The transmission and stability of cultural life scripts: a cross-cultural study Steve M. J. Janssen a,b and Shamsul Haque c a School of Psychology, University of Nottingham – Malaysia Campus, Semenyih, Malaysia; b School of Psychology, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia; c Department of Psychology, Jeffrey Cheah School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Monash University – Malaysia, Bandar Sunway, Malaysia ABSTRACT Cultural life scripts are shared knowledge about the timing of important life events. In the present study, we examined whether cultural life scripts are transmitted through traditions and whether there are additional ways through which they can be attained by asking Australian and Malaysian participants which information sources they had used to generate the life script of their culture. Participants hardly reported that they had used cultural and religious traditions. They more often reported that they had used their own experiences and experiences of relatives and friends. They also reported the use of comments of relatives and friends and the use of newspapers, books, movies and television programmes. Furthermore, we examined the stability of life scripts and similarities and differences across cultures. We found that life scripts are stable cognitive structures and that there are, besides cross-cultural differences in the content, small cross-cultural differences in the valence and distribution of life script events, with the Australian life script containing more positive events and more events expected to occur before the age of 16. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 26 September 2016 Accepted 21 May 2017 KEYWORDS Autobiographical memory; cultural life script; identity; social learning theory; vicarious memories Cultural life scripts are semantic knowledge about the timing for important life events likely to occur in an ideal- ised life course (Berntsen & Rubin, 2002, 2004). It has been argued that this knowledge is used when people tell their life story (Berntsen & Bohn, 2010; Bohn, 2010). Although 10 properties have been proposed, we will examine the prop- erty that suggests that cultural life scripts are transmitted through traditions. Although there have been studies which have shown that life scripts are formed throughout childhood (Bohn & Berntsen, 2008; Habermas, 2007), the present study is the first one – as far as we know – that has examined the transmission of life scripts. Besides examining the role of traditions, we will also explore if there are additional ways through which people can learn about the life script of their culture and examine the stability of life scripts and similarities and differences in life scripts across two cultures (i.e., Australia and Malaysia). Cultural life scripts Life scripts, which combine the concept of story scripts (Schank & Abelson, 1977) with that of age norms (Neugar- ten, Moore, & Lowe, 1965), are defined as culturally shared representations of the order and timing of transitional events in a prototypical life course (Berntsen & Rubin, 2004). Cultural life scripts do not represent a list of remem- bered experiences but events expected to occur in an idealised life course. Life scripts exist as shared cognitive structures influencing the retrieval of positive over nega- tive events and of events from early adulthood over those from other lifetime periods. Berntsen and Rubin (2004) proposed 10 properties of life scripts, six of which were derived from Schank and Abelson (1977), describing them as: (1) semantic knowl- edge about expectations regarding; (2) a series of tem- porally ordered life events; (3) defined in terms of their time slots; (4) forming a hierarchical arrangement, with transitional events forming a higher order (scene), in which a series of subordinate actions or episodes are nested; (5) used to process life stories and (6) comprising culturally important transitional events with culturally sanc- tioned timing. The remaining four properties were pro- posed by Berntsen and Rubin (2004): (7) life scripts do not represent an average but an idealised life, from which many common and some important life events are omitted; (8) life scripts are distorted from actual lives to favour positive events and (9) events expected to occur in early adulthood; (10) and, because life scripts represent a normative life course, they are not based on personally experienced events but transmitted through traditions. Two methods have been used to examine life scripts (cf., Janssen & Haque, 2015). The first method requires partici- pants to estimate at what age highly emotional events, such as the happiest, saddest, most loving, most fearful, most important and most traumatic event, might occur in © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group CONTACT Steve M. J. Janssen steve.janssen@nottingham.edu.my School of Psychology, University of Nottingham – Malaysia Campus, B1B21, Jalan Broga, 43500 Semenyih, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia MEMORY, 2017 https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2017.1335327