Mental Models

Mental Models is an AI Engineering skill for Claude Code, published by human-avatar in skills-for-humanity.

220 stars23 forkson human-avatar/skills-for-humanityAdded 2026/09/04Repository updated 2026/07/15

claude-codeclaude-code-plugincognitive-frameworkscreativitydecision-makingethicsmental-modelsproblem-solvingreasoningsystems-thinking

Install in seconds

Install Mental Models

Copy Mental Models into your Claude Code skills folder. Run the command in your terminal, or review the source on GitHub before installing.

terminal

npx degit https://github.com/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/tree/main/skills/s4h-cognition-mental-models ~/.claude/skills/s4h-cognition-mental-models

Requires Node.js. Downloads this skill only — not the rest of the repository — into your Claude Code skills folder.

Without Node.js

git clone https://github.com/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity.git

Clones the whole repository, then copy the skill’s own directory into your skills folder yourself.

In this catalog

Source file: skills/s4h-cognition-mental-models/SKILL.md in human-avatar/skills-for-humanity
Installs to: ~/.claude/skills/s4h-cognition-mental-models
Collection: One of 25 skills cataloged from this repository
Category: AI Engineering — 2970 skills

What Mental Models does

Mental Models surfaces the internal model driving a judgment or decision and checks its assumptions against evidence. Use it when you need to see what beliefs are shaping how a situation is being interpreted.

Mental Models is cataloged under AI Engineering on DirSkills. Mental Models comes from a repository tagged claude-code, claude-code-plugin, cognitive-frameworks, creativity and decision-making.

Documentation

README

Excerpt

Cognition: Mental Models

Every perception, judgment, and decision runs through a mental model. Philip Johnson-Laird's model theory, developed through decades of research at Princeton, demonstrated that human reasoning does not operate on formal logical rules — it operates on internal simulations of situations. We construct small-scale models of reality, reason by running those models mentally, and check conclusions against them. The problem is not that we use mental models — it's that the models become invisible.

This is the opening of the README. Read the full README on GitHub.

Commands Mental Models provides

Slash commands named in this skill’s SKILL.md, listed in the order they first appear.

/s4h-epistemology-justification
/s4h-emotional-trust-audit
/s4h-identity-values-clarification
/s4h-cognition-metacognition
/s4h-decision-option-mapping

Frequently asked about Mental Models

What else does human-avatar publish alongside Mental Models?
Mental Models is one of 25 skills that DirSkills catalogs from human-avatar/skills-for-humanity, the repository it ships in. Its siblings there include Aesthetic, Aesthetic Coherence Check and Aesthetic Elegance Testing. Each one is a separate skill with its own page in this directory, installs the same way Mental Models does, and is maintained by human-avatar in that same repository. The rest of the collection is listed on the human-avatar/skills-for-humanity page.
How does Mental Models compare to other AI Engineering skills?
Mental Models ranks #2584 by stars among the 2970 AI Engineering skills in this catalog. The most-starred ones next to it are Architecture Decision Records, AI-First Engineering and Agentic OS. DirSkills ranks by the star count of the repository each skill ships in, so that order reflects how popular those repositories are rather than any review of Mental Models against them. Open each page to compare what they document and how they install.