102 Teaching Minds
happen next in that arena. Dogs usually know the scripts that pertain to them, as well. They know which merchant will have the dog biscuit for them, for example.
People seem astonishingly dumb when they can’t predict what is obvious to everyone else. Not knowing what will happen next in a script you don’t know, because you don’t have the relevant experi- ence, means nothing at all, of course. The question is: If you have experienced something repeatedly, why haven’t you figured out that what you have seen before will happen again?
Script following is, therefore, a sign of intelligence but a very lim- ited one. We can blindly follow a script, and this can make us seem dumb indeed. Since scripts vary one from the other in many ways, the ability to see the nuances makes all the difference. Expecting that a fast-food restaurant will be the same as a three-star Michelin res- taurant because it is a restaurant after all is what makes people seem stupid. Failing to make the right generalizations indicates a lack of thought.
The real question is this: What do you do when your script fails? This is important because scripts fail all the time. You expect some- thing to happen and it doesn’t. You love the cheesecake at Lindy’s and suddenly it doesn’t serve cheesecake. Or you find that Lindy’s is now out of business. What do you do? People recover from script failure on a daily basis. How they do this tells us a lot about how the mind works.
When people refuse to abandon the generalizations they have made, they immediately are perceived as being stupid. When a medi- cal assistant asked me the other day about the upcoming Thanksgiv- ing holiday, I responded that I would be eating duck instead of turkey. She said that sounded awful and that duck was greasy and gamey and it sounded like a terrible idea. I asked her if she had ever eaten duck and she said no because it was game and she hated game. I told her it wasn’t gamey. She refused to believe me. I was about to recommend trying magret de canard but thought better of it and asked if she had ever eaten in a French restaurant in her life. She said that she hadn't.
People who have scripts often generalize them so that in their own minds they experts on things that they have never experienced. This is what stupid looks like.
On the other hand, we might wonder what smart looks like. Let’s imagine the same woman with the same beliefs hearing me say that duck was not gamey or greasy. Intelligent people respond, when they
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