Self categories are not fixed - individuals can toggle through self-categories based on their needs and relevance to a present situation.  Self-categories are flexible as to allow the individual to adapt to the social context.

Context dependance of self-categories

When a sensory experience (hearing a word/phrase, or seeing a picture), triggers an associational response that effects your decision making afterwards. The presentation of some stimuli affects someones response to the presentation of a following one.

Priming effect

Kahneman and Tversky in 1971, conducted a study to assess the intuitive understanding of sampling affects among statisticians. After asking the statisticians:
- There are two hospitals, one large and one small. 60% of the babies born in one of the hospitals on a specific day happened to be a boy. Which hospital was it likely to be?

During a causal conversation, most statisticians answered wrong and chose the large hospital. This is despite the fact a basic idea in statistics is that small sample sizes are likely to be variable. The context the idea was expressed in caused errors among "experts" in the discipline.

Domain specificity and intuitive understanding of sampling effects

Similarities/differences between the conditions of encoding and retrieval can affect retrieval performance.

state-dependent learning

information is encoded with considerations to  the context it was presented in.

encoding specificity

- Context dependance of self-categories (social vs. personal identification)
- Priming effect
- Intuitive understanding of sampling effects (especially among statisticians)
- state-dependent learning

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Human reactions, modes of thinking and intuitions are dependent on the "domain" (setting and context) of the event/object. We use different mental machinery ("modules") in different situations (there is no all-purpose computing mechanism in the brain)

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