Mental 'units' of knowledge that correspond to frequently encountered people, objects or situations.
Allow us to make sense of what we encounter - we can predict what is going to happen and what we should do in any given situation.
Be determined by social values and therefore prejudice.
Capable of distorting unfamiliar or unconsciously ‘unacceptable’ information in order to ‘fit in’ with our existing knowledge or schemas.
Result in unreliable eyewitness testimony.
“War of the Ghost” experiment (Bartlett, 1932)