Dr. Wallace's Favorite Mental Models

The Veil of Ignorance

A thought experiment for designing rules, policies, and decisions that stay fair even if you ended up on the losing end of them.

130-Second Overview

The idea in one sentence: before you decide a rule, a policy, or a split of resources, imagine you don't yet know which seat at the table you'll end up in — then ask whether the arrangement still feels fair.

Where it comes from

Philosopher John Rawls introduced it in A Theory of Justice (1971) as part of a thought experiment he called the "original position": people choosing the basic rules of their society before they know their own place in it.

Why it works

Once you don't know whether you'll be the CEO or the newest hire, the majority shareholder or the smallest one, you stop designing rules that quietly favor "people like me" — because you no longer know who "me" will turn out to be.

2Mental Model Compass

Type of thinking
Ethical reasoning
Best for
Policy & rule design
Difficulty
Moderate
Time to apply
10–20 minutes

Use it when you're the one writing the rule, not just living under someone else's. It's a design tool for whoever holds the pen — a manager setting a policy, a founder writing an equity split, a parent setting a household rule, a committee drafting a procedure.

3Walk Through It

4Try the Veil Yourself

Pick a decision below, then compare what you'd choose knowing your actual position versus what you'd choose behind the veil — not knowing which role you'll end up playing.

Deciding from where you sit now

Deciding behind the veil

5Diverse Examples

Business
Designing a bonus plan without knowing whether you'll be judged by sales numbers or by customer retention — so the metric that gets picked has to be fair under either role.
Healthcare
Setting a hospital's triage rule before knowing whether you'll be the patient who arrives first or the one who arrives sicker.
Parenting
Writing a screen-time rule for siblings before knowing which child will actually want more screen time this month.
Hiring
Writing an interview rubric before knowing whether the strongest candidate will be the one most like the hiring manager.
Civic life
Drawing a city zoning rule before knowing whether your own future home will end up near the new development or far from it.
Personal
Setting a household chore split before anyone has claimed the "easy" chores for themselves.

6Worked Application

Situation: A 12-person agency is writing its first paid-time-off policy. The founder is tempted to write "unlimited PTO," which looks generous on a careers page.

  • Step 1 — Name the roles behind the veil: founder, senior staff who rarely take time off, junior staff who feel pressure not to use unlimited leave, a new parent, someone managing a health condition.
  • Step 2 — Decide without knowing which role you'll hold: "unlimited PTO" looks fair to the founder, but behind the veil you might end up as the junior employee who never feels safe using it — a well-documented failure mode of unlimited-PTO policies, where ambiguity quietly produces less time off taken, not more.
  • Step 3 — Choose the rule that holds up under any role: a defined minimum (for example, 20 days) that must be used, plus a clear approval process — generous, but it doesn't rely on everyone having equal confidence to ask for it.
  • Step 4 — Pressure-test it: would this policy still look fair if you were the newest, least senior person on the team? If yes, it has survived the veil.

7Common Mistakes

Peeking behind the veil. Quietly keeping your actual position in mind while claiming to reason impartially defeats the exercise entirely.
Using it to avoid a decision. The veil is for designing the rule, not for stalling once the rule is already in motion.
Assuming everyone starts from the same risk tolerance. A person with savings and a person living paycheck to paycheck may reasonably choose different trade-offs even behind the veil.
Treating it as consensus-by-committee. It's a reasoning tool for one decision-maker to check their own blind spots, not a voting procedure.
Forgetting it's about rules, not single verdicts. It fits "what should the policy be," not "was this one person right or wrong in this one incident."
Stopping at good intentions. A rule that sounds fair behind the veil still needs to be checked against how it will actually play out in practice.

8When Not to Use It

  • Urgent, single-incident decisions. If something needs a call in the next five minutes, a slow fairness exercise is the wrong tool for the moment.
  • Decisions with a clear, already-agreed rule. If the policy exists and is fair, re-litigating it from behind the veil every time just adds friction.
  • Highly technical or safety decisions. Choosing a bridge's load tolerance isn't a fairness question — it's an engineering one, and the veil doesn't help there.
Counterpoint: critics such as philosopher Michael Sandel argue that no one can fully strip away their own values and life experience, even hypothetically — so treat the veil as a useful discipline for catching bias, not as a literal, bias-free vantage point.

9Related Models

The Golden Rule

A simpler, older cousin: treat others as you'd want to be treated. The veil goes further by making you genuinely uncertain which "other" you'll be.

Inversion

Instead of asking "what's the best policy," inversion asks "what policy would be worst for the most vulnerable person affected" — a close relative of reasoning behind the veil.

Second-Order Thinking

The veil forces you past the first, flattering answer to a decision and into its downstream effects on people unlike yourself.

10Try It Yourself

11Save as Skill

Turn this mental model into a reusable instruction you can hand to any AI assistant whenever you're writing a policy or rule.

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