Scripts

First, stop making assumptions.

Joe('tain't easy)Nation

This, I do not like-- I'd like to think people are more than a categorization... but I do it all the time. Eesh.

All of life is filtered by the scripts/values/ideals/associations etc that we have learnt.

I recall reading that some psychologists believe we run about 90% on Autopilot. This seems about right to me once we understand how much of what we do is affected by develop habbits / thought patterns / associations.

As a curiosity note - Language is a script that we have learnt. Pscyhologists have noted the link between language and the type of culture...because different languages allow different expression...culture is influenced by the strengths and weaknesses of the language.

What brought this up was that in cleaning out some of my stuff I ran across a small booklet made by the printing and stapling of the forms people filled out back before my twentieth high school reunion, with that reunion almost another twenty years past. Rereading all that was interesting - how interesting some lives were turning out, how (uh) dull seeming others were to me at that point, how the interesting and the dull didn't really fit who was who in the class social or educational hierarchy of twenty years before. Hierarchy is a poor word choice but I trust it conveys some of the aura of high school life. This was a small school for girls, but I suppose the numbers and the gender don't mean much except that I thought in high school that I "knew" these people fairly well, day after day after livelong day.

What you "knew" about those people is all in the past.

You had no way of knowing what would happen to them once they left school.

I can't believe the "immediate" hook-ups that happen between men and women after they've attended class reunions (later ones, like the 35th and 40th) I suspect the reason for the quick response to each other is because these people thought they "knew" each other. In reality,they only knew them at the age 5 - 18. In most cases, the "fling" didn't last. He or she was not the "same" person.

osssobucco wrote :



the first reunion i attended was the 45th - though i had met old friends/schoolmates over the years individully/in small groups .
since our reunion stretched over a whole week , it was a great opportunity to really get re-aquainted .
i found out quickly that those people i got along with well in high-school , were as pleasant as they were 45 years ago ... and those that i couldn't stand 45 years ago ... i still couldn't stand .

asking my old friends that had stayed in closer contact over the years , i found out that they felt pretty much like i did .

what i found amazing was that those schoolmates that we really didn't feel comfortable with , still kept attending the get-to-gethers regularly !

haven't been back for a class reunion in five years - but perhaps will make it again some year - i had to miss the 60th reunion this year .
the ranks are beginning to thin out !
hbg

Hah, I subtracted wrong. That 20th reunion was almost thirty years ago.
Time flies when...


Yes, Sully, my knowing people in high school wasn't really knowing. I certainly barely knew myself, much less them.

I've always had the impression that people really do not change all that much as we age. Our character was developed during early grade school years, and what we see today is a maturation (hopefully) and a little sophistication.

Certainly in many ways we stay the same, don't we, Hamburger.

But still...

one girl I remember purposely talking with since people tended to ignore her, never an "in" person, wrong socks you know, was building an eco type house on their sixty acres.. and that was in the late seventies. Another who was never in my classes (I was a smarty, having nothing else to do, heh) travelled the world and got involved in interesting projects. Well, I could go on.

A lot of the girls-to-women became teachers, probably the prime recourse for women around 1960, but a large percentage of those taught in interesting places.

I'll have to see if I can find out what happened with V. She was from Belgium, and already knew everything our high school could teach her when she started as a freshman. Straight A's all the way along with whatever college prep stuff she bothered with. But her interest was in the secretarial courses. She went to work at the studios (this was LA). I think of her now as a pioneer in the MBA zone.




Anyway, I think some people become more confident/less timorous, and develop themselves, essentially 'find themselves'.

an interesting observation from our class reunions :
those that were at the top of the class during high-school weren't the ones that were at the top later in life .
those with "the gift of the gab" seemed to have fared best in their jobs .

out of a graduating class of 36 students , four left germany over the years . two sort of disappeared - one of them apparently was a professor at an american university , but failed to respond to invitations to clas reunions , one went to mexico and did quite well , but decided to retire in germany . so that leaves me in the "true , cold north" - neither i nor mrs h ever had the urge to return to germany permanently - though we did visit several times over the years .
hbg

ps. i still try to keep up on german news - i'm somewhat of a news-junkie - i have about a hundred newspapers and magazines as "favorites" , but don't look at them every day .
i kid my b-i-l by telling him that i can read the latest german news over the internet before he gets to the store to pick up the day's paper the next morning .

I get a kick out of seeing the "late" bloomers. My husband graduated one year ahead of me, so I go to his reunions, too.

The class "beauty" is fat and unhappy. The class jock is an alcoholic and divorced three times, been in prison for beating a cop. Had a girl on his arm that looked 16.

That tall, skinny, gaulky red-headed guy with the freckles and crooked teeth is a classy, beautifully handsome, dark auburn-haired computer programmer. Absolutely gorgeous!!

I would have loved to have a time machine to zoom back and forth!

What you are talking about is known in the psychological literature as 'schema'. We all need some degree of short-hand in order to process the amount of information in the world effectively.

The classic example used is that of the schema we all hold of 'chair'. What defines a chair? Four legs? Any legs at all? A back? No - because we can all think of examples that don't meet those criteria. How about: A seat? Something made or designed to be sat on? Probably no again, because we would all recognise chairs that weren't originally made as such. And yet there is something about 'chairness' that we are able to hold in this schema - shorthand - as being more or less the same thing (as it is, fit for the same purpose in this respect - a chair is a chair when you just want to sit down). And schemas work similarly for more abstract concepts. We apply them similarly in our social, political and spiritual thinking, including having schemas about people.

Where schemas become unhelpful, is when they become rigid and fixed; when an individual becomes too reliant on them and unable to re-evaluate them in the light of new evidence. This is the basis of what are commonly known as stereotypes.

If you're interested, any introductory cognitive psychology textbook should have more information on schemas - Eysenck and Keane would be a good place to start.