‘As You Like It’ (Act II, Scene VII, lines 139-141), by William Shakespeare
Learn your lines, break a leg and off you go. That’s life. Well, that’s if you find learning lines easy, aren’t apt to keep wondering why you can’t improvise instead and don’t struggle with the idea of lines altogether. Put very broadly, social script theory articulates the view that many potentially complicated aspects of our lives and social relations are managed with relatively effortless ease because we know what it is we are meant to do when we go to the dentist, the café or go for a walk. We know how we’re meant to behave and what sequence of activities we have to carry out in what order. Differences from culture to culture and from context to context in the one culture can cause untold mishaps, confusions, anxieties and acts of aggression. On the one hand, you have the minor inconvenience and embarrassment of walking into a place with table service and trying to order at the counter, at the more extreme end you have Londoners during the Blitz going against official orders to redefine underground stations as places to sleep in, rather than simply as places to wait for a tube.
We’re imaginative that way. But it is a problem if you don’t like or understand social scripts at all at all at all. Once you start thinking about social scripts, you start to realise just how much we rely on their automaticity and also to see why people can react so emotionally when they go awry or they don’t know what they are. Carol Gray developed the idea of writing out social scripts and social stories for children with autism so they know what to expect in a given situation. Looking at a couple of them gives you a great idea of how much information we most often take for granted and pass over in everyday life. At this link you can find a sample script for going to Dublin airport.
A couple of things got me to thinking about implicit norms this week. Walking to the shop I saw a car at a give way about to enter a main road and a grey-haired woman shouting at the driver from the passenger side ‘You should look where you are going!’. Fair enough if someone has nearly run you over. Though out of the ordinary, this behaviour seemed acceptable given the context. If she had nearly been killed she would be frightened and angry and a bit of shouting is justified, I think. Then she walked around to the driver’s side and was shouting some more. This must have been some incident, or otherwise, I’m starting to feel quite sorry for the driver. I get closer and see that the woman is wearing a turquoise jacket, a straight knee-length skirt, unusual for someone of her age, but not impossible, and bright pink socks with plimsolls. Any one of these might have been alright on its own, but put together, along with the shouting, I start to wonder. She moves off down the street in my direction and crosses the road. She crosses back and nervously, almost affectionately, pulls a black wheelie bin from the middle of the pavement in front of me, then looks inside. When I leave the shop she is standing very close to the entrance, apparently waiting for something, and I almost bump into her as I leave. She had a bright twinkle in her eye. Whatever her state of mind, there is some art to nearly all of your behaviour being somewhat off-centre, given how much these norms steer and guide our actions so unconsciously. I also had to admit to myself that it had all made me a bit nervous, because I didn’t know what to expect. You can feel and see where fear and prejudice start to settle in. It’s easier and safer to set up defences than to find out more.
The next incident that got me thinking about social norms was a recent trip to a medical appointment which was in a new building. I got there and there was still a lot of noise and banging going on and a few puzzled looking people sitting in a windowless basement room under the glare of an electric light as a workman busied himself around them. In contrast to the usual routine which involved speaking to a receptionist and sitting in a waiting room separated from the reception by a frosted glass partition, I spoke to a receptionist by the door of the building who pointed me in the direction of another receptionist in a room opposite her, who then sent me downstairs. I had not met any of these women before, so I was not sure if I had spoken to the receptionist of the actual clinic or if I needed to speak to someone else. When I got downstairs I tried a door to see if there was any reception through it. No. I sat back in the waiting room then after a few moments asked the woman next to me if she had seen a reception or if we just to wait. She said she was waiting to see what signs the workman was putting up and lo and behold just as we finished our conversation he revealed a sign on the wall that said, well no, actually it didn’t say anything because as he proudly explained to us, there was no writing on the sign, just ‘international language’ meaning a picture of three people sitting, as all the people waiting agreed, on what looked like a chairlift for a skiing holiday. Wishful thinking. The laughter broke the ice and we all got on better with our new circumstances. Particularly after a sign was put up which indicated to me that the toilets were through the door I had tried before. What relief! This was also the door marked ‘procedures’ and I was thankful to note that there was no international pictorial symbol for that! Could have been a bit grim. Anyhow, the whole incident made me think how much we rely on signage and the routine of social scripts, and how much dialogue is necessary to reestablish these when they have gone off-track and emotions are running higher than usual. All of the chat there that day was about people getting lost in the building, when the work would be finished etc. etc. On the next trip the place will have accommodated itself even more to the institution it is and used to be, with its usual furniture, routines and social scripts. And people will go back to ignoring each other in respectful silence in the waiting room.
