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There has been growing interest within several subfields of psychology in the schematic nature of mental representations of real-world objects and events. One simple form of schema is the script, embodying knowledge of stereotyped event sequences. This article traces applications of the script concept in artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and social psychology. Scripts are compared and contrasted with related concepts such as habits, roles, and games. The suggested theoretic function of the script concept is to unify central notions in learning, developmental, clinical, social, and cognitive psychology. The present concept, while still incompletely articulated, offers encouragement toward such a unification. Areas of accumulating empirical evidence and of needed theoretical extension of the script concept are indicated.

Concerning a single major league at bat, the percentage of variance in batting performance attributable to skill differentials among major league baseball players can be calculated statistically. The statistically appropriate calculation is seriously discrepant with intuitions about the influence of skill in batting performance. This paradoxical discrepancy is discussed in terms of habits of thought about the concept of variance explanation. It is argued that percent variance explanation is a misleading index of the influence of systematic factors in cases where there are processes by which individually tiny influences cumulate to produce meaningful outcomes.

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According to the new conventional wisdom, social psychology has become captured by cognition; it should pay greater attention to affect. In that spirit, our article explores comparisons between conventional semantic judgments and affective reports. In two national surveys respondents were invited to ascribe personality traits to prominent national politicians as well as to report the feelings that the politicians elicited. We find first that summary scores of good feelings and bad feelings are nearly independent of each other, much more so than are good and bad trait judgments. Affective registrations, in short, seem less semantically filtered, less subject to consistency pressures. We also find that summary scores of affect strongly predict political preference. This effect is independent of and more powerful than that for personality judgments. Thus, affective registrations are not at all redundant with semantic judgments. Overall, these results should encourage the quickening interest in human emotion.Suddenly it is fashionable to write about emotion. According to a newly emerging conventional wisdom, social psychology has become too exclusively cognitive, and it is time to reexamine the role of affect (