How analytic reasoning style and global thinking relate to understanding stocks and flows

Understanding stock-flow relationships is fundamental to the management of operational systems. In their most basic form, stock-flow systems consist of resources that accumulate and flows that change their level. Managing stock-flow systems is an indispensable part of operations management, including supply chain, inventory, and capacity planning. Previous studies have shown that most people, even experts and well-educated individuals, make persistent errors when inferring the behavior of accumulation (i.e., stock) over time. However, little is known about what individual characteristics make a decision maker better or worse at understanding stock-flows. In this paper, we report the results of investigating the relationship between analytical-intuitive thinking and global-local processing on performance in a simple stock-flow problem. We find that individuals with an analytical thinking style, rather than an intuitive one, perform significantly better on a stock-flow problem; whereas individuals with a global, rather than a local, thinking style do not necessarily perform better. However, even individuals who exhibit analytical thinking have a poor understanding of stock-flow problems. Analytical thinking may be related to understanding stock and flows, but more work is needed to better understand what cognitive abilities are required to solve these problems.