How can your mental models about your world both assist and limit your perceptions when you meet a person for the first time?

Mental models are psychological representations of real, hypothetical, or imaginary situations (Princeton, 2013). The first known recorded postulation of the mental models theory came from the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, who stated that reasoning is a process by which humans "examine the state of things asserted in the premises, forms a diagram of that state of things, perceives in the parts of the diagram relations not explicitly mentioned in the premises, satisfies itself by mental experiments upon the diagram that these relations would always subsist, or at least would do so in a certain proportion of cases, and concludes their necessary, or probable, truth.”

Similarly the Scottish psychologist Kenneth Craik suggested that the human mind constructed small scale models of the world for which it used to anticipate events, to reason and to underlie explanation. Modern Cognitive scientists have since debated that the human mind constructs mental models due to perception, imagination and knowledge.

Mental models are created through various avenues such as personal experience, social values, religious beliefs, cultural attitudes and norms.

Therefore mental models are how we determine and make sense of reality; these can be range from simple generalisations to immensely complex ideas and theories. These models thus underpin all human action and importantly interaction, especially with each other as they can manifest themselves as preconceived notions about certain types of people. This makes mental models an integral aspect of "meeting a person for the first time" as it can both assist and limit a person’s perceptions.

The modern world is incredibly diverse and complex therefore when people are confronted with a