Constructivism part 3
How mental models can break
The purpose of building a mental model is to simplify the world and determine suitable actions by quickly predicting their outcome. That's the origin of surviving. If reality and model disagree, we are helpless and become very stressed, because we need to act quickly, but the fast instinctive thinking just failed, our logical thinking is slow and WE NEED AN ACTION NOW.
Babies learn how their parents react to crying or laughing and what they get as result. Things get more sophisticated from there, but childhood creates our deepest models.
One way of resolving such conflicts is to change the perceived information in order to resolve contradictions with the model to keep us actionable. That means the learned mental model influences how we perceive the world. Since we learn from observations, these changes in perception create a feedback loop.
There is a joke that engineers count “one, two, three, all”. That describes the tendency to build a rule after experiencing something a few times. If the sequence “pass, pass, pass, fail” feels different than “pass, pass, fail, pass”, you experience a cognitive distortion, because three sequential passes change how the fourth time is perceived.
Another example is “it can't be broken, it always worked!” We all know things work until they don't, so clearly there must be a moment when the transition from working to broken happens. Yet we like to reject the idea of being witness to that after having built a mental model of the item being reliable.
Under bad circumstances, this feedback loop can cause the model to converge to a fixed point, which causes heavy cognitive distortions.
If observed facts are changed so much that effectively they no longer matter, the result shows as strong simplification. This lack of input dependence is perceived e.g. as:
Confirmation and outcome bias
Binary thinking and over-generalization
Jumping to conclusions without evidence and emotional reasoning
Filtered perception and magnification
Wrong expectations
Labeling, personalization and blame
Decisions based upon heavily distorted perception tend to be unhealthy. Common unhealthy mental models are:
Defectiveness or entitlement
Abandonment and rejection
Unlovable
Sole responsibility
Excessive threat and danger
Due to constructivism, the person suffering from that strong feedback loop will be convinced that the world as they experience it is real, like everybody else does.
Cognition is fast and critical thinking is slow. The key to recognize your mental models at work is to be in a calm and relaxed situation, where cognition does not need to kick in, and asking: Do my actions serve me? Am I going where I want to go? If you queried the accuracy of the base upon which you made decisions, at best you would get contradicting inner views, but no helpful answer. Instead query the value of your decisions.
Some possible answers are:
“No, it does not serve me today/in this situation.”
“Yes, it does serve me in this situation.”
“It makes me feel better now, but I will regret it later.”
In any way, the answer should be specific to the situation and time and the reason must not hold true for every other situation. There are no universal answers, because universality means input data does not matter, which in turn suggests the model is over-simplified and likely broken.
If you are actually doing something that is not good for you, likely there is a flaw in the decision, in the model upon which it is based, and in your perception of the world leading to that model.
Now mental illness is the extreme end of things. A partially converged mental model may not be noticed easily, but it is still an issue to watch out for, because it screws up decisions, and engineering is full of decisions. It is good practice to review important ones after a day or two in a relaxed situation before acting on them.
Everlasting time pressure is the enemy of good decisions.