Mental Models: How To Reason Better & Be Less Irrational

Human reason is a puzzling ability. As a species, we’ve invented logic, mathematics, science and philosophy. Yet we suffer from a list of cognitive biases so long that an entire Wikipedia page is devoted to categorizing them.

So which is it: are we excellent at reasoning or incurably irrational?

Psychologist Philip Johnson-Laird has spent his career working out the answer. His theory of mental models explains how we have the ability to reason correctly — and also why we frequently fail to do so.

I recently read Johnson-Laird’s nearly 600-page book, How We Reason. The book weighs in on an impressive variety of topics related to reasoning:

• Why do some people reason better than others? (Mental models require working memory, which is both limited and varies between individuals.)
• Why are some puzzles harder than others? (The more mental models a correct inference requires, the harder it is to deduce the correct answer.)
• Does reasoning differ between cultures? (Johnson-Laird argues the basic mechanisms are universal, but there can be differences in knowledge or strategies.)
• Do people with psychopathologies reason more poorly? (It may actually be the opposite! People with obsessive-compulsive disorder actually reason betterwhen the content of the reasoning questions was related to their obsessions.)
• How does visualization impact reasoning…