Set (psychology)

Group of expectations in psychology

Part of a series on

Psychology

* Outline
* History
* Subfields

Basic psychology

* Abnormal
* Affective neuroscience
* Affective science
* Behavioral genetics
* Behavioral neuroscience
* Behaviorism
* Cognitive/Cognitivism
* Cognitive neuroscience
* Social
* Comparative
* Cross-cultural
* Cultural
* Developmental
* Differential
* Ecological
* Evolutionary
* Experimental
* Gestalt
* Intelligence
* Mathematical
* Moral
* Neuropsychology
* Perception
* Personality
* Psycholinguistics
* Psychophysiology
* Quantitative
* Social
* Theoretical

Applied psychology

* Anomalistic
* Applied behavior analysis
* Art
* Assessment
* Aviation
* Biography of famous people
* Clinical
* Coaching
* Color
* Community
* Consumer
* Counseling
* Critical
* Educational
* Ergonomics
* Fashion
* Feminist
* Food
* Forensic
* Health
* History
* Humanistic
* Industrial and organizational
* Legal
* Media
* Medical
* Military
* Music
* Occupational health
* Pastoral
* Peace and war
* Political
* Positive
* Photography
* Psychometrics
* Psychotherapy
* Religion
* School
* Sex differences
* Space
* Sport and exercise
* Suicidology
* Systems
* Trading
* Traffic

Concepts

* Behavior
* Behavioral engineering
* Behavioral genetics
* Behavioral neuroscience
* Cognition
* Competence
* Consciousness
* Consumer behavior
* Emotions
* Feelings
* Human factors and ergonomics
* Intelligence
* Maslow's hierarchy of needs
* Mental state
* Mind
* Psychology of religion
* Psychometrics
* Sex differences
* Terror management theory

Lists

* Counseling topics
* Disciplines
* Organizations
* Outline
* Psychologists
* Psychotherapies
* Research methods
* Schools of thought
* Timeline
* Topics

* Psychology portal

* v
* t
* e

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]

## Perceptual

[edit]

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

[edit]

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]

## See also

[edit]

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

## Notes

[edit]

1. ^ a b Weiten, Wayne (17 December 2008). Psychology: Themes and Variations. Cengage Learning. p. 193\. ISBN 978-0-495-60197-5. Retrieved 24 March 2011.
2. ^ Sonderegger, Theo (16 October 1998). Psychology. John Wiley and Sons. pp. 43–44\. ISBN 978-0-8220-5327-9. Retrieved 24 March 2011.
3. ^ a b c d e f Hardy, Malcolm; Heyes, Steve (2 December 1999). Beginning Psychology. Oxford University Press. pp. 24–27\. ISBN 978-0-19-832821-6. Retrieved 24 March 2011.
4. ^ a b Galotti, Kathleen M. (5 February 2009). Cognitive Psychology: In and Out of the Laboratory. Cengage Learning. pp. 341–344\. ISBN 978-0-17-644065-7. Retrieved 25 March 2011.
5. ^ Sharma, Ram Nath; Chandra, S.S. (1 January 2003). General Psychology. Atlantic Publishers & Dist. p. 157\. ISBN 978-81-269-0303-0. Retrieved 25 March 2011.
6. ^ a b c d e f g h Bruno, Frank Joe (2 August 2002). Psychology: a self-teaching guide. John Wiley and Sons. pp. 127–128\. ISBN 978-0-471-44395-7. Retrieved 25 March 2011.
7. ^ a b Coon, Dennis; Mitterer, John O. (29 December 2008). Introduction to Psychology: Gateways to Mind and Behavior. Cengage Learning. pp. 171–172\. ISBN 978-0-495-59911-1. Retrieved 24 March 2011.
8. ^ Block, J. R.; Yuker, Harold E. (1 October 2002). Can You Believe Your Eyes?: Over 250 Illusions and Other Visual Oddities. Robson. pp. 173–174\. ISBN 978-1-86105-586-6. Retrieved 24 March 2011.
9. ^ a b Mangal, S. K. (1 August 2007). Essentials of educational psychology. PHI Learning Pvt. Ltd. pp. 393–394\. ISBN 978-81-203-3055-9. Retrieved 25 March 2011.
10. ^ Klimczak-Pawlak, Agata (2014). Towards the Pragmatic Core of English for European Communication: The Speech Act of Apologising in Selected Euro-Englishes. Cham: Springer. p. 49\. ISBN 9783319035567.
11. ^ Hergenhahn, B.R. (2009). An Introduction to the History of Psychology, Sixth Edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. p. 284\. ISBN 9780495506218.

## Further reading

[edit]

* 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.

