Mental Models Research Paper

INTRODUCTION:

Meeting a person for the first time, can either be a positive or negative experience and the way someone interacts with this person can also show both positive and negative behaviours. So the question is, how can mental models about a person's world, both aid them and also limit their perceptions when meeting a person for the first time. Through exploring how and why these perceptions can be assisted and limited, we can start to question the reasoning behind our mental models.

MENTAL MODELS

Throughout the years, academic literature has defined a mental model in many ways, however the best way to understand what a mental model is, is the deeply imbedded ways of thinking or even certain images, that trigger assumptions
Very often, we see that we are not consciously aware of our mental models and the affects that they can have on our behaviour (Chermack 2003), this in turn, restricts our perceptions. Mental models are often vague, incomplete and imprecisely expressed (Karp 2005) however, once believed, mental models are extremely difficult to change (Chermack 2003). This is highly due to the fact that people are unaware of their own mental models, and the only way for a person to change their mental model, is for them to acknowledge that they have one to start
Using the example of the Detroit auto maker, not recognising that they had the mental model that all that customers cared about was styling, believing that "all people care about is styling", evidently shows us that their mental model had become tacit. This mental model continued to be unexamined, and because this mental model remained unexamined, the model remained unchanged, and thus as the world changed the gap grew between the mental model of this Detroit automaker and the world (Senge 1992). Clearly, mental models can perform as filters that screen incoming information that come to us, limiting our ways of thinking and also our perceptions (Unknown