The human brain has a tendency to continually employ strategies that make it easier and faster to categorize, pass judgments and make decisions. Ideally, these shortcuts result in more efficiency and lessen the expenditure of unnecessary energy. However, there are many pitfalls associated with these mental shortcuts. Automatic versus controlled processing can be compared to the ubiquitous and uncontrolled processes involved with implicit learning versus the effort associated with deliberate learning. Controlled processing is seen as deliberate, conscious, and effortful. Uncontrolled processing is seen as occurring without effort or awareness.
Automatic processing helps us with the continuity between the old and new. It often saves us time by allowing us to complete a task without consciously thinking about them. Consequently, we are constantly engaging automatically with the world. Examples of mental shortcuts associated with automatically analyzing the world include schemas and scripts. Schemas are mental structures people use to quickly organize the world. Scripts are standards of behavior and resulting consequences that are expected in specific environments or contexts. The difficulty with these phenomena is that they are not culturally universal and can be tied to deleterious processes such as prejudice and discrimination. Within the field of psychology, we frequently study how implicit beliefs and attitudes affect an individual's explicit behaviors or expressions.
Implicit refers to something that is held internally and can refer to attitudes or beliefs that are not in immediate awareness. Explicit refers to the physical manifestation of implicitly held beliefs or attitudes. A concrete understanding of how these processes influence and relate to each other is particularly important in real-world contexts. For example, policing is a practice that requires individuals to make quick decisions under stressful conditions. Failing to acknowledge the effects of implicit processes that influence decisions like whether or not to use deadly force can have disastrous results. Interventions that have been developed to help combat this problem include guiding individuals through exercises that allow them to recognize and acknowledge implicit feelings of bias, fear, or prejudice. The aim of these exercises is not to eliminate these components of thinking, but to help people to recognize that they exist so that they think twice before engaging in actions that have the propensity to be harmful to others. These exercises can be applied in our every day lives as well. Carefully examining the origin of our own attitudes and beliefs provides a greater awareness of how they directly or indirectly influence the way that we engage with the world around us.
By Sandra Yankah, M.S.
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