Systems thinking and environmental concern

Abstract Systems thinking is thought to facilitate complex decision-making, but relatively little is known about its psychological underpinning. We present three studies that situate a measure of the construct in relation to other dispositional measures that have received more attention in environmental psychology and by testing whether the mindset predicts behavior in a set of novel decision making tasks. In Study 1, we find that systems thinkers tend to believe in scientific consensus, recognize risks posed by climate change, and support policy interventions to address climate change; systems thinking was negatively related to conspiracist and free-market ideation. In Studies 2 and 3 we find that systems thinkers ascribe more value to the natural world — both in monetary terms as well as on social and ecological grounds. The findings suggest that models of environmental cognition can be improved by measuring peoples' tendency to engage in systems thinking.

[1]  H. Nelson,et al.  Ecosystem Services and Beyond: Using Multiple Metaphors to Understand Human-Environment Relationships , 2013 .

[2]  Aaron C. Kay,et al.  Sour Grapes, Sweet Lemons, and the Anticipatory Rationalization of the Status Quo , 2002 .

[3]  A. McCright,et al.  The Politicization of Climate Change and Polarization in the American Public's Views of Global Warming, 2001–2010 , 2011 .

[4]  Peter Checkland,et al.  Four Conditions for Serious Systems Thinking and Action , 2012 .

[5]  C. Klöckner.  A comprehensive model of the psychology of environmental behaviour—A meta-analysis , 2013 .

[6]  P. Tetlock,et al.  Providing public assistance: Cognitive and motivational processes underlying liberal and conservative policy preferences. , 1993 .

[7]  S. Flusberg,et al.  The mind is an ecosystem: Systemic metaphors promote systems thinking , 2016 .

[8]  Stephan Lewandowsky,et al.  NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax , 2013, Psychological science.

[9]  C. F. Kao,et al.  The efficient assessment of need for cognition. , 1984, Journal of personality assessment.

[10]  T. Little,et al.  To Parcel or Not to Parcel: Exploring the Question, Weighing the Merits , 2002 .

[11]  John D. Sterman,et al.  Does formal system dynamics training improve people's understanding of accumulation? , 2010 .

[12]  Nicholas Smith,et al.  Climategate, Public Opinion, and the Loss of Trust , 2010, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[13]  K. Holyoak,et al.  Far-Out Thinking , 2014, Psychological science.

[14]  A. Leiserowitz.  Climate Change Risk Perception and Policy Preferences: The Role of Affect, Imagery, and Values , 2006 .

[15]  Peter Jacques,et al.  The organisation of denial: Conservative think tanks and environmental scepticism , 2008 .

[16]  W. Adger,et al.  Vulnerability of national economies to the impacts of climate change on fisheries , 2009 .

[17]  Siddharth Suri,et al.  Conducting behavioral research on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk , 2010, Behavior research methods.

[18]  William R. Freudenburg,et al.  Global warming estimates, media expectations, and the asymmetry of scientific challenge , 2010 .

[19]  Robb Willer,et al.  Apocalypse Soon? , 2011, Psychological science.

[20]  I. Fazey.  Resilience and Higher Order Thinking , 2010 .

[21]  William N. Venables,et al.  Modern Applied Statistics with S , 2010 .

[22]  D. Kahan,et al.  Cultural cognition of scientific consensus , 2011 .

[23]  K. Maani,et al.  Links between systems thinking and complex decision making , 2004 .

[24]  Martin McKee,et al.  Denialism: what is it and how should scientists respond? , 2008, European journal of public health.

[25]  F. Mayer,et al.  The connectedness to nature scale: A measure of individuals’ feeling in community with nature ☆ , 2004 .

[26]  L. Boroditsky,et al.  Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning , 2011, PloS one.

[27]  J. Spangenberg,et al.  Precisely incorrect? Monetising the value of ecosystem services § , 2010 .

[28]  H. Rittel,et al.  Dilemmas in a general theory of planning , 1973 .

[29]  M. Siegrist,et al.  Addressing climate change: Determinants of consumers' willingness to act and to support policy measures , 2012 .

[30]  Michael Jackson,et al.  Total systems intervention: A practical face to critical systems thinking , 1991 .

[31]  R. McCrae.  Social consequences of experiential openness. , 1996, Psychological bulletin.

[32]  E. Rutherford,et al.  The scattering of alpha and beta particles by matter and the structure of the atom , 1911 .

[33]  R. Norgaard.  Ecosystem services: From eye-opening metaphor to complexity blinder , 2010 .

[34]  Judith Glück,et al.  Psychological wisdom research: commonalities and differences in a growing field. , 2011, Annual review of psychology.

[35]  B. Hofer,et al.  Dimensionality and Disciplinary Differences in Personal Epistemology. , 2000, Contemporary educational psychology.

[36]  R. Nisbett,et al.  Culture and systems of thought: holistic versus analytic cognition. , 2001, Psychological review.

[37]  S. Schneider,et al.  Climate Change 2001: Synthesis Report: A contribution of Working Groups I, II, and III to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change , 2001 .

[38]  B. Nerlich,et al.  Metaphor as a mechanism of global climate change governance: A study of international policies, 1992–2012 , 2015 .

