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.
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
|---|---|
| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4300993 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/sdr.1517 | DOI Listing |
Publication Analysis
Top Keywords
Similar Publications
Does correlation heuristic dependence reduce due to classroom teaching? A case study from India.
Front Psychol
March 2023
Applied Cognitive Science Lab, Indian Institute of Technology Mandi, Kamand, Himachal Pradesh, India.
Introduction: People worldwide have problems understanding the basic stock-flow principles (e.g., correlation heuristic), which govern many everyday tasks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBehavioral game and simulation analysis of extended producer responsibility system's implementation under environmental regulations.
Environ Sci Pollut Res Int
June 2019
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Pembroke, Pembroke, NC, 28372, USA.
The implementation of the extended producer responsibility (EPR) for e-waste is an important measure to develop an ecological civilization. In order to advance manufacturing enterprises to effectively implement resource and environmental responsibility, this study investigates the main causes of environmental regulation failure from the perspective of government and enterprises. The game theory was used to establish an evolutionary game model between government regulatory departments and electronic and electrical products' manufacturing enterprises.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFManaging the Budget: Stock-Flow Reasoning and the CO2 Accumulation Problem.
Top Cogn Sci
January 2016
Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University.
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 CO2 in the atmosphere, the "inflow" via anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and the "outflow" via natural CO2 absorption. This study addresses potential causes of reasoning failures in the CO2 accumulation problem and reports two experiments involving a simple re-framing of the task as managing an analogous financial (rather than CO2 ) budget.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMaking Sense of Dynamic Systems: How Our Understanding of Stocks and Flows Depends on a Global Perspective.
Cogn Sci
March 2016
Dynamic Decision Making Laboratory, Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University.
Stocks and flows (SF) are building blocks of dynamic systems: Stocks change through inflows and outflows, such as our bank balance changing with withdrawals and deposits, or atmospheric CO2 with absorptions and emissions. However, people make systematic errors when trying to infer the behavior of dynamic systems, termed SF failure, whose cognitive explanations are yet unknown. We argue that SF failure appears when people focus on specific system elements (local processing), rather than on the system structure and gestalt (global processing).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPublic and health professionals' misconceptions about the dynamics of body weight gain/loss.
Syst Dyn Rev
January 2014
Monterey Institute of International Studies, International Policy Studies, Monterey United States.
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.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWant AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?
Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!