Beyond the Control Room in your Head

What Pixar's 'Inside Out' Gets Wrong About How We Think and Lead

Apr 09, 2025

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I have wanted to write this blog for a while, but getting my understanding to a point where (I think) I can describe it, has been some time. It emerges from a conversation with a colleague and re-reading some stuff and conversations in an Eco Psych group (you all know who you are). So, thanks and here goes…

We all loved Pixar's "Inside Out." The film brilliantly personifies emotions as characters operating a control console inside young Riley's head, making decisions that guide her behaviour and shape her personality. It's a compelling metaphor that resonates with our intuitive sense of how our minds work - a little team of emotional managers pulling levers and pushing buttons inside our heads.

But what if this intuitive model of the mind - one that unknowingly shapes how we think about leadership, talent development, and organisational behaviour - is fundamentally flawed?

The Computer in Our Heads: Traditional Cognitive Assumptions

Before diving into what "Inside Out" gets wrong, let's acknowledge what makes its model so intuitive. The film's control room metaphor aligns perfectly with the traditional cognitive science view that has dominated psychology, neuroscience, and by extension, management theory for decades.

This view rests on two fundamental assumptions(Blau & Wagman, 2023a):

The Representational Assumption: Our brains create and manipulate internal representations (or models) of the external world. In "Inside Out," Riley's memories, personality islands, and core memories are all representations stored in her mental headquarters.
The Processing Assumption: Our minds process these representations through computational operations to produce behaviour. Joy, Sadness and the gang are essentially processors, taking in information, calculating optimal responses, and executing commands.

These assumptions underlie countless management frameworks. When we talk about "mental models," "information processing," "cognitive bias," or "executive function," we're implicitly accepting this computational view of the mind.

The problem? This model leads us straight into logical dead ends.

The Little People in Our Heads

When we watched Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust struggling for control of Riley's mental console, few of us stopped to ask a crucial question: Who's controlling the controllers?

If Joy is making decisions about Riley's behavior, what mechanisms inside Joy are making those decisions? Does Joy have her own team of tiny emotions inside her head? And if so, who's controlling them? We quickly find ourselves falling down an infinite regression of controllers controlling controllers.

A person sitting in a chair

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Image from Mangalam, 2025

This problem isn't just a quirk of a children's movie - it represents a fundamental issue in traditional cognitive science known as the "homunculus fallacy" or the "loan of intelligence" problem (Mangalam, 2025).

The Loan of Intelligence Problem

When we explain human behaviour by invoking internal mental mechanisms that "decide," "interpret," or "understand," we're often inadvertently lending our own intelligence to these mechanisms without explaining how they themselves possess such capabilities.

Let me illustrate this with a simple example:

Imagine watching a robot that can find a hidden object. The robot moves around randomly until you say "warmer" when it gets closer to the object or "colder" when it moves away. Eventually, the robot finds the object. An observer might say, "Look how intelligently that robot searches! It understands the concept of proximity and uses feedback to navigate effectively."

But this attributes far too much intelligence to the robot. The colder or warmer is ‘sufficient’ for the action. In reality, the robot is following an incredibly simple rule: "If I hear 'warmer,' keep moving in this direction; if I hear 'colder,' try a different direction." The robot doesn't understand concepts like "searching," "proximity," or even "object." The observer is lending their own understanding of these concepts to the robot.

This "loan of intelligence" occurs constantly in how we talk about behaviour in organisations:

"The brain processes information and makes decisions"
"The unconscious mind evaluates options before presenting them to consciousness"
"Her emotional intelligence allowed her to recognise the situation"

In each case, we're attributing human-like understanding to parts of the system without explaining how those parts themselves understand anything. We've simply pushed the explanation one level deeper.

This matters because our models of how minds work profoundly influence how we approach leadership development, team dynamics, and organisational change. If our foundational models are flawed, our approaches may be missing the mark.

The Unconscious Mind: System 1 & 2 Don't Solve the Problem

You might be thinking: "But what about unconscious processing? Doesn't that solve the issue?"

Many leaders are familiar with Daniel Kahneman's influential "Thinking, Fast and Slow" model, which describes two systems of thought(Kahneman, 2011):

System 1: Fast, automatic, intuitive thinking
System 2: Slow, deliberate, analytical thinking

This framework has been widely adopted in business contexts, from decision-making workshops to behavioural economics applications. But while this model is useful for describing different modes of thinking, it doesn't actually solve our central executive problem - it just pushes it deeper.

When we say, "Your System 1 processes information automatically without conscious awareness," we're still attributing complex understanding to a mechanism without explaining how that mechanism itself understands anything. We've simply moved the homunculus backstage, claiming it operates "unconsciously." But the fundamental question remains: how does even an unconscious process "know" how to interpret information meaningfully?

This creates what cognitive scientists call the "interaction problem" - if conscious and unconscious systems are completely separate, how do they interact? But if they overlap, where does one end and the other begin? The boundary becomes impossible to define coherently. Is System 1 and 2 are connected, would System 2 not be making the unconscious, conscious? Or is System 2 sworn to secrecy to you? But who is you……..?

In "Inside Out," this would be like discovering another control room behind the main one, where "unconscious" characters secretly influence Joy and Sadness. This doesn't solve the problem - it just adds another layer of controllers that would themselves need explanation. This creates internal loans of intelligence. At some point these loans need cashing out. But traditional cognitive science is yet to pay back these loans.

