Social Scripts
Jan. 16th, 2005 06:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
forsythMaybe I'm just a geek, but. I think I have had an insight, of sorts, into how people work. Or maybe it's just me. And it's probably not anything new, but what the hey.
People are creatures of habit. That's fairly universally known. It ties partially into how the human mind works, I bet. Since the brain grows new connections and reinforces them each time you do things, that's a large part of what practice is all about and part of why so much of school and learning in general is mindless repetitive busywork. Because you repeat something, and then it sticks in your mind better, literally.
And that includes social situations and things. It's not just a matter of patterns used before, though, our brains are great at pattern matching, we look back over the past to look for similarities in things that've happened before, then use that to help guide our actions now. So what's my point? My point is, in general, people run on scripts, like a play, or more geekily, a program. Heck, that's the whole fundamental concept of bots that can pretend to be people, usually. Somebody says X, you reply Y. It's not that simple, of course, but it works with variations. There's the Retail Script. Somebody walks in the door, you look at them, act happy, greet them, offer help if they need it, all on autopilot, without really thinking about it.
And yes, I'm generalizing, but the same thing applies to other social situations, and in the US at least, you can pick things up from TV, books, etc, but the biggest single one is probably school. Kids don't know most of the "scripts" as kids, which is why kids are alternately shy and then willing to say whatever to whoever. They pick them up from other people, and all the complicated cues and responses to social interaction get felt out a lot in school. Which is probably bad phrasing, given how much of human interaction centers around nookie, but what the hell.
I would imagine that people have varying skills at picking this kind of stuff up, just like people have varying skills for other kinds of learning, on the brain level, it's possible bits of brain that would get used for one or the other sometimes get recoded for something else if they don't get used, but that's just speculation. Anyway, so the point is, some people don't pick up the scripts as quickly as others, and so end up being more awkward, loners, etc. Or it might work the other way around, or more likely some of both, in a happy vicious cycle.
People don't rely just on scripts, of course, people can come up with new things, not just compare things to the old, even if we are really good at them. Otherwise we'd only have like three mental scripts, one for hunting, one for gathering, and one for making ook. But it's one of the reasons people get upset about new things, and why metaphors can be so useful, because things that we don't know, that we haven't run into before, leave us grasping for how to deal with them. And this gives newness and strangeness power, because they can derail typical scripts, and leave an opening for something new. That something new can be good or bad, or anything. It all depends on what fills in the void. What comparisons, what foundations, and what the people had to work from, too.
Why are so many of my realizations lately about ways to manipulate or un-manipulate people?
[meta: mindscribbles]
People are creatures of habit. That's fairly universally known. It ties partially into how the human mind works, I bet. Since the brain grows new connections and reinforces them each time you do things, that's a large part of what practice is all about and part of why so much of school and learning in general is mindless repetitive busywork. Because you repeat something, and then it sticks in your mind better, literally.
And that includes social situations and things. It's not just a matter of patterns used before, though, our brains are great at pattern matching, we look back over the past to look for similarities in things that've happened before, then use that to help guide our actions now. So what's my point? My point is, in general, people run on scripts, like a play, or more geekily, a program. Heck, that's the whole fundamental concept of bots that can pretend to be people, usually. Somebody says X, you reply Y. It's not that simple, of course, but it works with variations. There's the Retail Script. Somebody walks in the door, you look at them, act happy, greet them, offer help if they need it, all on autopilot, without really thinking about it.
And yes, I'm generalizing, but the same thing applies to other social situations, and in the US at least, you can pick things up from TV, books, etc, but the biggest single one is probably school. Kids don't know most of the "scripts" as kids, which is why kids are alternately shy and then willing to say whatever to whoever. They pick them up from other people, and all the complicated cues and responses to social interaction get felt out a lot in school. Which is probably bad phrasing, given how much of human interaction centers around nookie, but what the hell.
I would imagine that people have varying skills at picking this kind of stuff up, just like people have varying skills for other kinds of learning, on the brain level, it's possible bits of brain that would get used for one or the other sometimes get recoded for something else if they don't get used, but that's just speculation. Anyway, so the point is, some people don't pick up the scripts as quickly as others, and so end up being more awkward, loners, etc. Or it might work the other way around, or more likely some of both, in a happy vicious cycle.
People don't rely just on scripts, of course, people can come up with new things, not just compare things to the old, even if we are really good at them. Otherwise we'd only have like three mental scripts, one for hunting, one for gathering, and one for making ook. But it's one of the reasons people get upset about new things, and why metaphors can be so useful, because things that we don't know, that we haven't run into before, leave us grasping for how to deal with them. And this gives newness and strangeness power, because they can derail typical scripts, and leave an opening for something new. That something new can be good or bad, or anything. It all depends on what fills in the void. What comparisons, what foundations, and what the people had to work from, too.
Why are so many of my realizations lately about ways to manipulate or un-manipulate people?
[meta: mindscribbles]
