You already have a theory of human nature. You just haven't examined it.
Before you read a single word of this lesson, you already believe something about what people are. Whether humans are fundamentally selfish or fundamentally cooperative. Whether your coworker's silence in meetings means disengagement or careful thinking. Whether the stranger who cut you off in traffic is a bad driver or a good person having a terrible morning.
These aren't idle philosophies. They are operational schemas — default models that your brain applies automatically to predict, explain, and respond to every person you encounter. Social psychologists call them person schemas: cognitive structures that organize your knowledge and expectations about individuals, roles, and human nature in general. They run beneath your conscious awareness, shaping your decisions about who to hire, who to trust, who to argue with, and who to ignore.
The previous lesson examined schemas about change — how your model of whether things can shift determines whether you try to shift them. This lesson applies the same principle to people. Your model of what people are determines how you treat them. And how you treat them often determines what they become.
Person schemas: the cognitive architecture of social life
Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor, in their foundational text Social Cognition (1991), established that humans are not blank-slate observers of other people. We are, at best, motivated tacticians — choosing among cognitive strategies depending on our current goals. At worst, we are what Fiske and Taylor originally called cognitive misers: people who conserve mental resources by defaulting to prebuilt schemas rather than processing each person fresh.
Person schemas operate at multiple levels:
Individual schemas are your mental models of specific people. Your model of your manager includes expectations about how she'll respond to bad news, what topics make her defensive, and whether she reads emails on weekends. These schemas are built from experience, but they crystallize fast — often after just a few interactions — and then resist updating.
Role schemas are expectations attached to social positions. "Engineers are introverted." "Executives are strategic." "Salespeople are pushy." These aren't observations about specific people. They are templates you apply before you've gathered any individual evidence.
Group schemas — what most research calls stereotypes — are expectations attached to social categories: gender, age, ethnicity, profession, nationality. Greenwald and Banaji (1995) demonstrated that these schemas operate implicitly — below conscious awareness — shaping judgments even when the person holding them explicitly rejects the stereotype. Their Implicit Association Test, now taken by millions, consistently reveals gaps between what people believe they think about social groups and what their automatic associations reveal.
The critical insight is not that schemas exist. It is that schemas about people function as prediction engines — and prediction engines that generate data confirming their own accuracy.
The self-fulfilling prophecy: schemas that create their own evidence
Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson's 1968 Pygmalion study is the most striking demonstration of how person-schemas manufacture reality. Researchers told elementary school teachers that certain students had been identified by a special test as "intellectual bloomers" — students poised for unusual academic gains. In reality, the students were randomly selected. The test identified nothing.
The result: first and second graders labeled as bloomers gained an average of 27 IQ points more than the control group over the school year. Teachers, believing in these students' potential, had unconsciously given them more attention, more challenging work, more patience with mistakes, and warmer nonverbal feedback. The schema didn't just predict performance. It produced it.
This is the mechanism that makes person-schemas so consequential: they alter your behavior toward others, which alters their behavior, which generates evidence that appears to confirm your original schema. The manager who assumes employees are lazy micromanages them, which kills their initiative, which proves they "need to be managed." The parent who assumes a child is irresponsible never delegates meaningful tasks, which prevents the child from developing responsibility, which confirms they "aren't ready."
The loop is invisible from inside. You experience the confirming evidence as observation, not as a consequence of your own expectations.
Theory X and Theory Y: schemas about human nature as management architecture
Douglas McGregor formalized this in 1960 with a framework that remains one of the most practical demonstrations of person-schemas in action. In The Human Side of Enterprise, he described two implicit theories that managers hold about workers:
Theory X assumes people inherently dislike work, avoid responsibility, prefer to be directed, are motivated primarily by fear and financial incentives, and must be controlled and coerced to perform. Managers operating from Theory X build surveillance-heavy systems: time tracking, approval chains, rigid hierarchies, punishment for deviation.
Theory Y assumes people find work as natural as play, seek responsibility under the right conditions, are capable of self-direction, and are motivated by intrinsic factors like mastery, purpose, and autonomy. Managers operating from Theory Y build trust-heavy systems: clear goals with flexible methods, delegation with accountability, and investment in people's growth.
