Mental Model
Relational Accountability (Wilson)
Shawn Wilson (Opaskwayak Cree) argues Indigenous epistemology is fundamentally relational: knowledge is not an object to discover but a web of relationships to maintain
The encyclopedia
People, books, and breakthrough ideas—connected to the mental models and moves you can use.
Explore the encyclopedia
3,456 entries
Mental Model
Relational Ambivalence (Wanting Contradictory Things Simultaneously)
Relational ambivalence is the coexistence of positive and negative feelings or evaluations toward a relationship
Cognitive Move
Relationship
Invest in people rather than in yourself: build real standing with someone who can refer you, vouch for you, or tell you about roles before they post. This is access you cannot manufacture alone, no matter how skilled you get.
Mental Model
Relationship Annual Review Protocol
A lightweight annual review protocol for ALL important relationships — not just romantic partnerships — to assess investment, satisfaction, and intentionality across your social network
Mental Model
Relationship Crisis Protocol
A protocol for navigating a major relationship crisis — discovery of infidelity, breach of trust, major deception, or a declaration that the relationship is in serious trouble
Mental Model
Relationship State of the Union Protocol
A comprehensive annual relationship review protocol, modeled after Gottman's State of the Union meeting, for evaluating the overall health of a partnership and setting relationship goals
Cognitive Move
Relative coordinates
Put the zero point somewhere that moves with the thing you're measuring, instead of a fixed origin. Every value becomes a distance from a local reference: yesterday, the group average, the nearest neighbor. Distinct from indexing to a baseline, where the origin stays frozen at the start.
Mental Model
Relative Importance Testing
Relative-importance approaches use structured comparisons to study preferences or judgments under tradeoffs
Mental Model
Relative Satisfaction/Misery Tendencies
The finding that subjective satisfaction is determined more by RELATIVE comparisons than by ABSOLUTE conditions—people evaluate their situation by comparing to reference points (peers, past selves, expectations) rather t…
Mental Model
Relativity
Relativity relates physical measurements across reference frames while preserving laws and invariants
Mental Model
Relaxation (Solving Easier Versions of Hard Problems)
A mathematical optimization technique where you solve a simplified ('relaxed') version of a hard problem by removing constraints, then use that solution to guide the solution of the original problem
Cognitive Move
Relayout
Rearrange where things sit on the page or screen so that information used together can be seen together in one glance.
Cognitive Move
Relevant
Ask whether each candidate would actually settle the question you are facing right now, not a neighboring or future question. Options aimed at a different problem, a different timeframe, or someone else's situation get cut before you spend any effort comparing them.
Cognitive Move
Relevant peers
Ask who is genuinely comparable: people matched on the conditions that drive the result, like starting point, time invested, resources, and constraints. Whoever is loudest or most visible is a sampling artifact, not a peer group.
Cognitive Move
Relevant states and reliable signals
Pick the few genuinely different conditions your plan should branch on, then name for each one a measurement you can actually take on schedule. Two jobs: define the small set of modes, and pin each to an observable number rather than a mood.
Cognitive Move
Reliability / source
Find out whether this source, measure, or account can be trusted for this specific decision.
Mental Model
Reliability of Case Evidence
Individual cases and anecdotes are the weakest form of evidence yet the most psychologically compelling
Cognitive Move
Reloop
Trace how an outcome feeds back into its own causes, so you can see why the problem keeps recreating itself after every fix.
Mental Model
Ren (Humaneness/Benevolence)
Ren is the supreme Confucian virtue — humaneness, benevolence, or authoritative conduct
Cognitive Move
Renetwork
Draw the problem as nodes and connections, because indirect paths, hubs, and bridges explain behavior that straight-line thinking cannot.
Mental Model
Renormalization Group
A technique from theoretical physics for understanding how systems behave at different scales by systematically coarse-graining—zooming out and seeing which details matter and which wash out at larger scales
Cognitive Move
Renotate
Invent stable names, symbols, and legends only when the compression saves more mental effort than the decoding costs.
Mental Model
Rent-Seeking
Using political, legal, or institutional power to capture wealth without creating new value—extracting from the existing pie rather than expanding it
Cognitive Move
Reontologize
Change what kind of thing the problem is made of, turning an object into a process, a game, a signal, or an ecology, so new operations become possible.