The concept of mental models has been central to the practice of system dynamics since its inception. When system dynamicists intervene in educational or corporate settings to help people become better systems thinkers, they typically begin by "surfacing" the participants' mental models to make assumptions explicit and to assist the model building process. And, changing mental models to make them more complete, consistent, and dynamic is typically one of the primary goals of the intervention. It is the purpose of this paper to describe the limitations of currently available techniques for eliciting, changing, and measuring changes in mental models of complex systems. In particular, when designing its techniques for studying mental models, the system dynamics community has not taken into account recent development in the fields of cognitive psychology and the procedures for collecting unbiased data from human subjects. In addition, despite the compelling need for rigorous scientific evaluation of the effectiveness of efforts to improve systems thinking (Cavaleri and Sterman, 1995; Ganter, Doyle, and Radzicki, 1995), current interventions typically fail to include rigorous follow-up measures of the changes in mental models they claim to bring about.

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Date created

• 1996

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• Document

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• Processing documentation available at: https://wiki.albany.edu/display/SCA/Processing+Ingested+Digital+Files

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• Creative Commons BY-NC-ND Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International

  
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System Dynamic Society Records

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• This collection is part of the University Archives