This suggests first, that there is better learning of material when it is organised by a schema, and second, that this learning is more efficient and frees up cognitive resources, which could then be allocated to other tasks. Links to expectations and reconstructions . Participants who were first told that she was a librarian were more likely to remember the piano, believed that she was drinking wine and listening to classical music. Those who were told that she was a waitress remembered details such as a bowling ball, and reported that she was drinking beer and eating chocolate cake. So, the women each group of participants recalled was more like the stereotype of the category they had expected than the actual woman they had seen.
Stereotypes are particular types of schemata.
So they have these effects described above, but also have one very important additional specific characteristic. Their information content is consensual . An important feature of stereotypes is that there is a very high level of agreement on the content of each stereotype. Interestingly, this seems to apply even across people with positive and negative views about the target group. A major part of the answer to this question involves the distinction between two types of thinking processes - automatic and controlled.