Making Mental Models Actionable
Make mental models actionable: Test predictions against reality, use them to guide decisions, identify blind spots, and refine through feedback loops.
What was corrected
Article stated Philip Johnson-Laird developed his 1983 mental models theory at Princeton University, when he was actually at the University of Sussex at that time. It described Gary Klein's Recognition-Primed Decision research as including chess players and attributed a specific heat-pattern explanation to a real firefighter anecdote that could not be verified in Klein's actual account. It cited an unsubstantiated statistic for Crew Resource Management training covering 1994-2004, overstated Philip Tetlock's superforecaster performance as a 2-to-1 ratio over intelligence analysts, and misattributed a well-known Andy Grove exchange to Robert Noyce instead of Gordon Moore.
Corrected Johnson-Laird's institutional affiliation to the University of Sussex's MRC Applied Psychology Unit, where he actually worked in 1983 (he later moved to Princeton), removed the chess-players detail and unverified heat-pattern mechanism from the Klein anecdote, replaced the unsubstantiated CRM statistic with accurately hedged language, corrected Tetlock's superforecaster margin to the documented figure of approximately 30 percent, and corrected the Grove exchange to properly attribute it to Gordon Moore.
Why this is better
Verified against Johnson-Laird's own publication history and Sussex/Princeton affiliation timeline, Gary Klein's Sources of Power for the actual fireground commander account, IARPA Good Judgment Project reporting on superforecaster performance margins, and Andy Grove's Only the Paranoid Survive for the Moore exchange.