Handbook of Prejudice By Anton Pelinka, Karin Bischof, and Karin ...

the development of a complex mental apparatus, we cannot resist these basic distinctions and are deeply puzzled and irritated if the reassuring “either/or” of the dichotomy does not work (as in cases of the uncanny, the undead revenants, or transsexual people). From the point of view of phylogeny, such primary categorisation reflects an early stage of adaptation to the world; from the point of view of ontogeny, it represents a residual elementary level.

Stereotypes (Lippmann) or schemas (Piaget) transform a bewildering mass of sensory perceptions into typical—identifiable—persons, acts, situations, objects. They are generic classes that pigeonhole concrete phenomena and assign meaning to them. In creating order and meaning, stereotypes provide the necessary orientation for survival in the social world. The learning of a language needs to be accompanied by this process of category-formation, without which the environment would not allow access for feeling and acting. By distinguishing and memorising the types, and by associating them with the right tokens, humans are mentally equipped with the necessary categories to structure the universe in a dependable way. Through the acquisition of these basic functions, individuals grow up in a society and find their place in a language, a tradition, a culture.

Schema is also the term used by the psychologist Frederic C. Bartlett (1932) in his book Remembering.¹ Bartlett showed that schemas are not only patterns that are memorised in the deeper layers of the long-term semantic memory of the individual, but are also the format in which experiences, images, stories are remembered.² They not only store events in the memory, but programme them as well in recognisable shapes and patterns. These schemas are not created by the individual. They are shared and circulated in communication by members of a culture and form a bond of mutual understanding between the members of a group. Both stereotypes and schemas are generative concepts that enable the mind to digest the phenomenal world and to produce representations that are also recognisable and meaningful for others. Both are important categories in the process of “socialising the mind” on levels beyond language.