The Maps in your Mind
Topic: Mental models
by Riley, 2019 Cohort
A mental model, simply put, is a model of reality that we have in our heads. They are representations of the world and the relationships between different elements in the world. It is important to note that while these models shape our understanding of the world, and influence our behaviour, our representation of reality is distinct from reality itself. Failing to make this distinction makes it difficult to successfully affect change in the real world. We cannot simply draw an oasis on our map of a desert and then expect to find water there, nor can we erase a mountain if its presence is inconvenient. As Korzybski aptly puts it, “The map is not the territory”.
But it is still essential to adjust our models. Maps inform how we move through the territory, and changing the map in such a way that our beliefs are more aligned with reality will help us to successfully navigate our travels. A person who believes that a soccer ball can be moved by kicking it will be more successful at soccer than a person who believes they can move the ball by simply wishing it was elsewhere. And a person whose model has a more nuanced understanding of kicking will be better still.
Furthermore, it can be observed that the map itself is an object in the territory- our models are a part of reality and their construction has been influenced by reality. People may think that they find the sky beautiful because the sky was designed to be beautiful to them. But this is a fundamental misconception- the sky was here before humans were, and the evolution of our sense of beauty was influenced by its colour. We cause things to happen, and things cause other things to happen, but also things have caused us to be how we are- both as a species, and individually. Our experiences give rise to a toolbox of models we habitually apply. Analogies, and other framings, ask us to use ready-made models. Awareness of this can enable us to follow the territory rather than the map, when the two
Taking this all together, we can see that our mental modelling chiefly impacts us in two ways. Firstly, it directly influences our behaviour. Secondly, our models act as information filters. We must simplify reality in order to model it, so we prioritise information that we believe has a greater impact on other parts of the model, and we may entirely fail to notice things that don’t correspond to any of the model’s nodes. Similarly, many biases can be understood as preferences for certain types of models, often seen when we choose to tweak an existing model to fit the world rather than discarding it for another model entirely.
Given the ubiquity of mental models it is crucial to understand how they affect us. This, of course, requires us to model our own models. And as we do so, reflect on how the very idea of mental models is itself only a model.
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