Personal life stories: Common deviations from the cultural life script

Abstract

Autobiographical memories are typically thought of as people's memories for personal life events. Yet, life stories do not exist in isolation; they are shaped by the shared social norms and prescriptions of one's culture as to the order and timing of important transitional events: a cultural life script. An individual's knowledge of their culture's standard life script does not arise from compiled individual life events, but is learned detached from particular personal experiences. When probed, many people's most important personal life events do not match the cultural life script exactly. We note that even some commonly experienced life story events do not match the life script and that their qualitative differences have not been systematically investigated. Why are some common life story events in the cultural life script whereas others are not? To begin exploring these differences, we examined what distinguishes two main types of commonly nominated events within people's personal life stories: events that do overlap with what they conceive of as their culture's life script and events that do not. We offer a secondary data analysis of the Rubin, Berntsen, and Hutson's (2009) life story data, exploring American life story data using the proposed categories of events, the various ratings the authors previously collected, and unused demographic information of interest. Given that this is simply a first step in characterizing the nature of common important life story events, we also provide some speculation for future avenues of investigation and the broader relevance of this work.