Mathematical knowledge is related to understanding stocks and flows: results from two nations

Abstract

Stocks and flows (SF) are essential to every-day judgments: debt changes with rates of incomes and expenses, and body weight with calories consumed and energy expended. Research suggests that individuals with strong mathematical skills have a poor understanding of SF. However, past research used homogeneous participant samples and the relationship between mathematical knowledge and performance in SF tasks was not tested. In two studies involving different populations from China and the U.S.A, we find that individuals with better general mathematical knowledge tend to be more accurate in SF tasks. We find that most participants who make mistakes follow an erroneous correlation heuristic; however, we also find that the use of this heuristic is not related to mathematical knowledge. Our results open the door to new research questions, including the type of mathematical knowledge needed and the relationship of mathematical knowledge and cognitive processes that people need for solving SF tasks.

Seeing with the Mind: The Relationship Between Spatial Ability and Inferring Dynamic Behaviour from Graphs

“…We found that the male respondents performed better than the female respondents in a number of tasks, both on the (in)correct outcome measure and the correlation heuristic measure. Gender differences have been found in varying degrees in other studies (Booth Sweeney and Sterman, ; Sterman, ; Abdel‐Hamid et al ., ; Baghaei Lakeh and Ghaffarzadegan, ; Qi and Gonzalez, ). Our study strengthens the evidence that a gender difference indeed exists in STI tasks.…”

“…Similar, if the net flow is negative the level of the stock decreases. Throughout the past decade, numerous studies have shown that people experience difficulties solving problems that involve accumulation (Booth Sweeney and Sterman, ; Pala and Vennix, ; Cronin et al ., ; Sterman, ; Abdel‐Hamid et al ., ; Korzilius et al ., ; Baghaei Lakeh and Ghaffarzadegan, ; Fischer and Gonzalez, ; Qi and Gonzalez, ; Weinhardt et al ., ). The flow of materials in and out of a stock is present in all facets of life; it determines what your bank statement looks like at the end of the month or whether you overfill your coffee cup in the morning.…”

“…However, a mix of other errors is also observed, including a lack of explicit reasoning (Korzilius et al ., ). Also, different authors have shown that STI tasks performance might be related to gender, origin, and academic background (Booth Sweeney and Sterman, ; Sterman, ; Abdel‐Hamid et al ., ; Baghaei Lakeh and Ghaffarzadegan, ; Qi and Gonzalez, ), but not to context‐specific knowledge (Brunstein et al ., ; Abdel‐Hamid et al ., ). Some studies have investigated if performance could be improved.…”

Unrecognized interdependencies in mental models—The case for taking feedback loops into account

“…The attention of many system dynamics researchers has turned to the “stock‐and‐flow error” (SFE), which deals with the apparent difficulties humans have to infer the behavior of stock variables from information about the flows adding to or draining stocks (Baghaei Lakeh & Ghaffarzadegan, ; Bleijenbergh, Vennix, Jacobs, & van Engen, ; Booth Sweeney & Sterman, , ; Capelo & Dias, ; Cronin & Gonzalez, ; Cronin, Gonzalez, & Sterman, ; Qi & Gonzalez, ; Sterman, ; Stouten & Größler, ; Stouten, Heene, Gellynck, & Polet, ; Sweeney & Sterman, ; Sweeney & Sterman, ; Sweeny & Sterman, ). Just like the MoF thread, this line of research investigates decision processes and suggests that pattern‐matching heuristics may be responsible for the difficulty to intuitively understand accumulation.…”

The dual‐process theory and understanding of stocks and flows

“…Several studies have shown that people have difficulty inferring the behavior of a stock variable based on information about its inflows and outflows (Booth Sweeney and Sterman, ; Kapmeier, ; Cronin et al , ; Sterman, ; Abdel‐Hamid et al ., ; Qi and Gonzalez, ). However, little progress has been made on how to improve people's understanding of stocks and flows and many interventions that have been designed for such a purpose have not been successful.…”