Valence Matters in Judgments of Stock Accumulation Over Time: An Intervention to Improve Blood Glucose Control and Other Global Problems

摘要

A reasoning error of great societal relevance is the stock-flow failure, in which people often conflate a stock trend with that of its flows. Specifically, people misinterpret the accumulation of a quantity ("stock") and often reason that the accumulation should behave in direct relationship (be positively correlated) with the direction of the rates of change that accumulate ("flows") (Cronin, Gonzalez, & Sterman, 2009). This mistaken reasoning is termed the correlation heuristic, and many interventions to mitigate it, including the use of analogies, graphical manipulations, simulations, and learning tools, have been met with little or no success (Dutt & Gonzalez, 2012; Gonzalez & Wong, 2012; Newell et al., 2016).