Jeremy

We are talking about mental models that assemble lens that are created through our life experiences. We see everything through these lenses. Is a lens model the appropriate way to think about what we are considering? A mental model is an abstract concept. The notion of seeing everything through a set of lenses might make the notion of mental models more accessible.

Bill B

We can look at mental models at several different levels. There are the big ones (often called paradigms), and there are the smaller ones such as Mitch is bringing up about fructose. The big mental model is that food is good for us.  Chemicals are bad for us.  Mitch is talking about something that is more specific that is linked to how the mental model is built, how it is reinforced by people with money. Rich and powerful people who have a stake in the game of marketing high fructose corn syrup.

Jack

I’m going to say something a bit different about mental models.  I think the other part of this is that outcomes related to fructose corn syrup are ones for which we have a cultural construct of judgment.  This construct is about obesity, over-weight, diabetes, liver disease. Our cultural construct indicates that these are self-imposed, self-caused illnesses. This is a pervasive mental model.  Wow, you have lung cancer. You deserve it.  Because you smoked.  You are fat. You deserve whatever you get because you’re fat.  I think you probably all know the Implicit Association Test. The IAT can be easily taken. It detects implicit biases.  It is widely applied to matters of Race.  But they have used it for age, gender—and for obesity. When I took it, I had no implicit bias for race or age, but I had Hugh implicit bias related to weight.  I have implicit and probably explicit bias about weight. I grew up in a family with obese parents and my brother has had by-pass stomach surgery and lost 150 lobs. I had trouble with obesity.

I think we judge people and don’t think of the cause. We don’t think of the high fructose corn syrup as being the cause. We think of the moral failure of the person to moderate their intake. We don’t recognize that high fructose corn syrup is addictive.  And it is a chemical.  It plays on all sorts of long term, thousands of years old neural receptors that we have in our brains and our bodies. The fructose takes advantage of those receptors. I was talking to somebody who said that Starbucks figured out how to sell their products. But they didn’t do it by addicting people to caffeine. They did it by addicting people to sugar. Very few people want to order drip coffee when they go to a Starbucks. Most people want drinks laced with sugar. That’s what people keep going back for. Starbuck’s business model is not selling caffeine, it is selling sugar.