Seeing What to Do: Norms, Scripts, and Social Affordances

Human cognition and behavior are guided by a myriad of norms which enable us to successfully navigate our social environment and our interactions with others. Many of these norms might be hard for us to articulate (e.g. how far to sit or stand from a stranger on the bus), and some of them differentiate between different hierarchies and roles, reflecting patterns of injustice. This paper addresses the fact that social norms, including gendered, ableist, adultist, and racist norms, influence our perception of action possibilities, or affordances, making some actions possible for some agents and not for others. In particular, we propose an account of these interactions in terms of scripts, that is, expected sequences of actions that shape the landscape of the possible ways to interact with one another. Scripts can be learned implicitly, they are dynamic and flexible, and can regulate complex interactions by prescribing permissible actions and responses in specific situations. A script-based account can explain the way norms regulate which actions we perceive as possible in a representationalist way, and can help us explain how norm change occurs.