EMILIA
TOCZEK

There’s absolutely no doubt in the fact that Barbie breaks a lot of older stereotypes, such as women being made to be mothers and not seeking education and work related success. From the very beginning her purpose was to show a drastically different approach to being born a woman.

Barbie presented a wide range of jobs, she was a vet, astronaut, model, doctor, and lawyer all at once. The idea was to show that girls can do anything they put their mind to. This type of narration was needed in a man dominated society, yet it brought about some negative side effects onto the girls who played with the doll.

The creation of one, nearly perfect woman icon, who possessed every career imaginable created an immense amount of pressure on the small, mostly not yet conscious girls.

My investigation links with the theory because schemas are responsible for the way we view words. The schema in my study is the fact that certain words have a bigger emotional impact than others, because they are associated with specific intensity, they change our outlook onto a situation, in my case, a car crash.

The aim of this experiment is to study schemas and their impact on daily life aspects, such as witness testimony. Different words might be wrongly used to describe an event and the consequences of this might be tragic, if someone is falsely accused.

Due to the fact that word choice affects one’s perception of a given situation, witness testimony can be not entirely objective and influence the course of a trial.