You and your friend are debating the greatness of the human mind. She claims that relying on schemas ...

Answer: Schemas can be beneficial because they help to quickly organize a complex world, reduce ambiguity in our environment, and can help us make quick decisions in a dangerous situation. Automatic processes such as unconscious thinking are helpful because they can actually result in better decision-making at times, and require little effort. Schemas and automatic processes do have their drawbacks. Specifically, relying too heavily on heuristics (representativeness and availability) may result in inaccurate judgments. Additionally, relying on schemas about people can lead to inaccurate decisions and seeing potential harm where there is none.