Reducing people to models — Limitations of human modeling
Chaotic systems and complex organisms are hard to understand but they are even harder to process. Models give us the capability to understand these complex networks, link up related points and deduce patterns or find gaps in the actual world. However, when it comes to human modeling, more often than not, models fail to capture individualism, empathy, reasons for decision making, and unexpected circumstances. Models are far from intuitive decision-making when multiple factors come into the picture. Here are some limitations that modeling cannot often carefully capture.
1. Lack of Empathy
People take actions due to emotions. Emotions are the driving forces behind most of our human actions because the brain is wired to function that way. However, most modeling practices only capture the action side of a human story, leaving aside the emotions that caused it. Emotions are harder to predict and uncontrolled, while actions can be mapped and predicted. Models reduce humans from emotional beings to users, which takes aside the empathy required to understand a person.
2. Loss of individualism
Often people express ideas and feelings as self-expression. This innate capability of humans makes each one unique and socially complex. Models, do not capture these individualistic expressions and lose the human quality of actions and emotions. Preference of a particular taste, color, emotion, story, or any other idea is closely related to emotional individualistic reasoning or story which most models cannot capture or process.
3. Unexpected outliers
People are unique and many times they take unique actions based on an even unique emotion or story behind it. Most marketing companies or research organizations are only interested in the “averages”, “focus groups” and highest frequencies of actions. This is all the information that goes into and feeds a model but outliers on the extreme end remain ignored due to size or incapacity to cater to them. Although size matters and mass market is important for business, outliers show unique used cases and might show a perspective that most people miss out on about using a product. This can be helpful in envision a product or service or make it inclusive.
4. People don't understand themselves
If we set out to find, why most people prefer blue color and prepare and take interviews of a huge set of people, what answers can we get?
Some might be stories of the past, others just might be the reasoning behind not preferring any other colors. People don't understand themselves, they will not be able to answer their own preferences because preferences are unconscious decisions out of human control. To understand these factors that drive decision-making, psychology and science are involved, not people.
Apart from people, the maker of the models only maps the moments that stand out. There is only a limited amount of information we as humans can process from the external world. Researches would only map out the ideas and qualities that stood out to them, many emotions are lost in this translation of information. Human processing also comes with human biases which makes information processing harder and only partly accurate.
Model making is a great tool to understand complex systems, but failure to capture some important details and manual information processing limits model making.
