Mental Models

Have you ever looked up directions on Google Maps only to arrive at your destination and find that it isn’t there? Or decide to walk between two metro stations because they appear close on the map, but then find out that they were actually miles apart? Maps can be so deceiving sometimes. 

But as Polish-American philosopher and engineer Alfred Korzybski once pointed out, “The map is not the territory.”¹

By this, Korzybski was referring to the fact that people often confuse models of reality with reality itself. While maps help us to understand the layout of a place and to navigate our way around, they are just a reductive representation of what’s really out there. If they were a perfect copy of the physical space, they would no longer be of use to us (and unlikely to fit into a mobile app). 

The relationship between the map and its territory, or between perception and the actual reality, captures the idea behind mental models.

Mental models refer to the internal representations of external reality that individuals use to understand, interpret, and navigate the world around them. They consist of a set of beliefs, generalizations, and assumptions that make up our worldview. And because our worldview affects how we interpret experiences, these mental models also influence our thoughts and behaviours. Most of the time, we may not even know that mental models exist or that they are impacting our decision-making and actions. They are constructed by individuals based on their unique life experiences, perceptions, and understandings of the world.

So where do mental models come from? And how do we create them in the first place? Mental models are constructed by individuals based on their unique existing beliefs, perceptions, and understandings of the world.² That is, mental models are born out of prior experience and can influence our expectations about how things will function in the future. 

Our mental models are not static and are constantly evolving and refining based on our real-world experiences. As such, mental models are highly individually subjective; while we all live in the same world, we construct different mental models of how it works. That being said, there are hundreds of fundamental mental models—such as velocity, reciprocity, and relativity—that humankind has developed throughout history and that we use in our everyday lives to help us understand complex processes.