Textbook of AI

1928–2005, Social psychologist

Robert Paul Abelson was an American social psychologist at Yale whose collaboration with Roger Schank produced Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding (1977), introducing the script as a knowledge structure for representing stereotyped sequences of events. Abelson contributed the cognitive-psychological grounding for what was otherwise a thoroughly computational project.

Abelson's wider career was largely in social psychology: he was a leading researcher on attitudes, beliefs and computer simulation of belief systems (the early Kennedy-era "Computer Simulation of Personality" project), and a methodological writer on statistics and the "narrative" structure of scientific argument.