Mental models for conservation research and practice

Abstract

Conservation practice requires an understanding of complex social‐ecological processes of a system and the different meanings and values that people attach to them. Mental models research offers a suite of methods that can be used to reveal these understandings and how they might affect conservation outcomes. Mental models are representations in people's minds of how parts of the world work. We seek to demonstrate their value to conservation and assist practitioners and researchers in navigating the choices of methods available to elicit them. We begin by explaining some of the dominant applications of mental models in conservation: revealing individual assumptions about a system, developing a stakeholder‐based model of the system, and creating a shared pathway to conservation. We then provide a framework to “walk through” the stepwise decisions in mental models research, with a focus on diagram‐based methods. Finally, we discuss some of the limitations of mental models research and application that are important to consider. This work extends the use of mental models research in improving our ability to understand social‐ecological systems, creating a powerful set of tools to inform and shape conservation initiatives.

Why Won't They Listen to Us? Communicating Science in Contentious Situations

“…Incoming information is held up against our personal mental model, and we are predisposed to accept or reject the information based on how well it fits in with our understanding. There is extensive literature exploring methods for eliciting mental models and documenting the mental models of resource users (see, for example, Zaksek and Arvai 2004;Biggs et al 2011;Gray et al 2015;Horowitz et al 2018;Moon et al 2019), and an understanding of the mental models held by people can be critical for effective communication.…”

Fisheries Volume 45 Number 1 January 2020

“…Incoming information is held up against our personal mental model, and we are predisposed to accept or reject the information based on how well it fi ts in with our understanding. There is extensive literature exploring methods for eliciting mental models and documenting the mental models of resource users (see, for example, Zaksek and Arvai 2004 ;Biggs et al 2011 ;Gray et al 2015 ;Horowitz et al 2018 ;Moon et al 2019 ), and an understanding of the mental models held by people can be critical for effective communication.…”

Systems thinking for planning and evaluating conservation interventions

“…A common approach across disciplines is systems mapping, or the creation of visual diagrams that depict relationships between entities of a system. In its various forms, systems mapping can be used for example, to holistically consider different mental models of systems (Moon et al, 2019), explore issues of scale (Bosch et al, 2007), and inform computational models that provide insights on the dynamics of complex systems (Sterman, 2000). Systems maps are flexible and can vary in how they are developed, the types and ways relationships are depicted, and the different ways maps are used to inform decision-making (see Table S1 for examples).…”