Institutional inertia as one of the underlying reasons for hysteresis is often ascribed to external factors such as the distribution of wealth and income. Complementing these findings, the paper focuses on important internal factors, which render institutions stable and which prevent fast institutional changes, namely the role of mental models. Their importance is derived from the analysis of an important set of institutions, which can be described as enabling rules. Such rules enable actors to do certain things, such as speaking a language or playing chess. In doing so, enabling rules arguably require complementary mental models, which contain not only knowledge about the rules and the context in which they are applied, but also about how to apply the rules successfully. An important implication of this conceptualisation is that institutions and their representation are interdependent and mutually stabilising.

制度惯性是滞后的根本原因之一，通常归因于财富和收入分配等外部因素。作为对这些发现的补充，本文重点关注了重要的内部因素，这些因素使制度稳定并阻止了快速的制度变化，即心智模型的作用。它们的重要性源于对一组重要制度的分析，这些制度可以被描述为授权规则。这些规则使演员能够做某些事情，例如说一种语言或下棋。在这样做的过程中，可以说启用规则需要互补的心智模型，这些模型不仅包含有关规则及其应用环境的知识，还包含有关如何成功应用规则的知识。