* v
* t
* e

Worldview

Related terms

* Basic beliefs / Beliefs
* Collective consciousness / Collective unconscious
* Conceptual system
* Context
* Conventional wisdom
* Conventions
* Cultural movement
* Epic poetry / National epics / World folk-epics
* Facts and factoids
* Framing
* Ideology
* Life stance
* Lifestyle
* Memes / Memeplex
* Mental model
* Metanarrative
* Mindset
* Norms
* Paradigm
* Philosophical theory
* Point of view
* Presuppositions
* Primal world beliefs
* Reality tunnel
* Schemata
* School of thought
* Set
* Social reality
* Theory of everything
* Umwelt
* Value system

Aspects

| Biases|

* Academic
* Attentional
* Attitude polarization
* Belief
* Cognitive
* list
* Collective narcissism
* Confirmation
* Congruence
* Cryptomnesia
* Cultural
* Ethnocentrism
* Filter bubble
* Homophily
* In-group favoritism
* Magical thinking
* Media
* Observational error
* Observer-expectancy
* Selective exposure
* Selective perception
* Self-deception
* Self-fulfilling prophecy
* Clever Hans effect
* placebo effect
* wishful thinking
* Status quo
* Stereotyping
* ethnic

|

Change and
maintenance|

* Activism
* Argument
* Argumentum ad populum
* Attitude change
* Brainwashing
* Censorship
* Charisma
* Circular reporting
* Cognitive dissonance
* Critical thinking
* Crowd manipulation
* Cultural dissonance
* Deprogramming
* Echo chamber
* Education
* religious
* values
* Euphemism
* Excommunication
* Fearmongering
* Historical revisionism
* negationism
* Ideological repression
* Indoctrination
* Manipulation (psychology)
* Media manipulation
* Media regulation
* Missionaries
* Moral entrepreneurship
* Persuasion
* Polite fiction
* Political engineering
* Propaganda
* Propaganda model
* Proselytism
* Psychological warfare
* Religious conversion
* forced
* Religious persecution
* Religious uniformity
* Revolutions
* Rhetoric
* Self-censorship
* Social change
* Social control
* Social engineering
* Social influence
* Social progress
* Suppression of dissent
* Systemic bias
* Woozle effect

Culture|

* Anthropology
* cultural
* social
* Calendars
* Ceremonies
* Coronations
* Cross-cultural psychology
* Cultural psychology
* Doctrine
* Employment / Serfdom / Slavery
* Families
* Funerals / Burial
* Games
* Holidays
* Hygiene
* ritual
* Identity (philosophy)
* cultural
* Institutions
* Liminality
* Liturgy
* Marriage
* Myth and ritual
* Oaths
* Pilgrimages
* Play
* Rites of passage
* secular
* Rituals
* Social class / Social status / Caste
* Symbols
* Symbolic boundaries
* Worship

Groupthink|

* Abilene paradox
* Bandwagon effect
* Collectives
* Collective behavior
* animal
* Collective effervescence
* Collective intelligence
* Conformity
* Consensus theory
* Crowd psychology
* Cults
* Culture-bound syndromes
* Deindividuation
* Doublethink
* Emergence
* Emotional contagion
* Entitativity
* False consensus effect
* Folie à deux
* Group action
* Group cohesiveness
* Group dynamics
* Group emotion
* Group polarization
* Groupshift
* Herd behavior
* Holism
* Hysterical contagion
* Information cascade
* In-group and out-group
* Invisible hand
* Lynching
* Majoritarianism / Mob rule
* Mass action
* Mass psychogenic illness
* Milieu control
* Mobbing
* Moral panic
* Peer pressure
* Pluralistic ignorance
* Political correctness
* Pseudoconsensus
* Scapegoating
* Self-organization
* Social action
* Social behavior
* Social emotions
* Social exclusion
* Social facilitation
* animal
* Social group
* Social proof
* Social psychology
* Sociology
* Spontaneous order
* Status quo
* Stigmergy
* Swarm behaviour
* System justification
* Viral phenomena

Knowledge|

* Axioms
* tacit assumptions
* Conceptual framework
* Epistemology
* outline
* Evidence
* anecdotal
* scientific
* Explanations
* Faith
* fideism
* Gnosis
* Intuition
* Meaning-making
* Memory
* Meta-knowledge
* Methodology
* Observation
* Observational learning
* Perception
* Reasoning
* fallacious
* logic
* Revelation
* Testimony
* Tradition
* folklore
* Truth
* consensus theory
* criteria
* World disclosure

Metaphysics|

* Ætiology
* Afterlife
* Anima mundi
* Causality
* Concepts
* Consciousness
* mind–body problem
* Cosmogony
* Cosmology
* religious
* Creation myth
* Deities
* existence
* Destiny
* Eschatology
* Everything / Nothing
* Evolution
* Existence
* Fiction / Nonfiction
* Free will
* Future
* History
* Ideas
* Idios kosmos
* Illusions
* Incarnation
* Information
* Intelligence
* Magic
* Matter
* Miracles
* Mythology
* comparative
* National mythoi
* Nature
* philosophical
* Ontology
* Origin myths
* political
* Otherworlds
* axes mundi
* Physics
* natural philosophy
* Problem of evil
* Reality
* Souls
* Spirit
* Supernature
* Teleology
* Theology
* Time
* Unobservables

