Online Content

1. Cronin, Matthew with Cleotilde Gonzalez, "Understanding the Building Blocks of Dynamic Systems: What Is the Problem, Really?"

Type:
Document
Date Created:
2005 July 17-2005 July 21
Collection:
System Dynamic Society Records
Collecting Area:
University Archives
Collection ID:
ua435
Parent Record(s):
23d738ba88f8333bc39725f9cb5bd0b8, 3c582e6f5cf305ef0030c7471b499022, and cc5bb0ac12a5b68b26b1583548898dae
Thumbnail Path Ss:
/downloads/m613ng61f?file=thumbnail
System Modified Dtsi:
2020-01-02T19:31:52Z
Description:
Previous research has shown that individuals fail to understand the basic building blocks of complex systems such as stocks and flows, feedbacks, and time delays. This paper presents three empirical studies intended to understand why individuals misperceive the relationships between stocks and flows. We used problems that were quite familiar to the participants, interventions to motivate participants to think harder in the problem, simplifications of graphs and direction of attention to specific aspects of the graphs. The results seem to disclose some of the mechanisms that individuals use to make their inferences about the graphs. That is, individuals attend to the most salient features of the graphical representation to make their inferences about the stock in the task. Does this really imply a misunderstanding of stocks and flows? We believe the further research needs to address this problem in realistic presentations rather than graphical representations.