[39]  Dennis Fitzgerald,et al.  Do people “personally experience” global warming, and if so how, and does it matter? , 2013 .

[40]  R. Gifford,et al.  Free-Market Ideology and Environmental Degradation , 2006 .

[41]  Kristopher J Preacher,et al.  Effect size measures for mediation models: quantitative strategies for communicating indirect effects. , 2011, Psychological methods.

[42]  Barry Richmond,et al.  Systems thinking: critical thinking skills for the 1990s and beyond , 1993 .

[43]  A. Leiserowitz,et al.  The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change as a Gateway Belief: Experimental Evidence , 2015, PloS one.

[44]  A. Tversky,et al.  Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases , 1974, Science.

[45]  Arnold Vedlitz,et al.  Personal Efficacy, the Information Environment, and Attitudes Toward Global Warming and Climate Change in the United States , 2008, Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis.

[46]  Lawrence C. Hamilton,et al.  Education, politics and opinions about climate change evidence for interaction effects , 2011 .

[47]  R. Dunlap,et al.  A Widening Gap: Republican and Democratic Views on Climate Change , 2008 .

[48]  I. Choi,et al.  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin Individual Differences in Analytic versus Holistic Thinking , 2022 .

[49]  E. Rutherford,et al.  The scattering of α and β particles by matter and the structure of the atom , 2012 .

[50]  M. Hulme.  Why we disagree about climate change : understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity , 2009 .

[51]  Adam C. Davis,et al.  The Relationship between Systems Thinking and the New Ecological Paradigm , 2016 .

[52]  Diana Wright,et al.  Thinking in systems: a primer , 2012 .

[53]  Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis,et al.  Running Experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk , 2010, Judgment and Decision Making.

[54]  Jean-Daniel Collomb.  The Ideology of Climate Change Denial in the United States , 2014 .

[55]  John D. Sterman,et al.  Thinking about systems: student and teacher conceptions of natural and social systems , 2007 .

[56]  S. Linden.  The social-psychological determinants of climate change risk perceptions: Towards a comprehensive model , 2015 .

[57]  M. Åkerman.  What Does ‘Natural Capital’ Do? The Role of Metaphor in Economic Understanding of the Environment , 2003, Environmental Values.

[58]  P. B. Henning,et al.  Systems Thinking: Common Ground or Untapped Territory? , 2011 .

[59]  B. Schwartz,et al.  Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing , 2010 .

[60]  R Core Team,et al.  R: A language and environment for statistical computing. , 2014 .

[61]  A. Leiserowitz,et al.  How to communicate the scientific consensus on climate change: plain facts, pie charts or metaphors? , 2014, Climatic Change.

[62]  C. Sunstein,et al.  Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures* , 2009 .

[63]  R. Espejo.  What is systemic thinking , 1994 .

[64]  S. Schneider,et al.  Expert credibility in climate change , 2010, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[65]  N. Oreskes,et al.  Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming , 2010 .

[66]  R. Sternberg.  Wisdom: Its Nature, Origins, And Development , 1990 .

[67]  D. Levinson,et al.  The Authoritarian Personality. New York (Norton) 1950. , 1950 .

[68]  T. Adorno.  The Authoritarian Personality , 1950 .

[69]  Leonid Rozenblit,et al.  The misunderstood limits of folk science: an illusion of explanatory depth , 2002, Cogn. Sci..

[70]  Daniel R. Williams,et al.  Beyond the commodity metaphor: Examining emotional and symbolic attachment to place , 1992 .

[71]  Brian A. Nosek,et al.  A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo , 2004 .

[72]  Fabio Wasserfallen,et al.  Learning and the diffusion of regime contention in the Arab Spring , 2015 .

[73]  A. Spence,et al.  The Psychological Distance of Climate Change , 2012, Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis.

[74]  N. Jones,et al.  Social risk assessment and social capital: A significant parameter for the formation of climate change policies , 2012 .

[75]  J. Sterman,et al.  Understanding public complacency about climate change: adults’ mental models of climate change violate conservation of matter , 2007 .

[76]  Dedre Gentner,et al.  Causal Systems Categories: Differences in Novice and Expert Categorization of Causal Phenomena , 2012, Cogn. Sci..

[77]  P. Sutton,et al.  Changes in the global value of ecosystem services , 2014 .

[78]  Hammad Akbar,et al.  Systems thinking and absorptive capacity in high-tech small and medium-sized enterprises from South Korea , 2014 .

[79]  Lera Boroditsky,et al.  Natural Language Metaphors Covertly Influence Reasoning , 2013, PloS one.

[80]  P. Dawidowicz.  The Person on the Street's Understanding of Systems Thinking , 2012 .

[81]  M. Boykoff.  From convergence to contention: United States mass media representations of anthropogenic climate change science , 2007 .

[82]  Kosuke Imai,et al.  Causal Mediation Analysis Using R , 2010 .

[83]  Sander van der Linden,et al.  The conspiracy-effect: Exposure to conspiracy theories (about global warming) decreases pro-social behavior and science acceptance , 2015 .

[84]  P. Thibodeau,et al.  Situating a Measure of Systems Thinking in a Landscape of Psychological Constructs , 2016 .

[85]  Philip D. Waggoner,et al.  Are samples drawn from Mechanical Turk valid for research on political ideology? , 2015 .