How analytic reasoning style and global thinking relate to understanding stocks and flows
研究分析型与直觉型思维、全局与局部加工对理解存量和流量问题的影响，发现分析型思维者表现更好，但整体理解仍差，对运营管理决策者选择有参考价值。
Abstract 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.