"Scripts" and Human Behavior

There are two competing theories in sociology about the best way to understand different types of human behavior, such as the participation in public protest actions such as "Black Lives Matter" demonstrations, or demonstrations protesting the recent presidential election results. One approach emphasizes human agency, or the exercise of choices by actors with free will; the other approach emphasis the constraints on human behavior from how people are influenced by existing institutions like the educational system or the mass media. They are often described as "agency versus structure" frameworks for understanding human behavior. We would like to consider a third approach that locates human action between agency and structure, a space that we would call  "scripts."

A script is an internalized record or sequence of historical events and experiences (often of others) that one chooses to use as the basis for understanding or making sense of a current event or situation. So when one confronts  an event of police misconduct or brutality, a persons sense-making processes may try to understand what occurred using the evidence of present events (what the police did and what the citizen did). Or they may immediately see the event using a "script" that describes a past record of police abuse (e.g. the Rodney King incident).

Scripts are usually associated with racial and ethnic identities. The anti-Semite script will interpret events through the historical record of past events such as those that took place in Nazi Germany. The anti-Black script will do the same, focusing on the experiences of slavery. Sometimes scripts will be cross-over scripts that link the experiences of two or more racial or ethnic groups. Let us use an historical example. When Robert first read about Billie Holiday singing the song "Strange Fruit" (a powerful song about lynchings) at the Lenox Lounge in Harlem in 1939, he didn't locate this event in the anti-Black script and would not have been motivated to write a letter to the editor or to join a protest march. Instead, Robert would remember that in 1939 Life magazine published a story about Joe DiMaggio (the greatest baseball player of the day) which contained the most blatant anti-Italian comments: "Italians, bad at war, are well-suited for the milder competition, and the number of top-notch Italian prize fighters, golfers, and baseball players is out of all proportion to the population." Commenting further on Joe D. they state:"Instead of olive oil or smelly bear grease, he keeps his hair slick with water. He never reeks of garlic and prefers chicken chow mein to spaghetti..." (reported in the book Summer of '49' by David Halberstam).

This example of conflicting scripts led me to interpret the Billie Holiday song in  a fashion that is less sympathetic to the intent of the song writer or singer, and more consistent with my own internal script.

So we might consider the number of distinct scripts that people may use, including religious, ethnic, racial, sexual, etc. What is the source of scripts? Media? Social movement literature? How exactly would these scripts shape action?