Words That Change Minds: The 14 Patterns for Mastering the Language of Influence

by Shelle Rose Charvet

Chomsky's third mental filtering process is called generalization. It is the opposite of Cartesian Logic (where you can go from a general rule to specific examples but not the other way around). Generalization is where you take a few examples and then create a general principle. This is how learning occurs. A small child learns to open one, two, or possibly three, doors and then she knows how to open them all. The child develops a Generalization about how to open doors. That is, until they have to enter a high-tech company and realize that, to open the door, there is a magnetic card that has to be slid down a slot in a certain way. The child has to relearn how to open doors to deal with those exceptions. Generalization is about how we unconsciously generate rules, beliefs, and principles about what is true, untrue, possible, and impossible. Some women, for example, may have had several bad experiences with men and then come to the conclusion that men (i.e., all men) cannot be trusted. They develop the rule: Never trust a man. People have a certain number of experiences of a similar type and then make a rule or develop a belief. With these three filters, Deletion, Distortion and Generalization, we each create our own model of the world. Meta