Set (psychology)

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In psychology, a set is a group of expectations that shape experience by making people especially sensitive to specific kinds of information. A perceptual set, also called perceptual expectancy, is a predisposition to perceive things in a certain way.^[1] Perceptual sets occur in all the different senses.^[2] They can be long term, such as a special sensitivity to hearing one's own name in a crowded room, or short term, as in the ease with which hungry people notice the smell of food.^[3] A mental set is a framework for thinking about a problem.^[4] It can be shaped by habit or by desire.^[5] Mental sets can make it easy to solve a class of problem, but attachment to the wrong mental set can inhibit problem-solving and creativity.^[4][6]

Perception can be shaped by "top-down" processes such as drives and expectations. An effect of these factors is that people are particularly sensitive to perceive certain things, detecting them from weaker stimuli than otherwise.^[7] A simple demonstration of the effect involved very brief presentations of non-words such as "sael". Subjects who were told to expect words about animals read it as "seal", but others who were expecting boat-related words read it as "sail".^[3]

Sets can be created by motivation and so can result in people interpreting ambiguous situations so that they see what they want to see.^[7] For instance, a person's experience of the events in a sports match can be biased if they strongly support one of the teams.^[8] In one experiment, students were allocated to pleasant or unpleasant tasks by a computer. They were told that either a number or a letter would flash on the screen to say whether they were going to taste an orange juice drink or an unpleasant-tasting health drink. In fact, an ambiguous figure was flashed on screen, which could either be read as the letter B or the number 13. When the letters were associated with the pleasant task, subjects were more likely to perceive a letter B, and when letters were associated with the unpleasant task they tended to perceive a number 13.^[1]

Perceptual sets have been demonstrated in many social contexts. People who are primed to think of someone as "warm" are more likely to perceive a variety of positive characteristics in them, than if the word "warm" is replaced by "cold". When someone has a reputation for being funny, an audience are more likely to find them amusing.^[3] Individual's perceptual sets reflect their own personality traits. For example, people with an aggressive personality are quicker to correctly identify aggressive words or situations.^[3]

Mental sets are subconscious tendencies to approach a problem in a particular way,^[6] either helping or interfering in the discovery of a solution.^[6] They are shaped by past experiences, habits,^[9] and, most importantly, culture.^[10] These sets also exist as parts of our cognitive processes although they do not always enter consciousness.^[6] This is demonstrated in the way bookkeepers can balance their book without being aware of using addition or subtraction.^[11] An inappropriate mental set hampers the solution of straightforward problems.^[3] This could happen if the set contains a false assumption or a belief that is not correct.^[6] For example, when people are asked, "When a United States plane carrying Canadian passengers crashes in international waters, where should the survivors be buried?" the phrasing of the question suggests that it is a problem of international law. People who interpret the statement with this mental set will miss the fact that survivors would not need to be buried.^[6] A specific form of mental set is functional fixedness, in which someone fails to see the variety of uses to which an object can be put.^[3][6][9] An example would be someone who needs a weight but fails to use an easily available hammer because their mental set is to think of a hammer as for a specific purpose.^[6]

• Basic beliefs
• Mental model
• Mental representation
• Paradigm
• Rigidity (psychology)
• Schema (psychology)
• Worldview

• Quinlan, Philip; Dyson, Ben (2008). Cognitive psychology. Pearson/Prentice Hall. pp. 163–166. ISBN 978-0-13-129810-1. Retrieved 25 March 2011.
• Sternberg, Robert J. (2009). Cognitive Psychology. Belmont, California: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. pp. 449–457. ISBN 978-0-495-50629-4.