Achieving a shared context with your anam cara for solving a problem

Here, the Anam Cara's goal is to help the Agent in reinforcing his mental representation of the problem solving to retrieve or build successful mental models in accord with the Logic of Appropriateness" March and Olson 2013)[1].

Ray Simpson (2020) explains:

 "Perhaps the Soul friend [Anan Cara] senses something in the Seeker [decision-making Agent] is not quite as it should be. The Seeker seems to be banging her head against walls, never moving ahead in her spiritual development. The Provider Soul Friend realise that the Seekers' life is like a single puzzle piece. The Soul Friend glimpses something of the whole picture where the puzzle piece belongs, but the Seeker in not aware there is a bigger picture. This causes her a sense of futility, if not panic. So, the Provider Soul friend begins to fill in some of the missing pieces. The Soul Friend may introduce the Seeker to other contexts, ways of thinking, and types of temperament. This process will include the past, as well as the present. The Seeker begins to realise she has been trying to fit everything into her own narrow picture. Now the Seeker can move into a wider world. She begins to breathe more freely and looks around and sees how her piece of life can harmonise with other pieces: se goes with the flow. She begins to become whole."
 
The context of this interaction is the shared-context that enabled the Anam Cara to help the decision-making agent to find a path in his problem solving towards a positive solution. The Anam Cara’s experience is not directly dependent of the « problem to be fixed "», but on the way the Decision Maker experiences "the problem that must be fixed" and how the Anam Cara can change this for the Decision Maker, by sharing context between them.
 
Different causes (e.g. becoming trapped in Rational Choice over-thinking) may lead to a paralysis of an actor's decision-making (and thus of the decision). What is important here is to have a multi-level approach of how Anam Cara may help the decision maker: the experience (conceptual level) is transformed in a mental representation (operational level) and a contextual graph (implementation level). The Anam Cara takes a top-down multi-level approach while the decision maker takes a bottom-up multi-level approach because the decision belongs to the decision-maker.
 
In sharing her experience(mental representation) with the decision maker, the Anam Cara is developing a shared context aiming to enrich decision maker’ experience for fixing their problems. At implementation level, this sharing may lead the decision maker to modify: (a) an instantiation of a shared contextual element, (b) addition of a new contextual element from the Anam Cara’s mental representation, but new for the decision maker, and (c) addition of a new step of the reasoning for representing the contextual element in the decision-making process. 

 
A decision results from a proceduralized context (production of the decision-making process that extracts a mental model from the mental representation) that is the sequence of instantiated contextual elements in the mental model. Thus, for solving the decision paralysis (at conceptual level) due to the conflict between two decisions D1 and D2 (operational level), the decision-maker may compare (at implementation level) their associated proceduralized contexts PC1 and PC2, that corresponds to solving the « problem to be fixed », i.e., taking a "learning by doing" approach.

[1] Wikipedia explains: The core intuition of the logic of appropriateness is that humans maintain a repertoire of roles and identities, which provide rules of appropriate in situations for which they are relevant. Following these rules is a relatively complex cognitive process involving thoughtful, reasoning behavior. Such a process of reasoning is not connected to the anticipation of costs and benefits, as rational choice theory would suggest. Rather, the assumption is that actors will generally try to answer three elementary questions: (1) What kind of a situation is this? (2) Who am I?; and (3) How appropriate are different actions for me in this situation? Then they will often do what they regard as most appropriate