Everyone has their own way of explaining how something works. That framework is a mental model, often influenced by their environment (i.e., a mental model in Sasketchewan may be different from someone in Malibu). There is a hypothesis that this plays a major role in decision-making and how they approach a problem.

Example: To navigate further down a page, some users have the mental model of “swiping up” on a screen, whereas other users are accustomed to “scrolling down.”