Shared expectations about how routine episodes unfold let people act without negotiating each step, and make the deviation the only thing anyone notices.
Schank and Abelson's restaurant script is the standard example: nobody explains that the menu precedes the food or that payment follows it. The script's practical importance is what it does to attention, since only departures are salient, and to strangers, for whom nothing is scripted and everything must be worked out.
In practice
- A new employee exhausted after a week has been running without scripts that everyone else uses unconsciously.
- A meeting that departs from its expected shape is remembered in detail, and the twenty that followed it are not.