Most of the decisions that shape a life don’t feel like decisions at all. They feel like expectations to follow a certain path, shaped by parents, society, and peers, and driven by internalized patterns called “cognitive scripts.” These scripts quietly steer our careers, relationships, and sense of success, pushing us toward what we think we are supposed to do instead of what we actually want. Neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff explains how noticing your use of the word “should” can reveal the script in action, and how a subtle shift can open up entirely new possibilities.
Timestamps
00:00 The power of cognitive scripts
01:30 The Sequel Script
02:45 The Crowdpleaser Script
03:23 The Epic Script
05:01 The subtle shift to overcome cognitive scripts
Transcript
The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.
The power of cognitive scripts
A cognitive script is an internalized behavioral pattern that tells us how we’re supposed or at least how we think we’re supposed to act in certain situations. They can be very helpful for routine tasks and decisions in everyday life. Cognitive scripts were first discovered in a seminal 1979 study, where researchers found that people are following very similar scripts in similar situations, such as going to the doctor or going to the restaurant. And since then, they have found those cognitive scripts in all areas of your life.
For routine everyday decisions, cognitive scripts are actually very practical and useful. For example, you know that when you’re going to go to the doctor, you’re supposed to wait in the waiting room and then someone is going to call your name, and then, you’re going to go into doctor’s office. This is where you’re going to start telling them about whatever the issue is, right? And you know in which order you’re supposed to do all of those different actions. Great, useful, and it’s a pretty good thing that you don’t have to overthink it every time you go to the doctor.
The problem with cognitive scripts is when we use them to make more important decisions in our lives, in our careers, in our relationships, instead of asking ourselves, “Is that really what I want to do, is that my decision?”, we let our choices being driven by those stories that we have internalized by those scripts that tell us how we’re supposed to behave in a certain situation.
The Sequel Script
One of these scripts is the Sequel Script. That’s the script where we feel like we’ve always behaved in a certain way, so we’re going to keep on behaving in the same way. We feel like the narrative needs to make sense.
This is the script that makes people choose careers that are aligned with whatever they studied at university. That is the script that makes people keep on dating the same kind of people they’ve been dating before. In general the script that makes us repeat the exact same behaviors and patterns that we’ve had in the past. In relationships in particular, what’s very interesting is that we want the sequel to connect to whatever the previous experience was. That might mean dating the exact same type of person or choosing the next person in response to whoever we were dating before. They might look like the complete opposite, but the truth is we still pick this person based on the sense of continuity with whatever the previous experience was before.
With the Sequel Script, it’s quite obvious why it limits the possibilities that we might explore in life. Because we feel like whatever decision we’re making next needs to make sense in relation to the decisions we made in the past. We ignore a lot more left-field, unexpected type of decisions that might be opportunities for growth, and exploration, and self discovery.
The Crowdpleaser Script
Another cognitive script that rules our life is the Crowdpleaser Script. This is the script where we make decisions based on whatever is going to please people around us the most. Quite often, those are the people like our parents. We might make decisions based on whatever is going to make them feel like you’re safe and successful. But the audience for the Crowdpleaser Script can also be your friends, can be your partner, can be your colleagues.
And what you don’t realize when you follow the Crowdpleaser Script is that you’re not making decisions based on what you want and what would make you happy, but based on what will make others around you happy.
The Epic Script
Finally, there’s the Epic Script, and this one is very insidious because it’s actually celebrated in our society. It’s the script that says that whatever you do, it needs to be big, it needs to be very ambitious, it needs to be impactful. Anything less than that is failure.
The Epic Script is an extreme version of the idea of following your dreams. And because of that, it has created a form of stigma around having a small, simple life. A life that is focused on just being happy in the moment, being present, being connected, and exploring your curiosity. Because if you don’t have those external signs of success, if you’re not following your grand passion, then are you really living a meaningful life? This is the anxiety inducing question that is created by the Epic Script.
When you think about it, this is a very myopic definition of success where we try to put all of our eggs in the same basket. We choose this one thing and we say, “If I succeed to this, then I’m successful in life.” The problem with this is that if we fail at this particular project, this particular goal, we feel like we have failed at life, entirely. And the other problem with putting all of our eggs in the same basket is that then sometimes the basket just becomes too heavy and we drop it all together.
Our modern hyperconnected online world has made the Epic Script, unfortunately, very, very popular with people. We have become overly obsessed with finding our purpose. Mentions in books of the phrase, “find your purpose,” have surged 700% in the past two decades only.
The subtle shift to overcome cognitive scripts
We see all of those stories of success of people who have found their passion and who are very happy as a result of this. We see the entrepreneur that followed their passion and was very successful, but we don’t see all of the thousands of other ones that have tried the exact same thing and failed. This is called survivorship bias, and it’s very unfortunate how nowadays we are basing all of our decisions and even our self-worth based on that incomplete information.
Once you have identified the cognitive scripts that rule your life, you can actually break free from them, and it really starts by seeing them as stories we tell ourselves rather than truth that we need to follow blindly. A really good way to do this is to stop for a second every time you hear yourself saying, “I should do this.” This word should is actually a really good signal that there might be a cognitive script at play somewhere here. And once you’ve identified the places in your life and the situations in your life where you are using that word, should, you can then decide to replace that word with another word, might.
What might I want to do instead of what should I do. What might I want to explore? What might I want to experiment with? If you wanna start writing your own scripts in life, there are three questions that you can ask yourself while designing your next experiment. The first one is am I following my past or discovering my path? The second one is am I following the crowd or am I discovering my tribe? And then finally, am I following my passion or am I discovering my curiosity?
Those three questions together allow you to embrace the liminal space we’re all in. To make friends with uncertainty, to start experimenting more, and very importantly, to deal with those three powerful cognitive scripts that underlie a lot of our decisions on an unconscious level.
