"[...] each of us frames, orders and/or organizes our experiences in terms of socially learned incomplete mental models or mind sets that shape our experiences perspectivally. These mental models are constitutive of all our experiences. They are the ways in which we make sense of our experiences [...]" (Patricia H Werhane "A Place for Philosophers in Applied Ethics and the Role of Moral Reasoning in Moral Imagination", Business Ethics Quarterly 16 (3), 2007)
"The most serious problem in applied ethics, or at least in business ethics, is not that we frame experiences; it is not that these mental models are incomplete, sometimes biased, and surely parochial. The larger problem is that most of us either individually or as managers do not realize that we are framing, disregarding data, ignoring counterevidence, or not taking into account other points of view." (Patricia H Werhane "A Place for Philosophers in Applied Ethics and the Role of Moral Reasoning in Moral Imagination", Business Ethics Quarterly 16 (3), 2007)
"Although good ethical decision-making requires us carefully to take into account as much relevant information as is available to us, we have good reason to think that we commonly fall well short of this standard – either by overlooking relevant facts completely or by underestimating their significance. The mental models we employ can contribute to this problem. As we have explained, mental models frame our experiences in ways that both aid and hinder our perceptions. They enable us to focus selectively on ethically relevant matters. By their very nature, they provide incomplete perspectives, resulting in bounded awareness and bounded ethicality. Insofar as our mental modeling practices result in unwarranted partiality, or even ethical blindness, the desired reflective process is distorted. This distortion is aggravated by the fact that our mental models can have this distorting effect without our consciously realizing it. Thus, although we cannot do without mental models, they leave us all vulnerable to blindness and, insofar as we are unaware of this, self-deception." (Patricia H Werhane et al, "Obstacles to Ethical: Decision-Making Mental Models, Milgram and the Problem of Obedience", 2013)
"Because all mental models or mindsets are incomplete, we can engage in second-order studies, evaluations, judgments, and assessments about our own and other operative mental models. Of course this is highly complex since the act of reflection is itself a further of framing or reframing." (Patricia H Werhane et al, "Obstacles to Ethical: Decision-Making Mental Models, Milgram and the Problem of Obedience", 2013)
"It is important to emphasize that the dangers that certain mental models pose to ethical decision-making cannot be mitigated or overcome by imagining that we could somehow free ourselves of the need for mental models altogether. Without mental models to mediate and shape our experiences, we would be incapable of having experiences at all." (Patricia H Werhane et al, "Obstacles to Ethical: Decision-Making Mental Models, Milgram and the Problem of Obedience", 2013)
"Mental models bind our awareness within a particular scaffold and then selectively can filter the content we subsequently receive. Through recalibration using revised mental models, we argue, we cultivate strategies anew, creating new habits, and galvanizing more intentional and evolved mental models. This recalibration often entails developing a strong sense of self and self-worth, realizing that each of us has a range of moral choices that may deviate from those in authority, and moral imagination." (Patricia H Werhane et al, "Obstacles to Ethical: Decision-Making Mental Models, Milgram and the Problem of Obedience", 2013)
"Mental models serve to conceptualize, focus and shape our experiences, but in so doing, they sometimes cause us to ignore data and occlude critical reflection that might be relevant or, indeed, necessary to practical decision-making. [...] distorting mental models are the foundation or underpinning of many of the impediments to effective ethical decision-making." (Patricia H Werhane et al, "Obstacles to Ethical: Decision-Making Mental Models, Milgram and the Problem of Obedience", 2013)
"These framing perspectives or mental models construe the data of our experiences, and it is the construed data that we call 'facts'. What we often call reality, or the world, is constructed or socially construed in certain ways such that one cannot get at the source of the data except through these construals." (Patricia H Werhane et al, "Obstacles to Ethical: Decision-Making Mental Models, Milgram and the Problem of Obedience", 2013)
"Various scientific methodologies are themselves mental models through which scientists discover, predict, and hypothesize about what we then call reality. In the social constructionist paradigm such mental models frame all our experiences. They schematize, and otherwise facilitate and guide the ways in which we recognize, react, and organize the world. How we define the world is dependent on such schema and thus all realities are socially structured. In the socially constructed paradigm, the multivariate mental models or conceptual schema are the means and mode through which we constitute our experiences." (Patricia H Werhane et al, "Obstacles to Ethical: Decision-Making Mental Models, Milgram and the Problem of Obedience", 2013)
"We identify and analyze distorting mental models that constitute experience in a manner that occludes the moral dimension of situations from view, thereby thwarting the first step of ethical decision-making. Examples include an unexamined moral self-image, viewing oneself as merely a bystander, and an exaggerated conception of self-sufficiency. These mental models, we argue, generate blind spots to ethics, in the sense that they limit our ability to see facts that are right before our eyes – sometimes quite literally, as in the many examples of managers and employees who see unethical behavior take place in front of them, but do not recognize it as such." (Patricia H Werhane et al, "Obstacles to Ethical: Decision-Making Mental Models, Milgram and the Problem of Obedience", 2013)
