Mental models are a cognitive science concept. We build mental models to represent reality in ways that we can process, or that make it easier to make decisions. These mental models are by their nature incomplete – limited by our knowledge and biased by our experience.
One of the characteristics of a mental model is that they can cause selective perception – information presented to us that is contrary to our mental model is disregarded. When we’re presented with new information that doesn’t match our mental model, in a way that has to be acknowledged, it can cause cognitive dissonance.
So, given that our knowledge of everything around us is always incomplete, we should be constantly updating our mental models. This means we must learn to recognize, understand, and deal with cognitive dissonance.
Many people never get past this step (because cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug), and so end up with extremely skewed mental models, which can cause confusion, maladaptive responses or behaviors, and repeated cognitive dissonance.
We build mental models of people too. These form early on in getting to know someone, which means they’re based on extremely sparse information and experiential inference. They tend to be inaccurate to extremely inaccurate, especially when our interaction with a person is limited to specific social contexts (such as online or in an activity-based club).
When our initial interaction with someone is online – on a dating site, for example – our mental model tends to get filled with all sorts of made up bullshit. The sound of their voice, inflection, body language, how they look from various angles – this stuff is never accurate, and when we meet them in real life, we spend the whole first meeting repeatedly and uncomfortably dealing with cognitive dissonance as we update our mental model with one new piece of information after another.
This is, in part, why first meetings from dating sites can be extremely awkward, even after getting along and having easy conversation online. There’s an accuracy dip somewhere in between the initial conversation and much, much later, during which we’re already filling hole after hole in our mental model with made up shit. Talk with someone for a day before meeting? Not a problem. Talk with them regularly for years and years before meeting? There will be a few things, but probably not too much. Talk with them just long enough to decide we’re interested in meeting them (which is usually a few days to a couple weeks)? Now we’re in the dip. The bullshit zone. We’ve filled our mental model with a bunch of stuff we’re going to have to toss out if we want it to be accurate.
When we’re interacting with people, we’re basing our behavior on our mental model of that person, which is filled with inferred information drawn from our own selves and our experience with other people. This isn’t, in itself, a bad thing, because that’s what experience is for. The problem is that we should be constantly tossing out that filler when we’re presented with new – correct – information. In essence, when someone says or does something that’s new to us, we should pay attention and integrate it into our mental model. This is something that must be done throughout one’s experience with a person. Even with people we think we know well, if we don’t update our mental model when they show us they’ve changed, we’re going to have problems interacting with them.
This presents a particular problem within an intimate relationship (not only romantic relationships, but also family and close friendships). It’s extremely easy to think we “know someone”, when what we know is a collection of information from different snapshots of time, mixed in with a bunch of stuff we just inferred, and – sometimes – deliberately incorrect or incomplete information provided by the other person. It can be easy to lose track of what’s actual knowledge and what’s inference, not to mention sorting out what we were deliberately told versus what we’ve observed on our own, and inaccurate information we were given because someone wanted us to like them. (Aside: don’t do that. Just be authentic and open and don’t worry about the people who aren’t compatible with you.) And it can be easy to let selective perception run wild, because when we think we fully know someone, we get lazy.