Script

The notion of cognitive scripts, closely related to schema theory, became especially important in the 1970s, when cognitive psychologists (e.g., Robert Abelson, 1981; Roger Schank & Robert Abelson, 1977)—and, later, scholars of international relations—began to explore the role of cognitive shortcuts in information processing and decision [Page 2365]making. According to Abelson, one of the leading advocates of this approach, scripts are “conceptual representations of stereotyped event sequences.” Put more simply, a script may be thought of as a particular kind of schema or “mental box” that provides the typical default values for an event of some kind or an act that we are accustomed to performing, such as watching a movie or eating out at a restaurant. We usually experience little difficulty dining at a restaurant we have never visited before, for instance, since we simply rely on the default values stored in our memory to guide our behavior; we wait to be seated by the host or hostess, a server presents us with menus, we pick what we want to eat, we eat it when it arrives, and so on. By the same token, if a friend informs you that she went to see a movie last night, you can easily use the default values you keep in your head for typical visits to the cinema to guess how her evening probably went. Scripts can help decision makers assess the nature of a situation quickly but can sometimes be a source of cognitive error, a fact that has not been lost on students of foreign policy decision making. The notion of scripts has been broadly accepted within international relations, but it has also been subjected to various criticisms (as discussed below).

The concept of a script clearly draws itself on the cognitive image of a movie or theatrical script in which events are played out one after the other, and it can also be compared to a cartoon strip. This idea is consistent with the more general notion that human beings are “cognitive misers,” and the approach may be viewed as part of the bounded rationality tradition within political science, which stresses the ways in which individuals depart from “pure” or comprehensive rationality. Rather than considering everything we experience sui generis, according to this view, we are usually far more economical in our information processing. We commonly fit new sensory data into established mental categories, both because this requires little effort and because it allows us to make sense of the outside world quickly and expeditiously. This is particularly the case under conditions of high uncertainty and ambiguity, when the individual is being bombarded with too much information, or when he or she possesses too little. As well as helping us make sense of what has happened in the past or is happening now, scripts often play a strong predictive role in decision making, allowing us to ascertain in advance with a reasonable degree of confidence what is likely to occur in the future (or at least what we think is likely to occur).

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