McGregor's insight was not that one theory is true and the other false. It was that each theory creates the organizational reality that confirms it. Theory X organizations produce disengaged workers who do need micromanagement — because the micromanagement destroyed their engagement. Theory Y organizations produce self-directed workers who thrive with autonomy — because the autonomy enabled their self-direction.
You are running either Theory X or Theory Y (or some blend) about everyone in your life — your partner, your children, your team, your friends. The question is whether you've ever made the schema explicit enough to evaluate.
The fundamental attribution error: the schema that others are their behavior
Lee Ross (1977) identified what he called "the intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings" — a systematic bias in how humans explain other people's behavior. The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to over-attribute others' actions to their character ("she's disorganized," "he's selfish," "they don't care") while under-attributing those same actions to situational forces ("she had three emergencies this week," "he was sleep-deprived," "they never received the context they needed").
Ross, Amabile, and Steinmetz (1977) demonstrated this in the "quizmaster study." Participants were randomly assigned to be either quiz-askers or quiz-answerers. The askers got to choose questions from their own knowledge, giving them an enormous structural advantage. Observers watching the exchange consistently rated the askers as more knowledgeable — even though they knew the roles were randomly assigned. The situational cause (structural advantage) was invisible. The dispositional explanation (that person is smarter) felt obvious.
This is a person-schema operating in real time. You watch someone's behavior, and your brain reaches for the simplest available explanation: that's who they are. The schema says people's actions reflect their nature. The research says people's actions overwhelmingly reflect their circumstances — but you can't see circumstances from the outside the way you can see behavior.
The practical cost is enormous. Every time you explain someone's failure as a character flaw rather than a situational constraint, you're making a judgment that feels like perception but is actually your attribution schema filling in data you don't have.
Entity vs. incremental: your schema about whether people can change
Dweck, Chiu, and Hong (1995) extended Carol Dweck's mindset research into the domain of person-perception, identifying two implicit theories people hold about human attributes:
Entity theorists believe that people's core traits — intelligence, moral character, personality — are fixed. When they observe someone's behavior, they interpret it as diagnostic of a permanent quality. "He lied, therefore he is a dishonest person." Entity theorists make rapid, confident trait judgments, and those judgments are resistant to revision.
Incremental theorists believe that people's traits are malleable and context-dependent. They interpret the same behavior as reflecting specific circumstances, motivations, or developmental stages. "He lied in a situation where he felt cornered. Under different conditions, he might act differently." Incremental theorists make slower judgments and are more willing to update them.
The consequences ripple through every social interaction. Entity theorists assign blame and credit to persons. Incremental theorists assign them to processes, contexts, and systems. Research by Gervey, Chiu, Hong, and Dweck (1999) found that entity theorists even make different decisions about guilt and innocence — using the same evidence, they are more likely to conclude that a person's actions reflect a fixed disposition and deserve punishment.
Your entity-vs-incremental schema about others determines whether you see people as finished products to be evaluated or works in progress to be supported. And like every person-schema, it functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy: treating someone as fixed makes it harder for them to change in your presence.
Theory of Mind: the schema that others have schemas
All of the above operates at the level of what you assume about others. But there's a deeper layer: your capacity to model that others have their own assumptions at all.
Premack and Woodruff (1978) introduced the concept of Theory of Mind — the ability to attribute mental states (beliefs, desires, intentions, knowledge) to other people and to understand that those mental states may differ from your own. Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith (1985) demonstrated that this capacity develops in childhood and that its absence or impairment is associated with significant social difficulties.
Theory of Mind is, in the language of this curriculum, the meta-schema that other people have schemas. It is the recognition that your colleague didn't reject your proposal because they're obstructionist — they rejected it because their schema about risk, informed by their past experiences, produced a different assessment of the same evidence. Your partner isn't ignoring your request because they don't care — their schema about priorities, shaped by pressures you can't see, placed it in a different position in their queue.
Without Theory of Mind, person-schemas are one-dimensional: you model what people do, but not why. With Theory of Mind, person-schemas become recursive: you model their models, account for their contexts, and recognize that their behavior makes sense from inside their schema — even when it makes no sense from inside yours.
This is the difference between "she's wrong" and "she's reasoning from different premises." Both might lead you to disagree. But only the second keeps you in a position to actually change her mind, because you're engaging with her reasoning rather than dismissing her character.
