Schema Criticism: Literature, Cognitive Science, and Social Change

This article develops a new critical methodology, called schema criticism, for promoting social justice. Traditional methods of social criticism, including ideology critique and Foucauldian analysis, often fail to correct the faulty and harmful assessments of other people that underlie the punitive, violent, and counterproductive social policies, institutions, and structures that are dominant today. This is because such methods fail to alter certain deep cognitive structures that cognitive science has revealed to be responsible for these faulty judgments. These structures are cognitive schemas, which are composed of several types of knowledge—including exemplars, prototypes, and information-processing routines—each of which includes multiple forms or components. Such schemas cannot be deactivated simply by evidence and arguments that disprove them, but research in the field of schema therapy reveals that they can be corrected by engaging in cognitive activities of the sort that literary study is well positioned to provide.