development at various stages cradle to grave. In the case of the adult transitioning their thinking away from Mormonism, we're talking about a myriad of issues not the least of which is how we are able to process the experience. What have I lost? What do I have to lose here? With regard to Mormonism the personal cost to the individual is sky high and so I would assume that the very first time one's antenna goes up that it poses a threat to the individual. That's why you stuff various things on "the shelf" that you all talk about. It's safer to tuck them away (and take flight) than face what you might be losing (and fight your way through it).

Yes, the personal cost is pretty damn high. That creates a ton of resistance to accommodating the new information. The shelf is a nice straddle between assimilation and accommodation: you don't have to disprove the factual claim, you don't have to accept the factual claim, you just trust that it will all work out. I think that can reduce the CD, at least temporarily. But at some point the CD just piles on and on, for some folks eventually breaking the shelf.

Jersey Girl wrote:I skipped your question about accommodation. I'll come back to it eventually.

Hmmm...let's see if I can represent something here...

cognitive dissonance>>>>>Disquilbrium>>>>>Flight>>>>>Denial.

Does that make any obvious sense in that they are all the same response to a dilemma or crisis state?

I've been going back and forth on this one. I think the CD and Disequilibrium are both responses. But it seems to me that flight and denial look more like responses to the CD/equilibrium rather than the dilemma/crisis state. That would make them look more like assimilation or accommodation. Hmmmmm.

Jersey Girl wrote:I just got off the road, I need food. :-D

At least you're no longer house bound!
​“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”

― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
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Re: Schemata and Schema and ... bears (oh my)!

Post by _Jersey Girl »

The easiest (?) way for the brain to resolve the CD is to either discount the new information, forget the new information, or interpret the new information in a way that makes it consistent with the schemata. Would that be similar to assimilation? Less commonly, the brain changes the schemata to accommodate the new information. (Accommodation, right?)


Start with this. The purpose of assimilation and accommodation is to reorganize the schema.

Assimilation as I understand it is the discovery of a new piece of information and understanding it as thoroughly as we are able.

Accommodation is where and how we choose to store it.

Spit balling a couple of examples:

MLKJr Schema:

MLKJr as a central figure in the Civil Rights movement.
MLKJr as a well respected figure in the 1960's.
MLKJr as a proponent of passive resistance (Ghandi).
MLKJr as a well educated person.
MLKJr as a Baptist minister.
MLKJr as a dynamic personality.

Discovery: MLKJr as adulterer.

How does that change our schema (mental construct) regarding MLKJr? Individuals will have individual responses to that likely based on how they prioritize characteristics they value or what biases they hold.

You could compare your schema regarding JSJr before, during and after your intellectual transition away from Mormonism. And, I think if you did that, you would see yourself taking in new information, first rejecting much of it, start taking it off the shelf for examination and research, then slowly reorganizing your schema about JSJr over time, and in the process of your doing it (I'm making up the terms of your transition here) you are simultaneously reorganizing your schema about doctrine, church leaders, church history and how they function, family members, friends, and business associates, etc.

It's just like how a computer program works. Your brain is a computer that is constantly updating itself.

:-D

With regard to the changing schemata of Mormonism, I would say that past the point of the transition away from Mormonism, there comes another transition in thinking the point of which is reconciliation. Example, some ex-Mo's don't see their families or Bishops as misleading them. And so the schemata of Mormonism changes once again and likely does so with every new piece of information one receives regarding Mormonism.

Constant updates. ;-)
Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.
Chinese Proverb
_Jersey Girl
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Re: Schemata and Schema and ... bears (oh my)!

Post by _Jersey Girl »

Here's an idea regarding the Covington students. Take away the MAGA hats. How does that influence your perception of and reaction to them?

I don't think it's too late to try that experiment so long as one is willing to be self honest.
Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.
Chinese Proverb
_Jersey Girl
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Re: Schemata and Schema and ... bears (oh my)!

Post by _Jersey Girl »

Res Ipsa wrote:At least you're no longer house bound!

Only until 6 pm when it's going to start up snowing a blue streak again. I've got a bit of time to run out for food before my mental health status begins to tank again. :eek: I'll come back. Possibly with candy.
Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.
Chinese Proverb
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