Question
What is mental models decision making?
Quick Answer
Every agent embeds assumptions about the world — the schema it uses must be accurate.
Example: You built an agent for handling criticism at work: 'When someone challenges my idea in a meeting, assume they are attacking my competence, and defend the idea immediately.' This agent fires reliably. It also destroys collaborative relationships. The schema it operates on — 'challenges equal attacks' — is wrong. Replace the schema with 'challenges are stress tests for the idea, not evaluations of the person,' and the same trigger produces a completely different action: listen, ask a clarifying question, improve the idea.
This concept is part of Agent Fundamentals in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for agent fundamentals.
Learn more in these lessons
- Agents operate on schemas
- One framework per decision type
Create a specific framework for each recurring decision type.
Go beyond the answer
This topic is part of Context Engineering for Humans — a guided sequence of 16 lessons.
After completing this path you will engineer context deliberately: recognize which context you are in and load it on purpose, externalize the assumptions and decisions that machines and colleagues silently need, structure information so it survives handoff (identifiers, atomic units, explicit relationships), and manage the switching costs that fragment thinking. Your AI sessions start warm and your writing stops being misread.
Start the path →