Situating a Measure of Systems Thinking in a Landscape of Psychological Constructs

Many of the greatest challenges in society have emerged as a result of humans acting within complex systems without fully understanding how they work. To address this problem, scholars from diverse fields have appealed to systems thinking. To date, a psychological perspective has been conspicuously...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Systems research and behavioral science 2016-11, Vol.33 (6), p.753-769
Main Authors: Thibodeau, Paul H., Frantz, Cynthia McPherson, Stroink, Mirella L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
analogy
Behavioral sciences
Complex systems
Decision making
Foundations
Landscapes
mindset
personality
Psychological aspects
Psychological factors
reasoning
Systems analysis
systems thinking
Tasks
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Summary:Many of the greatest challenges in society have emerged as a result of humans acting within complex systems without fully understanding how they work. To address this problem, scholars from diverse fields have appealed to systems thinking. To date, a psychological perspective has been conspicuously absent from scholarship on this topic—a gap that the present paper seeks to fill by situating an individual difference measure of systems thinking in relation to well‐studied constructs (e.g. holistic and relational thinking) and decision‐making tasks in the psychological literature. Results indicate that the measure of systems thinking captures peoples' tendency to represent and reason about complex systems. The paper helps to validate a novel measure of an individual's tendency to engage in systems thinking and to provide a conceptual foundation for the thinking about the psychological underpinning of a systems thinking mindset. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
ISSN:1092-7026
1099-1743
DOI:10.1002/sres.2388