Thinking Aloud While Solving a Stock‐Flow Task: Surfacing the Correlation Heuristic and Other Reasoning Patterns

Abstract

In the literature, it is assumed that individuals, while performing stock‐flow tasks, often use a correlation heuristic, a form of pattern matching in which they think that the behavior of the stock resembles the (net) flow. To investigate this assumption and to increase our insight in the actual reasoning patterns when performing stock‐flow tasks, we conducted an experiment by using the department store task as baseline. In the treatment condition, participants performed the stock‐flow task while thinking aloud; in the control condition, they only had to write down their answers. The correlation heuristic was corroborated: participants actually did verbalize their thoughts in terms of the biggest difference between inflow and outflow at a particular point, thus expressing the correlation heuristic in words. However, other reasoning strategies that led to incorrect claims were also found. Further research is desirable to elaborate insight in the precursors of heuristic reasoning. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Math matters: mathematical knowledge plays an essential role in Chinese undergraduates' stock‐and‐flow task performance

“…Previous research shows that SF failure and the correlation heuristic are robust, present under a wide range of task conditions, including information displays (Cronin and Gonzalez, ; Cronin et al ., ; Newell et al ., ), cover stories and contexts (Ossimitz, ; Cronin and Gonzalez, ; Cronin et al ., ; Qi and Gonzalez, ; Newell et al ., ), motivation (Cronin and Gonzalez, ; Cronin et al ., ), domain experience (Brunstein et al ., ; Abdel‐Hamid et al ., ; Qi and Gonzalez, ), analytic reasoning style (Baghaei Lakeh and Ghaffarzadegan, ; Weinhardt et al ., ), mathematical knowledge (Qi and Gonzalez, ), global/local processing style (Fischer and Gonzalez, ; Weinhardt et al ., ) and other conditions (Gonzalez and Wong, ; Korzilius et al ., ; Veldhuis and Korzilius, ). Although many find that more exposure to stocks and flows, such as system dynamics courses and system thinking exercises, could bring improvements in SF task performance and reduce the prevalence of the correlation heuristic (Kainz and Ossimitz, ; Pala and Vennix, ; Sterman, ), most factors involved in SF failure and the correlation heuristic have not been proved to be useful in bringing an improvement of participants' performance in SF tasks.…”

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

“…They found that the most frequently observed errors in reasoning match the correlation heuristic misperception. 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 ., ).…”

“…Several studies have tried to discover antecedents of STI performance in the past. Korzilius et al (2014) conducted a study in which participants were asked to think out loud. They found that the most frequently observed errors in reasoning match the correlation heuristic misperception.…”

Graphical features of flow behavior and the stock and flow failure

“…Moreover, the “cannot be determined” error occurred more frequently for Q4 than in these prior studies. These errors may occur due to a general tendency to concentrate on the details of the graph rather than on the gestalt: being “local” rather than “global” processors (Fischer and Gonzalez, ; Korzilius et al , ). The lower error rate compared to prior studies may be due to a possible priming of “global” processing caused by the visual judgment task presented before the DS task.…”

“…Fischer and Gonzalez (2016) suggest that the graphical elements of the DS task may influence the way humans process information (i.e., whether they look at the "forest" or the "trees"). Research by Korzilius et al (2014), in which participants were asked to think aloud while solving the DS task, suggests that most people do focus on the local elements: participants concentrated on the peaks and the difference between the peaks. Relatedly, Fischer and Gonzalez (2016) found that global priming decreased SF failure relative to local priming.…”