Value|

* Aesthetic taste
* Aesthetic
* Almsgiving / Charity
* Altruism
* Autonomy
* Beauty
* Codes of conduct
* Comedy
* Common good
* Conscience
* Consent
* Creativity
* Disgust
* Duty
* Economics
* Ecstasy
* emotional
* religious
* Elegance
* Emotions
* Aesthetic
* Entertainment
* Eroticism
* Ethics
* Étiquette
* Family values
* Food and drink prohibitions
* unclean animals
* Golden Rule
* Guilt / Culpability
* Happiness
* Harmony
* Honour
* Human rights
* Judgement
* Justice
* Law
* jurisprudence
* religious
* Liberty
* political freedom
* Love
* Magnificence
* Maxims
* Meaning of life
* Morality
* public
* Obligations
* Peace
* Piety
* Praxeology
* Principles
* Punishment
* Qualities
* Repentance
* Reverence
* Rights
* Sexuality
* ethics
* Sin
* Social stigma
* Stewardship
* Styles
* Sublime, The
* Suffering
* Sympathy
* Taboo
* Theodicy
* Trust
* Unspoken rules
* Virtues and Vices
* Works of art
* Wrongdoing

Examples

| Attitudes|

* Misanthropy
* Optimism
* Pessimism
* Reclusion
* Weltschmerz

|

Economic and
political ideologies|

* Anarchism
* Authoritarianism
* Capitalism
* Christian democracy
* Collectivism
* Colonialism
* Communalism
* Communism
* Communitarianism
* Conservatism
* Constitutionalism
* Distributism
* Environmentalism
* Extremism
* Fanaticism
* Fascism
* Feminism
* Fundamentalism
* Globalism
* Green politics
* Imperialism
* Individualism
* Industrialisation
* Intellectualism
* Islamism
* Liberalism
* Libertarianism
* Masculism
* Militarism
* Monarchism
* Nationalism
* Pacifism
* Progressivism
* Radicalism
* Reformism
* Republicanism
* Sentientism
* Social democracy
* Socialism
* Utilitarianism
* Veganism

Religions|

* Baháʼí
* Buddhism
* Caodaism
* Cheondoism
* Chinese folk religion
* Christianity
* Eastern Orthodox Church
* Ethnic religions
* Hinduism
* Hòa Hảo
* Islam
* Jainism
* Judaism
* Korean shamanism
* Modern paganism
* Rastafari
* Secularity / Irreligion / Agnosticism / Atheism
* Shinto
* Sikhism
* Spiritism
* Taoism
* Tenrikyo
* Traditional African religions
* Unitarian Universalism
* Zoroastrianism

Schools of
philosophy|

* Agriculturalism
* Aristotelianism
* Atomism
* Averroism
* Cartesianism
* Cārvāka
* Collectivism
* Confucianism / New Confucianism
* Critical theory
* Cynicism
* Cyrenaics
* Determinism
* Dualism
* Eleatics
* Empiricism
* Epicureanism
* Eretrian school
* Existentialism
* Fatalism
* Foundationalism
* Hedonism
* Hegelianism
* Hermeneutics
* Historicism / New historicism
* Holism
* Humanism / Renaissance humanism
* Idealism
* Illuminationism
* ʿIlm al-Kalām
* Individualism
* Ionian
* Kantianism / Neo-Kantianism
* Kokugaku
* Legalism
* Logicians
* Materialism
* Megarian school
* Modernism / Postmodernism
* Mohism
* Monism
* Natural law
* Naturalism (Chinese)
* Naturalism (Western)
* Nihilism
* Peripatetic
* Phenomenology
* Platonism / Neoplatonism
* Pluralism
* Positivism
* Pragmatism
* Pre-Socratic
* Pyrrhonism
* Pythagoreanism / Neopythagoreanism
* Rationalism
* Reductionism
* Scholasticism / Neo-scholasticism
* Sentientism
* Social constructionism
* Sophism
* Spinozism
* Stoicism
* Structuralism / Post-structuralism
* Thomism
* Transcendentalism
* Utilitarianism
* Yangism

* v
* t
* e

Mental processes

Cognition|

* Association
* Awareness
* Cognitive flexibility
* Cognitive liberty
* Forecasting
* affective
* Foresight
* Comprehension
* Consciousness
* Critical thinking
* Decision-making
* Imagination
* Intuition
* Problem solving
* methods
* strategies
* Prospection

Perception|

* Amodal
* Color
* RGB model
* Depth
* Form
* Haptic (Touch)
* Perception as interpretation
* Peripheral
* Social
* Sound
* Harmonics
* Pitch
* Speech
* Visual

Memory|

* Consolidation
* Encoding
* Storage
* Recall

Other|

* Attention
* Experiential avoidance
* Higher nervous activity
* Intention
* Ironic process theory
* Learning
* Mental fatigue
* Relational frame theory
* Mental set
* Thinking
* Thought suppression
* Volition

Category
*[v]: View this template
*[t]: Discuss this template
*[e]: Edit this template