A few weeks ago a family became lost in a corn maze in Massachusetts and called 911 in a panic. Police rushed to the scene and found them, unharmed, just 25 feet from the entrance to the maze. A brief flurry of media coverage resulted, in which the family were generally portrayed as dimwits lacking common sense. [1] But mocking these people obscures the fact that we've all had similar experiences; their predicament was just an unusually literal example of being trapped by a mental model.
Many commenters wondered why the family didn't simply walk through the corn to escape the maze. They could have easily pushed aside the cornstalks, headed for the exterior and rescued themselves. But they didn't think they were in a cornfield; they thought they were in a maze, and while their failure to recognize the difference says something about their crisis management skills, it also says something about the power of mental models. They couldn't simply walk through the corn, because that would involve walking through walls, and that's impossible.
We habitually view the world through a series of mental models that shape our understanding of our circumstances, our relationships and ourselves. [2] And while these mental models are essential tools in allowing us to navigate through life, they can easily lead us astray. Philosopher Alford Korzybski said "A map is not the territory it represents," and a mental model is not the reality it seeks to depict. [3] But we can easily mistake our mental models for reality and apply them inappropriately.
We construct our mental models out of the meaning we extract from experience, and there's inevitably a loss of fidelity as we focus on certain aspects of an experience (while ignoring others), interpret that data, and then conceptualize it as a general principle. [4] And the gap that exists between our mental models and reality will continually increase over time unless we compel ourselves to test our assumptions, gather new data and update our models--which requires consistent effort.
A mental model I held about myself for years was that I was a poor public speaker. I'd get nervous before a presentation or speech, I interpreted my sweaty palms and the pit in my stomach as evidence of my ineffectiveness, and my expectation that I would perform poorly became a self-fulfilling prophecy which, of course, reinforced my mental model.
But while I was getting my MBA I took a public speaking course at Stanford's School of Engineering. The rationale for the course was that engineers are often brilliant technical thinkers whose poor communication skills prevent them from promoting their ideas more effectively, and the methodology was utterly simple: Prepare a short speech or presentation and deliver it to the class each week for ten weeks.
I quickly came to realize that it's easy to improve as a public speaker if you do it often enough, and that I had trapped myself in my own mental model: believing I was a poor speaker led me to avoid speaking opportunities, which prevented me from ever improving. Today I still get nervous before a speech or presentation, but I view that response simply as a manifestation of my desire to do well, not as damning evidence of my ineffectiveness. And I still make plenty of missteps as a speaker, but I view them as correctible mistakes, not as character flaws.
I don't mean to suggest that all our limitations derive from our mental models; we're surrounded by any number of real constraints that can't be altered merely by viewing them from a different perspective. But even in those cases our mental models often amplify those constraints and make them seem more daunting and more powerful than they truly are. And in many other aspects of life the limits we place on ourselves derive from outdated or inappropriately applied mental models. We see solid walls instead of flimsy cornstalks, and we allow ourselves to feel trapped instead of simply walking through the corn.
Footnotes
[1] Media reports on the family's 911 call:
- Family lost in Mass. corn maze calls 911 for help (Associated Press)
- Family lost in Massachusetts corn maze calls 911 (Lauren Keiper, Reuters)
- Family’s Corn Maze 'Fun' Ends In 911 Rescue (Katie Kindelan, ABC News)
- Couple lost in corn maze calls 911 and Couple lost in Massachusetts corn maze causes media bonanza (Deborah Netburn, Los Angeles Times)
- Family Lost in Corn Maze Calls 911 (Kevin Underhill, Lowering the Bar)
[2] Scottish psychologist and philosopher Kenneth Craik is credited with originating the concept of mental models in his 1943 book The Nature of Explanation:
If the organism carries a "small-scale model" of external reality and of its possible actions within its head, it is able to try out various alternatives, conclude which is the best of them, react to future situations before they arise, utilize the knowledge of past events in dealing with the present and the future, and in every way to react in a much fuller. safer, and more competent manner to the emergencies which face it. (Cited by Philip Johnson-Laird in Mental Models in Cognitive Science, Cognitive Science, 1980)
Craik died two years later at age 31 (tragically, in a bicycle accident one day before the end of World War II in Europe), but later scholars would build on the idea of mental models in the process of seeking to understand how the mind works, most notably English psychologist Philip Johnson-Laird and his mentor Peter Wason:
Beginning with [Swiss psychologist Jean] Piaget, who is considered the godfather of studies of children's intellectual development, some scientists believe that humans construct a mental logic as a result of experience. Of course, we're not normally aware of logical rules when we reason or grammatical rules as we speak, but Piaget's work was taken up by students of human reasoning. According to followers of Piaget, mental logic should not be affected by content. Our results were not, I think, something that people immediately appreciated. But they did imply that the mind does not contain a logic made up of formal or explicit rules of inference... We reason by imagining a situation in which the premises are true--that is, we construct a mental model of them. In the case of some premises, we may have to construct multiple models to capture multiple possibilities. A conclusion is necessary if it holds in all the models of the premises; it is probable if it holds in most of them; and it is possible if it holds in at least one of them... In very broad terms, we're not as imbued with a formal logic as some philosophers, logicians, and psychologists think we are. Logic, I believe, is rather a cultural invention. (Johnson-Laird interviewed by Farooq Ahmed, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011)
We discovered that people make systematic errors in reasoning, and that there is a large effect of the content of premises on the form of conclusions that they draw. The effects of content are not readily compatible with the thesis, still urged by some psychologists, that there is a mental logic consisting of formal rules of inference... But an essential question remained unanswered: what form did the mental representation of discourse take? I returned to the study of deductive reasoning, and following an earlier idea [see my paper, 'Models of deduction', 1975] put forward the theory that ordinary individuals reason by imagining a situation in which the premises are true--they construct a mental model of them... The greater the number of models that have to be constructed in order to draw the correct conclusion, the harder the task is. (Johnson-Laird, curriculum vitae, Princeton Neuroscience Institute)
While Johnson-Laird's work on the subject has been widely influential, it should be noted that not all scholars agree with his premise that mental models are the foundation of logical reasoning, rather than "formal rules of inference." In a review of Johnson-Laird's 1983 book Mental Models, Marilyn Ford offered a sharp critique: "In sum, Johnson-Laird presents a thought-provoking discussion of a number of topics. His book is disappointing, however, because it does not live up its claims." (Language, December 1985)
Both Craik and Johnson-Laird can be dense and inaccessible writers--Shane Parrish offers a useful exegesis in The Nature of Explanation.
[3] Korzybski was a Polish intellectual in the early 20th century, and he is remembered today largely for this one line from 1933's Science and Sanity, which I've only skimmed online and found nearly impenetrable. But his ideas live on in the lucid work of S.I. Hayakawa, a linguist who served a term as a U.S. Senator from California in the 1970s and is a fascinating figure in his own right. In the preface to the 5th edition of Language in Thought and Action, Hayakawa cites Korzybski as his primary influence.
[4] Racing Up the Ladder of Inference
For Further Reading
Mental Models (Julian Shapiro)
Mental Models (Shane Parrish, Farnam Street)
Mental Models: An Interdisciplinary Synthesis of Theory and Methods (Natalie A. Jones, Helen Ross, Timothy Lynam, Pascal Perez, and Anne Leitch, Ecology and Society, 2011)
Revised August 2020.
Photo by Carmelo Speltino.
