Think about what happens when someone tells you they went to a restaurant. You don’t need them to explain that they were seated, looked at a menu, ordered from a waiter, ate, paid, and left. You already know all of that. You have a mental template, a script for how a restaurant visit unfolds, and so does everyone else in your culture. The storyteller can skip the details because the script is shared knowledge.
This idea of a script comes from cognitive psychology, from the work of Schank and Abelson in the 1970s. A script is a structured piece of semantic knowledge about how a familiar sequence of events typically unfolds. And here’s the fascinating leap that researchers made: what if we have a script not just for restaurants, but for an entire human life?
That’s the idea behind the cultural life script, and it was the subject of my first serious piece of research.
What Is a Cultural Life Script?
A cultural life script is the culturally shared set of expectations about what happens in a typical life, and when. Just as the restaurant script tells you what to expect when you dine out, the life script tells you what a culture expects to happen across a person’s lifespan, and at what age each event should occur.
Start school. Graduate. Fall in love. Go to university. Start a career. Marry. Have children. Retire. Grow old. These aren’t just things that happen to happen; they form an expected sequence, a normative order that members of a culture know without being explicitly taught. The term cultural life script was coined by Berntsen and Rubin (2004), combining Schank and Abelson’s script concept with earlier work on culturally shared age norms.
Crucially, the life script isn’t the average life. It’s the idealized, prototypical life – the story culture tells about how a life should go, stripped of the countless mundane events that fill real lives and weighted toward positive milestones. And because it’s shared knowledge passed from generation to generation, even young people who haven’t lived most of it already know the whole script by heart.
Bringing the Method to Georgia
Berntsen and Rubin developed an elegant method to measure a culture’s life script. You ask people to imagine an ordinary infant, born into their culture, and to list the seven most important events that will happen in that child’s life from birth to death. Then, for each event, participants estimate the age at which it typically occurs, how common it is, how important it is, and how positive or negative it feels.
Collect these responses from enough people, keep the events named by at least a threshold percentage, and a shared script emerges from the aggregate. The method has been replicated in more than a dozen countries: Denmark, the United States, Turkey, Japan, the Netherlands, Malaysia, Qatar, and others.
When I began my master’s research, no such study had ever been done in Georgia. I wanted to know what Georgians expected from a life: what our script looked like, what we shared with other cultures, and what made us distinct. My study was the first attempt to establish the Georgian cultural life script. I collected responses from 270 participants across three age groups and multiple cities, carefully adapting the original instrument into Georgian through translation, back-translation, and piloting.
What was Found: The Georgian Script
The Georgian cultural life script turned out to contain 32 events. The five most frequently named were marriage, starting school, having children, starting work, and entering university – a set that will look familiar to anyone who has seen life-script results from other countries. In its top events, the Georgian script is quite similar to scripts found elsewhere. Marriage, children, and school appear near the top of nearly every culture’s script.
But two findings made the Georgian script distinctive.
The first, and most interesting to me, is that Georgians named periods of life, not just discrete events. Alongside point-in-time events like “getting married,” Georgian participants frequently listed spans of time: the school years, the university years, taking care of one’s family, growing up, old age. Most other cultures’ scripts are dominated by specific events; the Georgian script is unusually full of life periods. When you order the Georgian script by age, events and periods flow into one another – you enter school, attend school, finish school, enter university, live through the university years, and so on – almost forming a continuous life story rather than a list of separate milestones. Why Georgians think in periods rather than discrete events is a genuinely interesting question, and one worth future research.
The second distinctive finding concerns old age and retirement. In most cultures studied, retirement is rated as a negative or bittersweet event. Georgians rated it positively. My interpretation is that this is tied to grandchildren and to old age itself, both of which Georgian participants also rated positively. Several respondents grouped old age and grandchildren together, sometimes literally writing them as a single event. The expectation of caring for grandchildren appears to give old age and retirement a positive emotional meaning in the Georgian script that they lack elsewhere.
There was also a striking pattern in how Georgians rated events emotionally: they used the extremes. Not a single event fell into the neutral range of the rating scale. Every event was rated clearly positive or clearly negative, with nothing in between. It’s tempting to read something cultural into this – that we tend to evaluate life in black and white, with little grey.
Why It Counts as a Real Script
Finding 32 events is one thing. Confirming that they actually constitute a cultural life script is another. The literature specifies three criteria a genuine script must meet: most events should be positively valenced, the positive events should cluster in the 15-to-30 age range, and negative events should be distributed relatively evenly across the whole lifespan.
The Georgian data met all three criteria. The overwhelming majority of events were positive, over half of the positive events fell in the 15-to-30 window, and the handful of negative events were spread across the entire life course rather than concentrated anywhere.
This matters because it shows that the script structure works in Georgia too. It’s not just that we found a list of expected events – we found that those events behave exactly the way the theoretical model predicts a cultural life script should behave. That’s important evidence for the validity and reliability of the instrument, and for the cross-cultural robustness of the whole concept. The life script model, developed in Denmark and tested across very different societies, holds up in the Georgian context as well.
Why I’m Replicating It Now
That study was published in 2016. Now, a decade later, I’m running it again – and the replication is currently open for participation. There are two reasons this matters.
The first is reliability. Good science replicates. If I run the same study with a comparable sample and find the same script, that strengthens confidence that the original findings were real and not a fluke of one particular sample at one particular moment. Replication is how a field checks its own work, and running my own study again is a way of holding my earlier findings to that standard.
The second reason is more interesting. A great deal has happened in Georgia over the past ten years. Life here moves fast, and the pace of social change has been considerable. So the question becomes: has the script itself changed? Do young Georgians in 2026 expect the same life, in the same order, at the same ages, as Georgians did in 2016? A cultural life script is not necessarily fixed – it can shift as a culture shifts. Comparing the new data against the old gives a rare window onto whether and how Georgian cultural expectations about the shape of a life have moved over a decade. That’s the kind of cross-temporal comparison the original study couldn’t make, and it’s what makes the replication genuinely exciting.
The Invisible Hand of Culture
Here’s what I find most fascinating about this line of research. We think of ourselves as individuals, authors of our own lives. And in many ways we are. But underneath our individual choices runs a shared script – a culturally given template for how a life is supposed to unfold. We follow it, often without acknowledging it, sometimes without even noticing it’s there. It shapes when we expect to marry, when we expect to have children, what we count as being on time or behind in life.
It’s a kind of invisible hand of culture, quietly structuring the story each of us tells about our own life. And the remarkable thing, the thing that drew me to this research in the first place, is that we can actually measure it. We can take something as intangible as a culture’s shared expectations about the arc of a human life, and render it into data: 32 events, ordered by age, rated for importance and emotion. The invisible becomes visible.
That’s what psychometrics and careful research methodology make possible. And it’s why, ten years on, I’m still fascinated enough to run the study again.
The 2026 Georgian Cultural Life Scripts replication is currently collecting responses. If you’d like to take part, you can find the survey on the Research page.
Reference
Tchumburidze, G., & Khechuashvili, L. (2016). Cultural life script: Georgian version. GESJ: Education Sciences and Psychology, 4(41), 19-46.
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Giorgi Tchumburidze
August, 2026