Receptivity theory

Dr Roger Schank

I have a theory. People who rate themselves as highly ‘consistent and uncompromising’ on issues are slower to adapt to change and less likely to learn from their mistakes. To put it bluntly, “I think inflexibility leads to arrested development”. Roger Schank has a model of speech comprehension that says sometimes people only tune-in long enough to retrieve the most likely script from memory [link]. After that, communication becomes a process of listening for information to fill-in the missing pieces. Tom Trabasso says script-based processing is a useful strategy but only when matters are highly predictable ..like listening to a kidnapping story where you can safely narrow your attention to the parts that talk about “what kind of force was used” or “what the kidnapper’s demands are.” My theory says that over-reliance on script-based processing is sort of like Procrustes bed in Greek mythology .. reception becomes limited to what conforms to a standard set of precedents in the listeners head. The rest is quickly dismissed as either immaterial, inconceivable or unacceptable (take for example John Boehner’s “Hell, no!” anti-Obama strategy, or Senator Russell Pearce’s claim that all opposing views are “treasonous”). I talked to Dr Thompson about it. Although he generally considers theories a dime a dozen, he thinks it merits attention and even suggested some ‘assessment tools’ I could use to measure ‘willingness to yield’ on issues. I didn’t think it would be hard getting people to admit to having an uncompromising nature and I have tests that measure how swiftly people handle unexpected events in a narrative. Now I’m interested in getting started and seeing what turns-up. Perhaps it’s already been done. I mean, you’d think it’d be a factor in Alzheimer’s or something. Considering the political atmosphere around here there’s bound to be some interest in the subject.