There are trends in the way of thinking that almost always distort facts and specifics to the detriment of the entire thought process. Not to say that facts and specifics are the only important details of our mental models, but they are important. Here are some of those trends:

–Filtering: taking the negative details and magnifying them.

–Polarized: tending to perceive everything at the extremes, with very little room for a middle ground.

–Overgeneralization: coming to a general conclusion based on a single incident or piece of evidence.

–Mind Reading: without their saying so, you know what people are feeling and why they act the way they do.

–Catastrophizing: continuously expecting disaster.

–Personalization: the tendency to relate everything around you, to yourself.

–Blaming: holding other people responsible for your pain.

–Necessitating: having a list of ironclad rules about how you and other people should act.

–Emotional Reasoning: believing that what you feel must be true-automatically.

–Labeling: generalizing one or two qualities into a negative global judgment.

–Rewarding: expect all your sacrifice and self-denial to pay off.

Often, these trends of thinking come with flavors of care and love. But that doesn’t defeat the fact that the capacity of these thinking models is limited to the time required for their discovery by others. At the end, no intellectual model betters tolerance for doubt, curiosity, and reasonable discourse.