Mental Models of Reality

"People in all human societies create mental models of reality. These mental models attribute causality to various factors—oftentimes invisible ones—and their function is to make the world more legible, predictable, and easy to manipulate… The sharing of belief and culture improves cooperation by providing common goals and facilitating the cooperative solution of shared problems…

They, like the rules they enjoin, are invested with considerable emotional meaning and therefore are believed for intrinsic reasons and not simply because they are accurate or useful… they are also difficult to falsify. All of this reinforces the fundamental conservatism of human societies, because mental models of reality once adopted are hard to change in the light of new evidence that they are not working.”

-Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order (2011)