Managing the Budget: Stock‐Flow Reasoning and the CO₂ Accumulation Problem

Abstract

The majority of people show persistent poor performance in reasoning about "stock-flow problems" in the laboratory. An important example is the failure to understand the relationship between the "stock" of CO 2 in the atmosphere, the "inflow" via anthropogenic CO 2 emissions, and the "outflow" via natural CO 2 absorption. This study addresses potential causes of reasoning failures in the CO 2 accumulation problem and reports two experiments involving a simple re-framing of the task as managing an analogous financial (rather than CO 2 ) budget. In Experiment 1 a financial version of the task that required participants to think in terms of controlling debt demonstrated significant improvements compared to a standard CO 2 accumulation problem. Experiment 2, in which participants were invited to think about managing savings, suggested that this improvement was fortuitous and coincidental rather than due to a fundamental change in understanding the stock-flow relationships. The role of graphical information in aiding or abetting stock-flow reasoning was also explored in both experiments, with the results suggesting that graphs do not always assist understanding. The potential for leveraging the kind of reasoning exhibited in such tasks in an effort to change people's willingness to reduce CO 2 emissions is briefly discussed.

When A+B < A: Cognitive Bias in Experts’ Judgment of Environmental Impact

“…Past studies with similar ambitions have shown, for example, that people tend to rely on symbolically significant information (Sütterlin and Siegrist, 2014) or other irrelevant attributes such as object size (Cowen and Gatersleben, 2017) while neglecting other more important information when judging energy use. People also have difficulty understanding the stock-flow relationship of the CO 2 accumulation in the atmosphere (Newell et al, 2016); and they believe that environmentally friendly actions and choices can compensate for less sustainable behaviors (Kaklamanou et al, 2015). The latter of these conceptions is called ‘compensatory green beliefs’ and may be one of the reasons for negative spillover of pro-environmental behavior.…”

Bathtub Dynamics Revisited: An Examination of Déformation Professionelle in Higher Education

“…Whereas we vary the cover story, other studies test the impact of framing, visualization, and the format of data (e.g. Cronin and Gonzalez, ; Veldhuis and Korzilius, ; Schwarz et al, ; Sedlmeier et al, ; Fischer and Gonzalez, ; Baghaei Lakeh and Ghaffarzadegan, ; Newell et al, ).…”

“…Yet, its actual effect still remains unclear. Although some studies indicate that a domain‐specific problem context increases SF performance (general support in Brunstein et al, ; Kapmeier et al, ; Kapmeier et al, ; Newell et al, ), other studies do not find statistically significant impact (some particular problems in Brunstein et al, ; Abdel‐Hamid et al, ; Newell et al, ).…”

“…A particular stream of SF performance research focuses on problem familiarity (Cronin et al, 2009;Brunstein et al, 2010;Newell et al, 2013;Abdel-Hamid et al, 2014;Kapmeier et al, 2014;Kapmeier et al, 2015). Some studies test SF performance in the context of everyday-life tasks like filling a bathtub (Booth Sweeney and Sterman, 2000), keeping the distance when driving a car (Cronin et al, 2009), people accumulating in a metro (Qi and Gonzalez, 2015), or managing finances (Booth Sweeney and Sterman, 2000;Newell et al, 2013;Newell et al, 2016). Other studies argue that a domain-specific context that matches the participants' knowledge domain influences SF performance (Kapmeier et al, 2014).…”

Future Global Change and Cognition

“…Second, several articles reflect on the intrinsic cognitive difficulties that arise from scientific evidence in general and climate change in particular. Thus, Shtulman () reveals the lasting conflict between our intuitions about the world and scientific explanations, and Newell, Kary, Moore, and Gonzalez () show, yet again, the great difficulties that people experience with the relation between greenhouse gas emissions and atmospheric CO 2 concentrations. Ranney and Clark () provide a counterpoint by showing that it is possible to teach people the basic physics of greenhouse‐gas‐induced warming in a few minutes with lasting effects.…”