Understanding the building blocks of dynamic systems

We report three empirical studies intended to clarify why individuals misperceive the relationships between stocks and flows. We tested whether familiarity with the problem type, motivation to solve the problem, or the graphical presentation of the problem affected participants’ understanding of stock and flow relationships. We conclude that the misperceptions of stocks and flows are a pervasive and important problem in human reasoning. Neither the domain familiarity nor increased motivation helped individuals improve their perception of stock and flow relationships; but it seems that the graphical representation directs attention to flows and not stocks, setting the stage for subsequent mistakes. Individuals attend to the most salient points of a graph rather than comprehending the overall accumulation over time. Future research needs to investigate several aspects of the problem representations, such as the use of physical or textual rather than graphical representations. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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

[2]  S. Fiske,et al.  The Handbook of Social Psychology , 1935 .

[3]  Lee W. Gregg,et al.  Knowledge and cognition , 1974 .

[4]  Chris Hawkins,et al.  Motivation to Think and Order Effects in Persuasion: The Moderating Role of Chunking , 2001 .

[5]  H. Simon,et al.  Why are some problems hard? Evidence from Tower of Hanoi , 1985, Cognitive Psychology.

[6]  Paul J. Feltovich,et al.  Categorization and Representation of Physics Problems by Experts and Novices , 1981, Cogn. Sci..

[7]  Reid Hastie,et al.  Content Effects on Decision Making. , 2001, Organizational behavior and human decision processes.

[8]  Duane T. Wegener,et al.  Attitude change: Multiple roles for persuasion variables. , 1998 .

[9]  B. Fischhoff,et al.  Fault Trees: Sensitivity of Estimated Failure Probabilities to Problem Representation , 2005 .

[10]  Erling Moxnes.  OVEREXPLOITATION OF RENEWABLE RESOURCES : THE ROLE OF MISPERCEPTIONS , 1998 .

[11]  Erling Moxnes,et al.  Misperceptions of basic dynamics: the case of renewable resource management , 2004 .

[12]  J. Cacioppo,et al.  Attitudes and Persuasion: Classic and Contemporary Approaches , 1981 .

[13]  John T. Cacioppo,et al.  The Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion , 1986, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology.

[14]  David V. Budescu,et al.  Decisions based on numerically and verbally expressed uncertainties. , 1988 .

[15]  John D. Sterman,et al.  Bathtub dynamics: initial results of a systems thinking inventory , 2000 .

[16]  G. Vining,et al.  Data Analysis: A Model-Comparison Approach , 1989 .

[17]  Herbert A. Simon,et al.  Understanding written problem instructions. , 1974 .

[18]  W. Klein.  Justifying Optimistic Predictions With Minimally Diagnostic Information Under Conditions of Outcome Dependency , 1999 .

[19]  S. Epstein,et al.  Individual differences in intuitive-experiential and analytical-rational thinking styles. , 1996, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[20]  Neil Charness,et al.  Expertise in chess: The balance between knowledge and search. , 1991 .

[21]  K. A. Ericsson,et al.  Protocol analysis: Verbal reports as data, Rev. ed. , 1993 .

[22]  Colin Camerer,et al.  Iterated Dominance and Iterated Best-Response in Experimental P-Beauty Contests , 1998 .

[23]  William T. Ross,et al.  Making Inferences about Missing Information: The Effects of Existing Information , 1992 .

[24]  Stuart G. Shanker,et al.  The nature of insight , 1995, Minds and Machines.

[25]  H. Simon,et al.  Models of Thought , 1979 .

[26]  K. A. Ericsson,et al.  Protocol Analysis: Verbal Reports as Data , 1984 .

[27]  J. Sterman,et al.  Cloudy Skies: Assessing Public Understanding of Global Warming , 2002 .

[28]  Mitchel Resnick,et al.  System Blocks: A Physical Interface for System Dynamics Learning , 2003 .

[29]  D. Sterman,et al.  Misperceptions of Feedback in a Dynamic Decision Making Experiment , 1989 .

[30]  John T. Cacioppo,et al.  Processes of Social Influence: The Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion , 1985 .

[31]  B. Fischhoff,et al.  Accentuate the Relevant , 1997 .

[32]  Mark Paich,et al.  Boom, bust, and failures to learn in experimental markets , 1993 .

[33]  Jac A. M. Vennix,et al.  Effect of system dynamics education on systems thinking inventory task performance , 2005 .

[34]  K. A. Ericsson,et al.  Toward a general theory of expertise : prospects and limits , 1991 .

[35]  John D. Sterman,et al.  All models are wrong: reflections on becoming a systems scientist† , 2002 .