assimilation-accommodation |
Working Definition:
Assimilation is the process of interpreting your experience in terms of the presuppositions (cognitive frameworks) available to you. Accommodation is the process of allowing your presuppositions to be reformed in the face aspects of the experience that are incompatible with it.
Disciplinary Definitions:
The primary source for this distinction is Jean Piaget, The Pyschology of Intelligence. In An Outline of PIaget's Developmental Psychology, Ruth M. Beard, defines the paired concepts as follows:
Assimilation: incorporation of new objects and experiences into existing schemas.
Accommodation: modification of schemas as a result of new experiences. (ix)
For an interesting graphical delineation of the relation between assimilation and accommodation in Piaget's thought, see Labinowicz The Piaget Primer, 36ff.
Comments:
a key question in the Virtual Harlem project is: under what conditions do accommodations occur? Given that persons are "cognitive misers" (Aronson, Social Psychology, 90) who take mental shortcuts whenever they can instead of reasoning and inferring, then a condition of accommodation would seem to be reasoning
Unfortunately, my assumption that entering into Virtual Harlem would provide a counter-stereotype and thus lead people away from their prejudices seems to go contrary to the evidence from social psychology, which suggests that people persist with their customary schemata in the face of counter-instances that should discredit them. A critical factor has to do with the relationship between the person's life and the persons they are encountering. Motivation is also a key determinant in whether a person responds to a situation with an automatic schema or with a controlled analysis. "Controlled processing . is thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful" (Aronson, Social Pyschology, 1999, 93). We automatically believe what we see and hear and only upon reflection check to see if it might be false.
These "theorems" allow for the following hypotheses: That persons who do not have strong negative emotions toward African Americans will accommodate their views of African American culture in a more memorable way than by merely reading about it.
Notes
See "accommodation" (Langacker, Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, 2002, 75-76 [2.1.5., 10.4.2.]). For him, "Accommodation is one of the primary forces driving schematic networks." (76). He defines it as "the adjustment in details of a component required when it is integrated with another to form a composite structure [485]
Schank speaks about "anticipation failures," that is, when scripts fail to help us anticipate the structure of an event. At that point, they have to be changed. So, if visitors to a virtual scene have to utilize scripts to behave in that scenario, then repeated failures of their stored scripts can occasion changes in them. Dynamic Memory, 45ff.
Check:
Piaget commentators
jjs
TO RETURN TO READING, CLICK "BACK" ON YOUR BROWSER MENU.
last revised:
June 13, 2007
Send comments to jjs.
copyright © jjs, 2007