After writing about using words to your advantage in life and business, I began thinking of one of my all-time favorite mental models. It comes from legendary marketing psychologist Clotaire Rapaille, who wrote about it in his treatise “The Culture Code“. Before we get into that, let me say that Dr. Clotaire Rapaille caught my attention so…
Mental Model: Intergenerational Transmission and What It Has to Do With Adrian Peterson Beating His Child A huge percentage of the people in this community are fans of the mental model concept – ideas, like tools, that can be used to analyze, study, and understand both why and how something is happening – made popular by Charles…
Mental Model: Expression Contagion Whether you are a business leader, running a non-profit, or even a weekday book club, one of the most dangerous assumptions you can make as a decision maker is believing that people implicitly agree with you. A lot of folks mistake lack of opposition for consent or affirmation when that is…
Whether identifying changes in public policy that could do exponential good or revealing internal assumptions about the way the world works, mental models are the best construct I’ve ever come across to categorize, analyze, study, document, and reflect upon the universe. Yesterday, The Washington Post published an example of cognitive bias when it detailed how how subconscious beliefs can…
Following the post on the Dies Irae Principle earlier, I started thinking about the role of sound in regulating mood. Thirteen years ago, I was sitting in my undergraduate freshman music theory class, having moved thousands of miles away from home to begin university. At the time, I had enrolled in the Bachelor of Music…
One of the biggest mental model obsessions I’ve had for the past few years – so consuming that I rarely even mention it in public, and hardly ever on this site as I am still working on fully grasping the implications and mechanics – is something called signaling theory. The gist of signaling theory is that at all times, in all situations, you are broadcasting aspects of your identity, beliefs, personality, and lifestyle to the people around you, often with significant social implications. It exerts such a strong pull on civilization that I consider it second only to the social proof mental model in importance. It interacts with other mental models so efficiently, it often goes unnoticed.
In the 1930’s and 1940’s, the Carlay Company in Chicago, Illinois developed a candy coated dietary suppressant called Ayds. It sold the business to Campana Corporation. Campana was then sold to Dow Chemical. In the 1960’s, Dow sold the business to Purex and hired legendary Hollywood stars and other celebrities to endorse the product. In…
A topic I’m studying now from a mental model perspective is that of “Otherkin”. Don’t know what it is? You aren’t alone. It’s a sub-niche movement of people who believe – not pretend, but actually believe – they are partially, or entirely, non-human. Some think that they have been reincarnated with the soul of an animal, dragon, fairy, plant, alien, cartoon, demon, angel, elf, vampire, etc. Some believe they actually are partially these things biologically.
Warning: This is the working essay I promised to release earlier tonight. It deals with certain common cult beliefs that arise throughout human history and civilizations. It contains mature themes, images, and concepts. It was written for myself as a way to process and understand these recurring patterns. Due to the length of the essay, I…
This is the second in a three-part post on narcissism; the topic du jour for our mental model study. We’ve been talking about narcissism for the past few days and one interesting thread that comes up throughout history is that narcissism, despite being horribly destructive and disruptive, can work, in rare situations, in the favor…
