Mental Models as Mental Traps
Are international alliances essential for a peaceful world or a hindrance to national sovereignty? Is public debt important for economic growth or a danger? Does good education require frequent skills testing or a less structured classroom atmosphere? It depends on your mental model.
Writing to Robert Evans on June 15,1819, James Madison, a lifelong slaveholder, laid out the only approach he could see to end human bondage. The plan, he said, must be "consistent with the existing & durable prejudices of the nation." For Madison, this meant freed blacks must be removed from white society by transporting them back to Africa. Coexistence, he concluded, would be impossible due to "reciprocal antipathies" of each race against the other. Yet nearly three decades earlier, while traveling in upstate New York, Madison came upon a farm owned by a black man who employed six white men. All worked together peacefully. This could have changed Madison's view of what was possible, but it didn't.
Madison and so many of his contemporaries had a "mental model" - a set of beliefs that shaped their decisions. We are a meaning-making species. Our perceptions and experiences create beliefs which we organize into models of "the way the world works." As Michael Shermer put it in The Believing Brain, "we are descendants of those who were most successful at finding patterns." If we had not done this - associating the roar of an animal outside the cave with the likelihood that venturing out was dangerous - we would not have survived.
Our mental models can be helpful, but they can be dangerous, as the enslaved people who labored for Madison experienced. We cannot not have mental models, but we have a choice about how we form and challenge them.
We may accept that our mental models might be faulty, but stepping outside them to raise questions is like peering through a dense fog hoping to figure out what is there. Our mental models always have some facts as building blocks, but they ignore others. We organize our chosen facts and perceptions into beliefs, which we then defend. Thinking traps aid such defensiveness. Perhaps the most prominent is confirmation bias - looking only for evidence that supports our mental model. If you believe the homeless are dangerous, you are much more likely to read articles about homeless men who commit crimes than articles explaining how mental illness, PTSD, and savings-busting health care costs lead many to live on the streets.
Our mental models anchor our lives, another reason we're reluctant to question them. Economist Richard Thaler coined the phrase "the endowment effect" to describe the tendency to place a higher value on what we have than what we do not. In one experiment, subjects given a $6 coffee mug were asked what they would sell it for, and the average bottom-line price was $5.25. Other subjects, asked what they would pay to have the mug, were willing to spend only $2.75. As Shermer notes, "Beliefs are a form of private property...The longer we hold a belief, the more we have invested in it ... and the less likely we are to give it up."
As Leo Tolstoy once put it: "I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have profoundly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives."
Our mental models occur in a social environment. We tend to associate with people who share our mental models (and reject those who do not). They may be authority figures we look up to, family and friends who reinforce our thinking, or political, social, cultural or scientific groups to which we belong. Changing a mental model can damage those relationships. If you're a liberal, how willing are you to openly question climate science?
While Americans differ on how best to protect our environment, there is widespread agreement that we must live in harmony with nature. This was not always the case. Our early history focused on subduing nature to colonize North America and grow an industrial economy. "Conservation" and "environmental protection" were not part of our mental model. A new mental model only gained widespread acceptance in the last half of the twentieth century. The publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson and "earthrise," the photo of the earth seen from space, taken by astronaut William Anders during the Apollo 8 mission, helped us challenge our thinking.
Madison could not see the fault in his mental model, nor could we see the fault in our own earlier view of nature. Yet both mental models, in time, changed. We may well wonder what mental models we hold that will prove faulty or dangerous from the vantage point of future years. All the more reason to begin challenging them now.
Photo Credit: George Lezenby
