Social Scripts
Eickers (2024) offers a new, script-based theory of social cognition. Here is a summary.
The traditional approach to social cognition, at least among philosophers more generally, is to understand social cognition in terms of the attribution of beliefs and desires. Here is a concrete example. You approach me at a bar. I make an inference about who you are and why you are approaching me, given my beliefs about you and the bar I am in. The idea is that social interactions are simply the result of individuals trying to predict and explain individual behavior.
On the script-based model of social cognition, social scripts play a role, where “scripts are normative, context-sensitive, nested knowledge structures that describe behavior in terms of corresponding events, situations, social roles, individuals, or mental state types in a way that guides action.” So a script, in the bar case, would tell me what roles people play in a bar. There are bartenders and customers. There are also social scripts surrounding gender. On the script-based approach, I start by directly interpreting your activities as part of a script of some kind. If those scripts fail, I fall back on good old fashioned theorizing about what you are doing.
Here is Eickers’ description of the model.
Scripted Alignment explains social cognition by appealing to scripts. Patterns of social behavior get stored in scripts and are retrieved in order to enable us to interact, to predict the actions or behaviors of others, and eventually also to understand others. Scripts can represent situations, mental states, or even individuals. These scripts are not limited to fixed situations, as some have presumed, but may be flexibly nested and recombined.
I am compelled by this theory of cognition because it strikes me as better complimenting theories of social norms. A traditional theory of social norms thinks of social norms as rules; the traditional theory of social cognition then says that individuals internalize rules and then obey them. A script-based theory allows us to understand the adherence to social norms at least partly in terms of the deployment of social scripts. Appealing to scripts moves away from the picture of humans as agents that simply apply rules to contexts.
I believe social ontology needs to move far, far away from the idea of a social rule, so I welcome social scripts wholeheartedly.