Abstract for: An Expanded Feedback View of Decision Maker Mental Models

It is hard to study problems where boundedly rational stakeholders determine important decisions in the system. This is because the dynamics of boundedly rational social cognition and social influence are complex and because data about stakeholder mental models and social networks are difficult to elicit, organize, and test. The proposed method to study these kinds of problems combines data elicitation techniques from stakeholder management, theories of boundedly rational social cognition and social influence, and a system dynamics simulation model. This method takes rough qualitative stakeholder data, organizes it into stakeholder diagrams, and uses it to parametrically populate existing system dynamics structure. This allows the researcher to quantitatively simulate complex stakeholder-centric problems where data quality is poor.