Seeing Differently: Welcome to my OCD World

Abstract

My STEM students have a way of making sense of the world that is based in the primacy of rational analytic thinking, and is in often dominated by a hidden model of the world that is based in static equilibrium models - a Newtonian physics understanding of the world if you will. However, the social world tends to behave more like over-determined, context-dependent, dynamical (non-linear, & adaptive) systems. When the very rational analytic thinker applies their tacit assumptions about how systems work, they tend to be very disappointed because their models are wrong and over-determined, context-dependent, dynamical (OCD) systems don't behave like they expect it to behave. This makes them both not very good at successfully acting within those systems, and very frustrated. To leverage all of their analytic talent and become more successful in the social world, they need to shift their underlying (and generally completely implicit) model of what sort of system it is.