Scripts

Theory - A statement about reality which seeks to predict or explain the relation between phenomena
Hypothesis - A specific predicted result derived from a theory

Theory - If I give someone a pencil they will like me more
Independent Variable - Giving of the pencil
Dependent Variable - The reaction different people give me

Scripts

These shared expectations get performed with hugely different degrees of commitment, or subversion, bypass, the actors (see Durkin; Goffman). They involve important images of how like may be lived; how to behave with others in particular situation, and so on.

Script Example 1

The very conventionalised ways in which romantic encounters are often portrayed may make you  feel you will know when 'true love' hits you because you've seen its stages scripted so many times. Maybe you have even rehearsed it in private fantasy moments

Script Example 2

You may have tried to copy the ways that being a 'real man/woman is framed and scripted by repeated media imagery, often involving, above all, notions of toughness/femininity.

All the men in my intro were macho as they were the bad guys and the hero and the woman was the victim and innocent.

Scripts and performances

These scripts often include a sense of when is the appropriate time to resort to be active of passive, use brute force or be gentle, and how to express or not express emotion etc. Of course they differ depending especially on ethnicity and class

Origins of the word stereotype

Where prejudices lurk, stereotypes are seldom far behind. The term stereotype coined in 1978 by the French printer Didot, originally referred to a printing process used to create reproductions.

Journalist Walter Lippmann (1922) later likened stereotyoes to "pictures in the head" or mental reproductions of reality, and from there, the term gradually came to mean generalizations -- or, quite often, over generalizations -- about the members of a group.

Walter Lippmann

In public opinion, his classic 1922 study of "public mind" and the forces that shape popular consciousness, Lippmann presented "stereotypes" as axiomatic (self evident or unquestionable) elements of human perception