Framers

The telephone was first thought about as a way to listen to music remotely: people would dial in to hear a concert. The phonograph was considered to be a way to communicate messages:

The Principle of Mutability When conjuring up an alternative reality, people focus on aspects that they believe they can alter.

The Minimal-Change Principle When selecting which constraints to loosen or tighten, we should aim for the fewest, not the most, modifications. We should aspire to minimal change.

The Consistency Principle The third principle for choosing constraints is perhaps the most obvious: consistency. Constraints should not be placed in direct contradiction to one another. As we envisage alternative realities, one constraint cannot go against another one; otherwise our counterfactuals would keep running into contradictions.

Frames empower us because they focus our mind. When they work well, they highlight the essential things and let us disregard the rest.

Einstein reframed physics by showing that time, long considered constant, is actually relative.

Mental models bring order. They let us focus on essential things and ignore others—just as, at a cocktail party, we can hear the conversation that we’re in while tuning out the chatter around us. We craft a simulation of reality in our minds to anticipate how situations will play out.

The idea of agency provides that humans have choices and can exercise them. We are subjects, not objects, in the world. We have the capacity to act. Having agency hinges upon our ability to frame causally. This is not to say that “free will” exists objectively, nor that human choices aren’t influenced by social structures. Yet only if our actions h

The second element of our mental models is counterfactuals, which we examine in chapter 4. These are imagined alternatives to reality; hypotheses of a world in which one or several things are changed. As with causality, we think in counterfactuals all the time. They come naturally to us. Counterfactuals let us escape the cognitive here and now: we