Implicit bias: the schemas you can't see running
Greenwald and Banaji (1995) introduced the concept of implicit social cognition — the idea that past experience influences judgment in ways "not introspectively known by the individual." Their research program, spanning three decades and millions of IAT tests, has consistently shown that people hold automatic associations about social groups that diverge from their explicit beliefs.
You can genuinely believe in equal treatment while your automatic processing links certain groups with certain traits. You can commit to meritocratic hiring while your schema about what a "senior engineer" looks like filters candidates before you've read their qualifications.
The lesson for person-schemas is not that everyone is secretly prejudiced. It is that the schemas with the most influence over your behavior are the ones operating below the threshold of awareness. This is true for group-level schemas (implicit bias) and equally true for individual-level schemas (your unexamined assumptions about your partner, your boss, your children).
The only remedy is the one this entire phase has been building toward: making the implicit explicit. You cannot audit a schema you haven't surfaced. You cannot update a model you don't know you're running.
AI builds person-schemas too — and calls them user models
Every recommendation algorithm, every personalization engine, every AI assistant that "learns your preferences" is constructing a person-schema. Netflix's schema about you says you prefer dark thrillers on weekday evenings and comedies on weekends. LinkedIn's schema says you engage with posts about leadership but skip posts about cryptocurrency. Your email client's schema decides which messages are important before you see them.
These algorithmic person-schemas operate by the same logic as human ones: observe behavior, build a predictive model, generate outputs based on the model, and use your response to those outputs as confirming or disconfirming evidence. The difference is that AI user models are explicit and inspectable (at least in principle), while yours are not.
Modern recommendation systems analyze up to 100 distinct behavioral patterns simultaneously to build their models of you. They are, in a real sense, better at modeling your behavior than you are at modeling other people's — because they update continuously, process more data, and are not subject to the fundamental attribution error.
This creates an uncomfortable mirror. When you notice that Spotify's model of your taste has hardened into a filter bubble — recommending the same genres, the same artists, the same mood — you're seeing the failure mode of any person-schema: crystallization. The model stops updating. New data gets interpreted through the existing frame rather than allowed to reshape it.
Your schemas about the people in your life have the same failure mode. The question is whether you've noticed.
The audit: surfacing your person-schemas
This lesson is not asking you to stop making assumptions about people. That's not possible. Person-schemas are how your brain manages the computational complexity of social life. Without them, every interaction would require starting from zero — no predictions, no preparation, no efficiency.
The lesson is asking you to make your person-schemas inspectable. To treat them as models that can be named, evaluated, and updated — rather than as transparent perceptions of how people really are.
Start with three questions:
1. What is my default model of human motivation? Are people primarily driven by self-interest, or by a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic factors? Do you assume people need incentives to contribute, or that contribution is natural when conditions are right? Your answer is your operational Theory X / Theory Y position, and it shapes every system you design, every delegation you make, and every interpretation of someone else's behavior.
2. When someone behaves badly, where does my explanation land? Do you reach first for character ("they're incompetent") or situation ("something went wrong in the process")? The fundamental attribution error predicts you'll default to character for others and situation for yourself. Noticing this asymmetry is the beginning of calibration.
3. Do I treat the people in my life as fixed or evolving? When you think about your partner, your child, your colleague — do you see their current behavior as a snapshot of who they are right now, or as a permanent expression of who they will always be? Entity theorists freeze people in place. Incremental theorists leave room for movement. Your answer determines whether your relationships have developmental trajectories or whether they're locked into the patterns your schema predicts.
From schemas about others to schemas about yourself
Every person-schema you hold about others is, at its root, a projection of a deeper schema: your model of what a person is. Your assumptions about human nature are not just about other humans. They apply to the one human you spend the most time with.
If your schema says people are fundamentally self-interested, that includes you — and it shapes how you interpret your own motivations. If your schema says people resist change unless forced, that includes you — and it shapes how much effort you invest in your own development. If your schema says people's characters are fixed, that includes yours.
The next lesson — L-0331, Schemas about yourself — takes the audit inward. Your self-model is the most consequential schema you maintain, because it determines the ceiling of every other improvement. But you can't examine your self-schema until you've recognized the machinery of person-schemas in general. You just did. Now turn the lens around.