A Different Way of Understanding Riley (and Ourselves)

Let's return to Riley from "Inside Out" and reimagine how her behaviour might work without Joy, Sadness, and the gang at the control console.

From an ecological psychology perspective, Riley doesn't need little emotional characters making decisions for her. Instead, her behaviours, emotions, and development emerge naturally from her ongoing interactions with her environment(Blau & Wagman, 2023b).

When Riley steps onto the ice with her hockey stick, she doesn't need Joy pressing buttons to tell her what to do. Her body has developed skills through practice that allow her to directly perceive opportunities for action - the open lane, the teammate in position, the approaching defender. These opportunities (or "affordances") directly guide her movements without requiring a control room of emotions deliberating and deciding(Gray, 2022).

When Riley struggles with her move to San Francisco, it's not because Sadness is taking over the console. Rather, the familiar affordances she relied on in Minnesota (her friends, hockey team, familiar places) are suddenly absent, while new, unfamiliar affordances surround her(Rietveld & Van Westen, 2018). Her sadness, frustration, and eventual adaptation emerge from this changing relationship with her environment, not from emotional characters wrestling for control.

And what about Riley's memories? In the film, we see memories as little glass orbs stored in vast libraries, retrieved when needed. This storage-and-retrieval model is another common but problematic metaphor. From an ecological perspective, memory isn't about "files" stored somewhere in the brain. Instead, memories exist as patterns of how Riley's body and brain can respond based on past experiences. When she picks up a hockey stick, her "memory" of how to play emerges directly from how her perception-action system has been shaped by previous experiences. No retrieval system or memory orbs needed.

Of course, this ecological view might make for a less charming movie! The personification of emotions as characters creates a narrative we can relate to. But as a model of how minds actually work, ecological psychology offers a more elegant explanation without the conceptual problems of infinite Russian dolls at the controls.

Three key concepts from ecological psychology help explain this alternative view:

1. Self-organising systems

Rather than requiring central control, complex systems can organise themselves through local interactions. Think of how birds in a flock maintain formation without a leader bird directing traffic, or how team dynamics emerge without explicit orchestration.

A system doesn't need a central executive to behave intelligently. When each component follows relatively simple rules based on local information, sophisticated collective behaviour can emerge.

2. Affordances

Our environments offer "affordances" - opportunities for action that we perceive directly. A doorknob affords turning, a chair affords sitting, a colleague's furrowed brow affords checking in.

Critically, these affordances aren't processed through complex cognitive mechanisms - they directly invite action based on our abilities and current state. A skilled leader doesn't need to consciously analyse their team's dynamics; they perceive opportunities to intervene directly based on their experience and the situation(Stubbs & Friston, 2024).

3. Information for action

Rather than requiring internal representations and computations, our perception-action systems are attuned to patterns in our environment that directly inform behaviour.

A baseball player doesn't calculate trajectories to catch a fly ball - they move in ways that maintain certain optical patterns. Similarly, effective leaders often can't articulate exactly how they know what to do in complex situations - they're responding to information in the environment they've become attuned to through experience.

Implications for Leadership and Organisation Development

This ecological perspective has profound implications for how we think about work and organisations:

Development happens through attunement, not just knowledge acquisition
Instead of just teaching leaders cognitive frameworks, create environments where they can attune to relevant information through varied experiences.
Environmental design matters more than we think
If behaviour emerges from person-environment interactions, then changing the environment (physical, social, informational) often has as much, if not more impact than trying to change people's internal states(Scott, 2005).
Expertise isn't about better internal processing
Expert performance doesn't come from better "internal algorithms" but from more refined attunement to subtle environmental information and possibilities for action (affordances).
Diversity creates resilience through varied perception
Different people perceive different affordances in the same situation. This isn't a bug but a feature - it expands the organisation's collective ability to detect and respond to opportunities and challenges.

Rethinking HR and Leadership Practices

How might an ecological perspective transform common workplace practices?

Instead of: Training programs that focus primarily on "mindset shifts" and cognitive frameworks Consider: Creating practice environments where people can develop new skills through direct experience with carefully designed affordances

Instead of: Performance reviews that attribute success or failure to internal traits or mental states Consider: Analysing how the work environment enables or constrains effective performance, and how individuals are attuned to different aspects of that environment

Instead of: Change management that focuses on "overcoming resistance" and changing attitudes Consider: Redesigning environments to make new behaviours naturally emerge without requiring internal cognitive conversion

Instead of: Talent selection based on presumed internal qualities and attributes Consider: Observing how candidates interact with realistic work scenarios and what affordances they perceive and act upon

This shift doesn't mean abandoning all traditional practices, but it does mean supplementing our excessive focus on internal mental states (mindsets) with equal attention to the environments we create and how people interact with them.

Moving Beyond the Control Room Metaphor

The next time you catch yourself thinking about "controlling emotions," "processing information," or "executive functions," pause and consider whether you're falling into the "Inside Out" fallacy - assuming little controllers in the head that themselves would need explanation.

Instead, try shifting to questions that reflect a more ecological perspective:

What in this environment is enabling or constraining certain behaviours?
How might we design contexts that naturally invite the actions we want to see?
What patterns are experienced team members attuned to that novices might miss?

By moving beyond the control room metaphor, we open up new possibilities for understanding and influencing human behaviour in organizations - possibilities that don't require us to explain the inexplicable homunculus at the console.

Riley doesn't need little people in her head pulling levers to navigate her world effectively. Neither do we or the people we lead.

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