Script Theory

Script theory is a psychological theory holding that human behavior largely falls into patterns called scripts, so named because they function the way a written script does, by providing a program for action. Silvan Tomkins created script theory as a further development of his own affect theory, which treats a person's emotional responses to stimuli as falling into categories he called affects; Tomkins observed that the purely biological affect response can be followed by conscious awareness and by what a person cognitively does in acting on that affect, so a complete account of what he called human being theory needed more than affect alone. These scripts sit within the broader cognitive concept of schemas, organized chunks of information, and a schema becomes a script once it carries an ordering that requires action, such as the sequence of steps involved in starting a car. In script theory, the basic unit of analysis is the scene, a sequence of events linked together by the affects triggered while experiencing them, and Tomkins held that a person's affective experiences fall into patterns grouped by criteria such as the people and places involved and the intensity of the affect felt, patterns that together constitute the scripts guiding behavior in an effort to maximize positive affect and minimize negative affect.