During their recent episode, Taylor, Carlisle, and Anne-Laure Le Cunff discussed How Cognitive Scripts Shape Our Decisions and Influence Everyday Life. Here’s an excerpt from the episode:
Anne-Laure: So, something that I was going to just mention in passing and I ended up expanding quite a lot on out of sheer personal curiosity, because I loved the research, was the concept of cognitive scripts. Basically, if you put people in similar situations, they will tend to behave exactly in the same way, which is fine.
Tobias: Same person or different people in the same situation?
Anne-Laure: Yeah, different people in the same situation. So, just to give you an example, if you go to the doctor and I ask you, “What do you do when you go to the doctor?” Well, I go, I sit in the waiting room, I wait there. That’s why it’s called the waiting room. And then, when someone calls my name and I go in the doctor’s office. And if I ask you if the doctor came out of their office and asked you to get undressed in front of everybody in the waiting room, you would feel really weird, right? Why? Because there’s a script that we all agreed on and we never talked about it. But that’s just the script. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you go to the doctor.
We have scripts like these for going to the restaurant and having conversations. This is all fine, and I think this is helpful in society to just know in that situation I’m supposed to behave in this way. But then, scientists discovered that we actually follow similar types of scripts in lots of areas of our lives, not just going to the doctor or going to the restaurant. We use scripts to decide what our next career steps, to decide on our relationships, to decide on the kind of work projects that we’re going to take on. I’m not an investor, but I imagine we also use scripts to decide what we’re going to invest in or not and how we’re going to structure that investment.
So, that was something that I thought was absolutely fascinating. I included it, but it added quite a few pages to the book and I went a little bit longer on that chapter than my editor asked me to, and I still decided to keep it. It turns out this is one of the things most people resonate with in terms of the scientific concepts that I explore.
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