Thought Shrapnel

Most of this post talks about the differences between Japan and Italy, which makes it well worth reading in full. What I like about it, though, is that it goes beyond “mental models” to talk about framings and how these are the unseen, and somewhat hidden things that make cultures different. Fascinating.

A mental model is a simulation of “how things might unfold”, and we all build and rebuild hundreds of mental models every day. A framing, on the other hand, is “what things exist in the first place”, and it is much more stable and subtle. Every mental model is based on some framing, but we tend to be oblivious to which framing we’re using most of the time […].

Framings are the basis of how we think and what we are even able to perceive, and they’re the most consequential thing that spreads through a population in what we call “culture”.

[…]

Each culture is made of shared framings—ontologies of things that are taken to exist and play a role in mental models—that arose in those same arbitrary but self-reinforcing ways. Anthropologist Joseph Henrich, in The Secret of Our Success, brings up several studies demonstrating the cultural differences in framings.

He mentions studies that estimated the average IQ of Americans in the early 1800’s to have been around 70—not because they were dumber, but because their culture at the time was much poorer in sophisticated concepts. Their framings had fewer and less-defined moving parts, which translated into poorer mental models. Other studies found that children in Western countries are brought up with very general and abstract categories for animals, like “fish” and “bird”, while children in small-scale societies tend to think in terms of more specific categories, such as “robin” and “jaguar”, leading to different ways to understand and interface with the world.

But framings affect more than understanding. They influence how we take in the information from the world around us.

Source: Aether Mug

Image: Maksym Tymchyk