[MUSIC] This is part two of our social norm lectures. Here, I will discuss norm change and the tools we may use to enact change. Since norms do not exist in isolation, our lecture highlight how social norm are embedded in a wider web of beliefs, values and of course other norms. Changing norms involved paying attention to the elements within which a norm is embedded. These elements are group together instructures that we call schemas and scripts, and this lecture is devoted to understand what they are and how they make change, lets us now listen to a good description of what this web of believe and values might be in child marriage. >> Child marriage is embedded in a complex web and hierarchy of gender norms including boy preference, low value of girls, arranged marriage, dowry, cost endogamy, etc. And these social and gender norms remain very very strong in India. None of these social and gender norms are necessarily challenged by delaying marriage of girls until aged 18 years. Today, we will talk about norms, scripts, and schemas. As I mentioned, Norms Do Not Exist in Isolation. They are part of a web of cognitive elements and structures. It is important to understand that Changing the underlying elements a norm is embedded in can help change the norm. Shall see later on, this is a way in which a norm can be changed. Now, the first question we want to ask is how is a norm activated? What is the mental cognitive process through which norm activation takes place? The first thing we do when we encounter a social situation, be the person, a phenomenon, or an event we need to Interpret it. What is it? To Understand it, and Encode it. And this is what we call performing a social inference. After I observe a social situation, let us call it a stimulus or a pattern of stimuli, I try to understand it by assessing how similarities to other situations. Or events that they have stored in memory. So for example, in the case of a person, or a social situation, I will ask myself, is it similar to ones I have encountered in the past? How can I understand it, and how should I act given my understanding of what I am observing? Note that this processes are not conscious. We are not aware that we are processing all this information and this process take place in our minds in split seconds. The process of trying to find similarities. Finding in our memory similar events, people, or situation we have experience, is called a process of categorization. Think of a coin sorter. Similar coins are put in the same category. Tens with tens, five with five, quarters with quarters. We abstract from specific features of particular coins say quarters, we overlook the differences such as being more or less worn, new or old. What matters is that they are all quarters. Categorization strips away inessential features, sort of things, quarters in our case, into a very general abstract category. There are two main theories about methods of categorization. One says that we place a new stimulus into category by looking at how similar it is to a single prototype. Another instead says that a new stimulus is compared. To multiple non exemplars in a category. A prototype is an abstract average of category members, whereas an exemplar is an actual member of a category. Often these two approaches work together in everyday life. We may learn through exemplars, but then we form a prototype. Once we categorize something as been part of a large class of objects, events, or people, we lease it what we call a schema. Now what is a schema? A schema is a cognitive structure that represent our knowledge about particular phenomena. Take quarters. We know how much a quarter is worth, what we can buy with it, that we can use it in parking meters and so on. Similarly we have a lot of stored knowledge about many, many things. Most of them much more complex than quarters. And this stored knowledge encompasses beliefs, expectations, and often also rules of behavior. We have schemas for social categories, animals, objects, events, people, and even ourselves. For example, there are occasion in which I may think of myself as an Italian, with all the typical or stereotypical characteristics we attribute to Italian women. Schemas are often organized around prototypes. And they're constructed through the observation of many examples. Think of a child learning what it car is. The child will be pointed to many examples, we call them exemplars of cars. Toy cars he plays with, but also real cars. They all share certain elements, they have four wheels, have steering wheel. They have doors, a windshield, and they can move. So, the child will learn to recognize Is a car when he sees one. The child has learned the typical features of a category of things, cars in this case, he has developed a cognitive representation of the prototype of a car. Whether you observe is small or a big car, a red or a black car, he will match what you observed with his prototype of a car. The choice schematic knowledge of cars, will be very different from an engineer's knowledge, who will distinguish cars by their engine types and form subcategories. What I want to stress is that these capabilities of forming categories and, when we face a new stimulus, making a similarity judgment and draw a categorization conclusion, is something we constantly do. We possess schematic knowledge of people animals, objects, situations and events. And when we match something with a category, we immediately trigger the corresponding schema.
