chapter 5

I do believe that the relational schema is absolutely a conglomerate of self, event, role, and person schema in chapter 5. How we are with our love life, friends, family and job effect what our experiences become and how we process, perceive, react, recognize, stereotype, perceive and reflect to understand others, situations and ourselves and how others see us.

One thing in chapter five I can relate to is stereotypes and attributions. I find that I am always making attributions about things that happen. Something that I have always been guilty of but I blame the increased frequency of it on the fact that I have been in intensive therapy for the last 2 years trying to figure out why it is I do the things I do in my life. So I often find that I do the same when I am trying to understand others behaviors and actions. For example, my boss and I were witness to theft last week. We were the only two customers in a small boutique store when about 6 young kids came in, in a rather swooping manner and ransacked the store stealing 13 very expensive items in all. Now, I knew right away when the kids entered I didn’t want to make any quick judgments about them based on how they were dressed or what type of kids I thought they were based on the type of group they belonged too. However, I did feel within myself a sense of uneasiness just based on the group or category that they belonged to and the one I began to place them in. So I did try and quickly change that by keeping myself busy with other items in the store, though keeping vigilant based on the fact that the way they entered the store made me feel like something was wrong. I wonder, what made them steal? Are these just troubled kids? Where these kids experts and was this the everyday norm for them, seeing as how they seemed to have a method as they went about. Where they part of gang and this was some sort of initiation? Did they just decide to do this for kicks? Where they working for someone? Where they stealing because the items were worth so much money and in this day and age when the economy is so bad and things are getting so expense, did these kids really need to steal in order to resell these items to survive? They didn’t look all that in need. They were dressed in rather trendy, street clothes. I will never really know why they did what they did because they were never caught by security or the police that arrived to take statements. I can only make attributions for their actions.