Public and health professionals’ misconceptions about the dynamics of body weight gain/loss

Abstract

Human body energy storage operates as a stock-and-flow system with inflow (food intake) and outflow (energy expenditure). In spite of the ubiquity of stock-and-flow structures, evidence suggests that human beings fail to understand stock accumulation and rates of change, a difficulty called the stock–flow failure. This study examines the influence of health care training and cultural background in overcoming stock–flow failure. A standardized protocol assessed lay people’s and health care professionals’ ability to apply stock-and-flow reasoning to infer the dynamics of weight gain/loss during the holiday season (621 subjects from seven countries). Our results indicate that both types of subjects exhibited systematic errors indicative of use of erroneous heuristics. Stock–flow failure was found across cultures and was not improved by professional health training. The problem of stock–flow failure as a transcultural global issue with education and policy implications is discussed.

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.…”

Dynamics of Implementation and Maintenance of Organizational Health Interventions

“…We used system dynamics modeling to develop the causal loop diagram, a potential tool to understand the complexity of a system-increasingly used in public health in general and obesity literature in particular [32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42]. Similar to any project, an intervention includes several components that need to be implemented.…”

Dynamics of Implementation and Maintenance of Organizational Health Interventions

“…Causal loop diagram is a potential tool to understand the complexity of a system-increasingly used in public health in general and obesity literature in particular [39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49]. Similar to any project, an intervention includes several components that need to be implemented.…”