The Cognitive Projection Framework: A Three-Dimensional Model for Understanding Human Decision-Making

Core Hypothesis

Human decision-making variations across domains—from politics to health to entrepreneurship—can be understood through a three-dimensional cognitive framework based on:

1. Projection Bandwidth: The capacity to simulate future outcomes with depth, complexity, and temporal range

2. Affective Filtering: The automatic suppression or distortion of simulations that produce negative emotions or cognitive dissonance

3. Valence Sensitivity: The baseline bias toward positive versus negative projections (optimism bias vs. catastrophizing)

This framework suggests that many behaviors we attribute to irrationality, moral failure, or misinformation actually reflect systematic differences in how individuals process and emotionally respond to future projections.

The Three-Dimensional Topological Model

Rather than discrete categories, we propose a continuous three-dimensional cognitive space where individuals occupy different regions based on their cognitive-affective configuration:

Core Dimensions

Projection Bandwidth (X-axis): Varies from narrow/short-term to broad/long-term simulation capacity Affective Filtering (Y-axis): Varies from low filtering (accepting all projections) to high filtering (suppressing threatening scenarios) Valence Sensitivity (Z-axis): Varies from optimistic bias (preferentially attending to positive outcomes) to pessimistic bias (preferentially attending to negative outcomes)

Key Regional Attractors

• Resilient Strategic Core (High bandwidth + Low filtering + Balanced valence): Adaptive decision-makers who can process complex futures with emotional stability

• Blind Optimist Basin (Low bandwidth + High negative filtering + Strong positive bias): Charismatic entrepreneurs and risk-takers who suppress negative projections

• Doomer Valley (High bandwidth + Low positive filtering + Strong negative bias): Catastrophizers who simulate detailed negative futures with heightened emotional salience

• Reactionary Plateau (Low bandwidth + High change filtering + Negative bias): Traditional conservatives who resist change and expect negative outcomes from disruption

• Manic Visionary Peak (High bandwidth + High negative filtering + Strong positive bias): Revolutionary innovators who see grand positive futures while ignoring implementation challenges

• Defensive Pessimist Ridge (Moderate bandwidth + High filtering + Negative bias): Cautious planners who expect problems but avoid thinking through solutions

• Naive Optimist Chamber (Low bandwidth + Low filtering + Strong positive bias): Individuals vulnerable to exploitation due to unrealistic positive expectations

Key Insights

Political Behavior

Self-defeating voting patterns may reflect not stupidity or misinformation, but cognitive architectures that operate in specific regions of the three-dimensional space—unable to simulate long-term consequences, filtering threatening scenarios, or biased toward overly positive or negative interpretations of political outcomes.

Entrepreneurship

The same cognitive configuration producing climate denial (high negative filtering + optimistic bias) may drive business innovation through selective suppression of failure scenarios combined with enhanced attention to positive possibilities. However, low projection bandwidth may limit long-term strategic thinking.

Health and Addiction

Poor health choices often stem from specific combinations: inability to emotionally inhabit future consequences (low bandwidth), automatic filtering of negative health projections (high filtering), and optimistic bias about personal risk ("it won't happen to me").

Innovation and Risk Assessment

Revolutionary breakthroughs may require high bandwidth for complex simulation, high negative filtering to overcome realistic pessimism about feasibility, and strong positive bias to sustain motivation through uncertainty.

Educational and Developmental Implications

Individualized Cognitive Development

Instead of teaching generic "critical thinking," education should:

• Map students' positions in the three-dimensional space

• Provide targeted interventions based on their cognitive configuration

• Expand projection bandwidth through systems thinking and scenario planning

• Build tolerance for emotionally difficult projections without eliminating protective filtering

• Calibrate valence sensitivity to match realistic base rates while preserving motivational optimism

Cognitive Configuration Assessment

Diagnostic tools could evaluate individuals across all three dimensions to:

• Identify cognitive blind spots and strengths

• Predict performance in different decision-making contexts

• Design personalized scaffolding for complex choices

• Match individuals to roles that leverage their cognitive architecture

Societal and System Design Implications

Democratic Governance

Universal suffrage assumes all citizens can meaningfully project consequences of political choices and process them with appropriate emotional regulation and valence calibration. If this assumption is false, we need democratic innovations that:

• Provide cognitive scaffolding for different projection configurations

• Account for systematic biases in different regions of the space

• Design information systems that work across cognitive architectures

Organizational Leadership

Understanding leadership teams' positions in the three-dimensional space can predict:

• Strategic blind spots (where will planning fail?)

• Innovation capacity (can they envision and pursue radical change?)

• Risk management (do they over- or under-estimate threats?)

• Crisis response (how will they process and react to negative information?)

Public Health and Safety

Policy interventions must account for population distribution across the cognitive space:

• High-filtering individuals need different messaging than low-filtering populations

• Optimistic-bias groups require different risk communication than pessimistic-bias groups

• Bandwidth limitations require simplified vs. complex intervention designs

Advanced Applications

Climate Change Response

Climate action requires specific cognitive capabilities:

• High projection bandwidth to simulate long-term environmental consequences

• Low negative filtering to emotionally engage with threatening scenarios

• Balanced valence sensitivity to avoid both denial and paralysis

Populations concentrated in regions with high negative filtering and optimistic bias will systematically underrespond to climate threats, requiring specialized intervention strategies.

Financial Decision-Making

Investment success depends on cognitive configuration:

• High bandwidth enables complex market modeling

• Appropriate filtering prevents emotional trading while allowing threat recognition

• Calibrated valence sensitivity avoids both excessive risk-taking and opportunity paralysis

Therapeutic Applications

Mental health interventions could target movement within the three-dimensional space:

• Depression treatment might focus on reducing negative valence bias and increasing projection bandwidth

• Anxiety treatment might involve calibrating filtering mechanisms without eliminating adaptive caution

• Addiction recovery could involve expanding projection bandwidth to make future consequences more emotionally salient

The Narrative Question Revisited

When projection fails, filtering activates, or valence bias distorts scenarios, humans engage in narrative substitution—creating coherent stories to fill cognitive gaps. This emerges naturally from the interaction of all three dimensions: low bandwidth creates gaps, high filtering removes threatening elements, and valence bias colors the replacement stories as either optimistic myths or pessimistic explanations.

Testing the Framework

The three-dimensional model generates testable predictions:

• Individuals' positions should remain relatively stable across different decision domains

• Interventions targeting specific dimensions should produce predictable movements in the space

• Population-level distributions should correlate with political, economic, and social outcomes

• Extreme positions in the space should predict specific behavioral patterns and vulnerabilities

Limitations and Future Directions

This framework focuses on cognitive architecture rather than content knowledge, values, or situational factors. Future research should explore:

• How the three dimensions develop across the lifespan

• Cultural and genetic influences on cognitive configuration

• Plasticity and intervention effectiveness

• Integration with personality psychology and neuroscience findings

Conclusion

By treating cognitive differences as architectural rather than moral, this three-dimensional framework offers a more nuanced and potentially effective approach to understanding human behavior. Rather than asking why people make "bad" decisions, we can ask: what cognitive tools do they have available across all three dimensions, and how can we design systems that work with human cognitive diversity rather than against it?

The ultimate goal is not to pathologize cognitive variation but to understand it well enough to create educational, political, and social systems that help all cognitive configurations contribute their strengths while compensating for their limitations through intelligent design and targeted support.